Air combat between US and Chinese aircraft during the Vietnam War

[yahya]

William Blum in Killing Hope argued that:

There were many other CIA flights over China for purely espionage purposes, carried out by high-altitude U-2 planes, pilot-less "drones", and other aircraft. These over-flights began around the late 1950s and were not discontinued until 1971, to coincide with Henry Kissinger's first visit to Peking. The operation was not without incident. Several U-2 planes were shot down and even more of the drones, 19 of the latter by Chinese count between 1964 and 1969. China registered hundreds of "serious warnings" about violations of its air space, and on at least one occasion American aircraft crossed the Chinese border and shot down a Mig-17.

How substantiated is this assertion?

 

[SUPER=BUG]

It is possible that it existed, but it was so long ago that it's hard to verify the details. However, at that time, the PLAF did have many intense clashes with the US Air Force. Whether this plane was a MiG-17 or a J-5 is still debatable (actually, they're pretty similar).

 

[Archibald]

A lot of weird shit happened inside the PRC air space in the 1960's (and the decade before)

1-US warplanes shot down near Hainan island during the Vietnam war (F-104, A-6)
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/th...igs-shot-down-american-warplanes-521fb522369f
2-Ryan 147 Firefly drones shot down over southern China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Model_147#China_overflights
3-ROCAF airplane shot down spying China, 1959-1968 : RB-57D and U-2, plus a collection of jets and WWII planes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cat_Squadronhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bat_Squadron

Long story short: LBJ painfully remembered the fall of 1950, when the PRC massively entered the Korean war and pushed back NATO forces, before a bloody stalemate that lasted three years. LBJ feared the chinese crossed the border into North Vietnam and turned the war into something much bigger - China having nukes since October 1964.

That's why aerial spying of southern China intensified. SR-71 and A-12 overflew North Vietnam and North Korea, but were never allowed by LBJ to make border penetration flights of southern China. Instead, Ryan Model 147 Firefly were send by the dozens, and many of them were shot down by the PLAAF.

Meanwhile the USA called Taiwan air force to the rescue: the ROCAF clandestine squadrons, Black Bat and Black Cat. They had RB-57Ds and U-2s, of which half a dozen were shot down by PRC SA-2. They also had fast jets (RF-101) to make low altitude reconnaissance flights.