[TalonDJ]

It is not retracted. Making a all moving control surface but pivot and retract would be both difficult and silly. What is more these ones are almost certainly loaded and provide lift. The reason it looks like that in the picture is because they have dihedral. Both canards are angled up. So from camera angle like that the far one looks longer and the near one looks shorter. This is not a high maneuverability aircraft. Someone posted a very good analysis a year or so back. The short version is that those canards are helping hold the plane up so they don't have that much more ‘authority’ to make it also pitch rapidly. See how massive that nose is and how tiny the canards are in comparison? That is a lot of airplane to move. The smart money on this one is saying it is an interceptor or a high speed medium bomber.

[zot]

OK. Maybe the J-20 isn’t agile. But in the picture, the canards are set to hold the nose down. What happens when they are trimmed the other way at high speed? I recall the recent P-51 airshow crash in which the horizontal stabilizer trim-tab came off in high-speed flight and the aircraft did a 9-G pitch-up.