Japan's Nikkei Asian Review believes that Russia is beginning to yield to China in the development of new weapons and military technologies. Gradually, this lag may become irreversible. China is becoming the world's number two arms exporter. Russia is the third. Beijing is targeting traditional Russian arms markets.
Beijing's ability to trade weapons in a package with other economically attractive programs threatens Russian budget revenues
A striking recruitment video released last week by the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force shows four J-20 fighter jets soaring into a stormy sky, deftly maneuvering between flashes of lightning.
In this dramatic digital film, one important detail was not visible: for the first time in history, Chinese aircraft will be equipped with engines of domestic production, and not Russian.
Beijing's decision to replace the J-20 engines, revealed by the Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper, is just the latest sign that China is rapidly closing the military gap with its northern neighbor. For decades, China has relied on Russian weapons to modernize its armed forces. But the situation has begun to change as China builds its own powerful defense industry and even begins to challenge Moscow in the global arms market.
In some respects, it may already have an advantage over Russia. This shift has the potential to change the course of the development of sometimes imperceptible, but increasingly close relations between countries.
According to data from December last year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) ranks Russia as the world's second-largest arms producer in the period from 2015 to 2019. The United States remained in first place.
SIPRI found that four of the top 25 weapons manufacturers in 2019 were Chinese. These four, three of which were in the world's top 10, accounted for 16% of total arms sales, and earned $ 56.7 billion in that year. In contrast, only two Russian companies entered the top 25, occupying a niche of just under 4% of the global arms market and earning $ 13.9 billion.
Some representatives of the Russian defense industry and experts dispute SIPRI's conclusions, arguing that it is impossible to accurately calculate the volume of China's arms exports, since it keeps information about its military-industrial complex secret. They also disagree with SIPRI's decision to exclude the Russian state conglomerate Rostec, one of the country's largest arms exporters, from the world's top 25 report card.
However, few in Moscow deny that China is rapidly gaining global positions not only in terms of the quantity of weapons produced, but also in terms of quality.
Vadim Kozyulin, project director for new technologies and international security at the PIR Center, told Nikkei Asia that China has already surpassed Russia in developing unmanned aerial vehicles, some types of warships, and possibly even hypersonic missiles. The latter direction has been a source of special pride for Russia in recent years.
"We see that China is developing and producing new weapons very quickly, releasing a new generation every 10 years, as the Soviet Union once did," he said. "In these conditions, it is difficult for Russia to compete, because our budget is smaller than the Chinese one, and it is only decreasing."
For most of the post-Cold War period, Russia was the main supplier of weapons to China.
The two neighboring states began to cooperate in the field of military-technical cooperation in the early 1990s, when China was just launching an ambitious program to upgrade the outdated weapons of the PLA. Initially, Beijing counted on the West as a potential source of advanced military technology, but these hopes were not fulfilled after the United States and Europe imposed an arms embargo on China in response to the repression in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
China soon found a replacement in Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 dealt a heavy blow to Russian arms manufacturers. Old sources of revenue, such as domestic military spending and lucrative contracts with foreign client States, quickly dried up. The emergence of China as a potential buyer has given the limping Russian defense industry vital strength.
From 1992 to 2007, China imported 84% of its weapons from Russia. For the PLA, combat aircraft, air defense systems, destroyers and submarines were purchased.
Much to Moscow's chagrin, Beijing also copied many of its Russian acquisitions.
Some of China's newest weapons, most notably the J-11 fighter jets and HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles, are almost identical to earlier versions purchased from Russia. In December 2019, Rostec publicly accused China of illegally copying a wide range of Russian military technologies for almost two decades.
Despite these concerns, the arms trade between the two countries continued to flourish. From 2014 to 2015, Moscow agreed to provide Beijing with six divisions of S-400 air defense systems and 24 Su-35 fighter jets, which are among the most modern Russian weapons.
It is unclear how much longer China will need Russian weapons. In just 20 years, China's military-industrial complex has evolved from a novice to a global heavyweight. Beijing can not only meet most of its military needs, but also export weapons to consumers from Pakistan to Serbia.
China's growth as a weapons manufacturer has been helped by a rapid increase in military spending. According to SIPRI, China's defense budget has grown by 85% over the past decade, reaching $ 261 billion in 2019. Although Russia has increased its military spending in the past under President Vladimir Putin, its growth has been much more modest, and since 2015, defense spending has gradually decreased.
Equally significant is the emergence of Beijing as a technological power. China has the largest population of scientific researchers in the world - 1.87 million people. The number of high-tech giants such as Huawei, Tencent and ZTE is also growing in the country.
Despite the Kremlin's recent attempts to stimulate the domestic technology sector, Russia has not achieved such success here. Experts warn that Russia is lagging behind China in key new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and that if the situation does not change, its defense industry will find it difficult to keep up with China and the United States.
"In Russia, there are no such giants as Microsoft or Huawei that produce dual - use products - both for civilian and military use," said Vadim Kozyulin. "In our country, the state must create everything from scratch, and this is very expensive."
As China becomes more advanced in the field of weapons, Russia is beginning to explore the possibility of joint development of weapons with Beijing. In 2016, the two countries teamed up to develop and produce more than 200 new-generation heavy helicopters for the PLA by 2040. Another major cooperation program was announced last August, when Russian military-technical cooperation officials announced that Moscow and Beijing had begun work on a new non-nuclear submarine.
"It is very clear that Russia is now moving towards technology transfer and subcontracting to China, because while China can now produce many of its own systems, it still lacks Russia's vast engineering and design capabilities and the ability to build many key components," said Michael Kofman, director of the Russia program at the CNA Military Research Center in Washington.
However, other experts are skeptical that such cooperation will be sustainable in the long term. Simon Weseman, a senior researcher at SIPRI's weapons and military spending program, argues that Moscow is already too far behind to be seriously interested in Beijing.
"I expect the Russians to completely fall out of China's sphere of interest as suppliers of military technology over the next 5-10 years," he said. "The Russians will even start looking for opportunities to get Chinese technology in some way, because they are seriously behind the Chinese, and in some cases they will simply not get anywhere else."
Weseman added that in the long term, China may even displace Russian arms manufacturers from their traditional markets in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. He warned that China is well positioned to bypass Russia in these markets because, unlike Moscow, Beijing can link arms deals with lucrative economic offers.
"These countries have no real reason to work with the Russians if they can get something similar or even better from the Chinese," Weseman said. "In some ways, the Chinese probably have more to offer, not just in terms of weapons, but in various other areas as well."
Dimitri Simes (Simes Dimitri)
