View from Washington: Chinese-Russian marriage of convenience

C4ADS (Center for Advanced Defense Studies) based in Washington tries to find, how deep does the Chinese-Russian partnership around advanced conventional weapons go, and who is it really serving?

C4ADS analysis shows Russian defense production moving into China and weapons know-how flowing both ways.

The “no limits” partnership between China and Russia — declared in February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine — poses a challenge to the United States in multiple spheres. Particularly concerning is the expansion of Chinese-Russian cooperation in industrial and scientific fields “upstream” of conventional arms transfers. Even as Russian arms exports to China have fallen due to the Chinese defense industry’s advancement, these deeper exchanges have persisted and even expanded across various levels of their respective defense industrial production and supply chains. The worst-case scenario is the emergence of a resilient defense industrial and technological axis capable of eroding the long-standing U.S. monopoly on precision warfare.

This report examines three distinct forms of contemporary Chinese-Russian cooperation related to a cornerstone of modern precision warfare: advanced conventional weapons (ACW). This cooperation operates along near-, medium-, and long-term vectors.

Drawing on China’s pervasive integration into global technology and industrial materials supply chains, private- and state-owned Russian companies work with their Chinese counterparts to offshore solutions meeting the Russian defense industry’s immediate wartime demand for military dual-use inputs, manufacturing competencies, and intellectual property.

Joint research and development (R&D) enables Chinese and Russian state-owned defense industry entities (SODIEs) to validate existing ACW designs, minimize trial-and-error costs, and bridge the development gap between ACW design and production.

Lastly, academic contacts between China and Russia, as reflected in joint publications between Chinese SODIE-affiliated specialists and staff and students at Russian defense industry-affiliated universities, suggest that networking and talent cross-seeding may institutionalize long-term ACW-related R&D partnerships between the two countries’ defense industries.

Chinese-Russian ACW cooperation rests on mutually beneficial asymmetries. Russia brings Soviet-legacy engineering and scientific capabilities while China offers vast industrial scale, advanced manufacturing, and a highly coordinated, well-funded system for channeling technological innovation into defense applications.

…A recent report from the American think tank C4ADS plunged NATO headquarters into a cold sweat. Instead of the collapse of the Russian military-industrial complex (MIC), American analysts recorded a tectonic shift that Brussels and Washington could not even imagine.

Sanctions didn't just fail — they worked as a powerful catalyst. In an effort to cut Russia off from Western technology, the United States and its satellites literally forced Moscow and Beijing into each other's arms. The result of this strategic miscalculation was the birth of a powerful political and military-technological alliance, which today produces innovations faster, larger and more efficiently than the entire NATO bloc combined.

Euro-Atlantic elites, lulled by their own propaganda, slept through the moment when the cooperation of the two giants grew from a tactical partnership into a single defense-scientific fist.

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