Dr. Elliot Ji
Since 1949, Soviet technologies have enabled China to jump-start advanced weapons research and development (R&D) with a weak military-industrial base. Soviet or Russian experts have helped China with the atomic bomb, rockets, submarines, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and just about every military aircraft, from jet fighters to drones. As the Chinese economy grew, China gradually advanced from a buyer to an equal collaborator and sometimes a supplier of defense technology. By buying and copying Russian technologies, China could overcome significant hurdles in the weapons R&D process and obtain the much-needed military capabilities to compete with the United States. In return, Russia could expect Chinese support, such as cash and basic arms, during events like the war in Ukraine. This has helped Russia alleviate the financial strain from its stagnated economy due to international sanctions. Over the past decade, China and Russia have signed formal treaties and agreements to enable R&D collaboration in civilian and military applications, including several recent unspecified “high-tech weapon” programs.
While it appears that the two “no limit” partners enjoy a harmonious relationship in defense technological collaboration, deep R&D collaboration between the two is easier said than done. For democratic nations, trust, transparency, and institutionalization safeguard military technology-sharing and are necessary for a productive, sustainable military technological collaboration. Institutionalization, the construction of formal rules, procedures, and protocols for the two parties, is particularly difficult for Russia and China to accept. I argue that both Russia and China’s strong desire to keep technological innovation indigenous, a practice constituting techno-nationalism, has constrained and will continue to limit the effects of long-term weapons R&D productivity. The Chinese political imperative of achieving indigenous technological innovation encourages opportunistic behavior, damaging the prospects of trustful and sustainable technological collaborations with its security partners.
In more than seven decades, China and Russia have collaborated most in the military aviation-aerospace industry. This area shows that the collaboration lacks mutual investment of R&D resources and is often one-sided in favor of China. The long-term, high-sunk-cost effort to institutionalize joint R&D faces significant challenges because of China’s opportunistic behavior. These include several violations of Russian intellectual property (IP) and short-term partnerships that cease immediately as Chinese indigenous systems become available. Furthermore, once China finishes indigenizing the systems it once relied on Russia to acquire, it becomes less incentivized to open itself up to Russian scientists since these Chinese innovations must be guarded by the Chinese state. Institutionally, this discourages deep collaboration on the fundamental R&D that created the advanced capabilities that China sought, including advanced metallurgy and novel materials. The result is likely a military-techno symbiosis at the lower end of the value chain, such as the production of low-tech parts and basic electronics, but a break at the higher end, including material science, metallurgy, and advanced electronics. As such, long-term, sophisticated R&D collaboration will likely remain a challenging goal for the two countries.
The One-sided Collaboration
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has ordered aircraft, jet engines, air defense systems, sensors, and missiles from Russia worth over $30 billion. Between 2001 and 2010, China spent an enormous amount purchasing Russian arms, accounting for well over half of China’s foreign-made weapons. The purchases peaked in 2005 but began dropping shortly after as China ramped up its indigenous R&D capacity. While the number of arms transferred has waned since 2015, the sophistication of the technologies transferred to China has remained high. From 2015 to 2020, Russia sold several cutting-edge systems that filled critical gaps in Chinese capabilities, like the S-400 air defense system, the Su-35 flankers, the 3M-45E anti-ship missile, and two major types of military engines, the D-30 and AL-31.
The track record of transferring military technology to China is large in volume but transactional in nature. Unlike the Soviet assistance in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union supplied not only manufactured products but also all the know-how, today’s Russia seems to sell only completed products, components, and spare parts to China. Concerns about Chinese IP thefts have obstructed cooperation for the sophisticated technologies that China struggles with, including submarine technology. The Russian worries are well-founded. Russia has accused China of committing over 500 cases of IP theft against them. In response, Russia is offering less sophisticated “export models” or declining to sell the most sensitive technologies, such as rocket engines and submarine technology. Russian experts have found their Chinese counterparts secretly replacing original Russian parts with unsuccessful Chinese imitations and then seeking Russian assistance to solve the problem or bypassing Russia to obtain Soviet weapons through Ukraine.
China’s approach of “introduce, digest, absorb, and re-innovate 引进, 消化,吸收,再创新” has repeatedly resulted in copying Russian technology for a domestic version and continuously seeing access to foreign innovation. Two leading scholars on the Chinese military have cleverly categorized the way the Chinese military aviation industry sought advanced aviation technology as “buy, build, or steal.” Faced with an inability to originally innovate, China flexes its ability through other means.
Several Chinese jet fighter programs during the 2000s illustrate the opportunistic practices of the Chinese defense industry well. The Chinese J-11B was secretly developed by reverse-engineering the Su-27 fighter, which China was licensed to co-produce in 1995. Russia discovered several years later that China had taken advantage of the license for the J-11B and halted further negotiations at the time. China pulled the same trick on the Su-30 fighter, which became the J-16, further agitating the Russians. While Russia eventually agreed to overlook the issue in favor of further sales, it has become more wary of allowing licensed production of complete systems. Russia is now opting to sell only key components or complete products without licensing authorization. The hope is that this will increase the Chinese reliance on Russian technologies, especially certain aircraft engines that cannot be easily reverse-engineered.
Therefore, while nominally a “cooperation” between the two countries, the Sino-Russian military technological exchange has almost exclusively focused on the one-sided commerce of weapons, not the R&D processes that created these weapons. No institutional anchor secures the long-term technological engagement between the two countries. For example, the transfer of low-bypass jet engines tapered off in the past three to five years as China indigenously developed acceptable substitutes like the WS-15 and WS-20. Negotiations of repeated sales seem only to be initiated by China when the indigenous development fails to deliver, as in the case of transport helicopters. As such, there has been almost no foundation of trust between China and Russia for military technological cooperation, and both sides are acutely aware of the nature of their exchange.
The Challenge of Techno-Nationalism
By withholding the know-how and selling only complete products, Russia intends to preserve a safe capability gap with its customers while maintaining the attractiveness of systems to other buyers. China, similarly, wants to maximize its bang for the buck, buying only the technology it has yet to master, preferably only once for immediate absorption and re-innovation.
Typically, states are strategic in transferring sensitive military technology. They often determine the depth and content of the transfer by assessing the recipient’s capability gap with the seller and the prospect of future defense interest alignment. As the recipient state’s indigenous R&D capabilities grow, it can better absorb, replicate, and even re-innovate the acquired technology to substantially enhance its national power even after the collaboration ceases. Eventually, this process can challenge the seller state’s position by eliminating future demand. As such, if the transfer of the technology will result in the recipient country’s complete mastery of certain technologies, the prospect of long-term collaboration is slim. Russian scholars have stated this concern even in Chinese-language publications. The seller, being fully aware of the unsustainable nature of such sales, would be increasingly reluctant to transfer or sell cutting-edge technologies, invariably downgrading the depth of cooperation over time.
Because of this thinking, both China and Russia have opted for an equilibrium strategy to maintain techno-nationalism at the expense of collaborative R&D effectiveness. They insist that all critical R&D and production efforts be excluded from the partner while simultaneously striving to maximize their own trove of knowledge through learning from the partner. Tsinghua University professor and former PLA officer Wu Dahui, was quoted by the People’s Digest magazine (published by The People’s Daily) as saying, “[from 2003-2010] we were no longer merely acquiring but absorbing and digesting the technology [from Russia], entering a new phase of arms trade with Russia… China shall not be Russia’s purse or teller machine. Introducing [Russian] technology is completely centered on China’s interest.”
Both Russian and Chinese scientists and engineers have lamented techno-nationalist practices like unauthorized reverse engineering and superficial deals. The opportunistic approach prohibits deep and innovative technological cooperation. A 2017 joint annual report published by the Fudan University Institute of International Studies and the Russian International Affairs Council identifies techno-nationalism in the military-industrial systems as an impediment to the stable development of Sino-Russian cooperation. The report also identifies China as the party that manifests a more extreme form of techno-nationalism, which justifies its actions by “an economic logic 经济的逻辑” – a euphemism for opportunistic behavior. Russian scholars in the report recognized that the lack of mutual trust and long-term vision for collaboration has created difficulties for “more complicated forms of cooperation on artificial intelligence, laser weapons, robotic technologies, and ultrasound.” This has led the two countries to “engage in expensive and unique R&D on their own to respond to American large-scale military technological development.” From China’s perspective, scholars have recognized that their previous IP violations led Russia to downgrade its arms export to China and temporarily suspend military-to-military exchanges on military-technological cooperation between the two countries from 2006-2008. Such behavior runs against the advice of Chinese engineers who have long advocated for a robust, reliable, fair institution to manage IP protection for military technologies to build mutual trust. Still, China has yet to implement substantive changes that alleviate Russian concerns. The Chinese defense industry emphasizes safeguarding China’s own military IP as it pushes its product to “go aboard 走出去.” A group of experts at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (formerly the First Academy) of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the primary R&D entity of rocket and missile systems, wrote in 2021 that China must “specify the legal restrictive conditions of intellectual property protection and ensure that our military technology IP rights are not violated, especially against the backdrop of a diverse cooperative model between enterprises.”
Currently, while many agreements and collaborative frameworks exist to promote research engagement between the Chinese and Russian aerospace industries, few of them include the high sunk cost and joint investments that help institutionalize long-term R&D collaboration. A 2021 report from the Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) provides the raw data on current Sino-Russian collaborative activities. The report documents 38 cases of R&D-related collaborations, including 23 organizations collaborating with Russian entities on research, development, and testing, 13 conferences, forums, and seminars, two collaborations on production and manufacturing, and 34 organizations seeking sales and acquisition opportunities for the Chinese aerospace industry. However, among these cases, most of the collaborations only had signed agreements, memorandums, and minutes of intent that did not entail joint investment of concrete R&D resources. For military engine technology, the China Aviation Research Institute only managed to sign a memorandum of understanding to support “potential collaboration in aero-engine technology development.” The Institute of Aeronautical Industry Manufacturing has an agreement with the All-Russian Institute of Aeronautical Materials (VIAM) that merely entails “strengthening mutual visits and exchanges, holding academic conferences and forums, and jointly applying for scientific and technological projects.”
Only seven collaborations identified by CASI entailed establishing joint research efforts and named specific research projects; about half were not for military use. The ones for military applications include R&D programs on high-strength and high-toughness titanium alloys and other new materials, a specific agreement for testing the TWS-800 turbofan engine using Russian high-altitude platforms, and the establishment of a joint laboratory at the Northwestern Polytechnic University. The rest of the concrete collaborations included joint investment in systems for civilian uses, such as the CR929, the T-128 transonic wind tunnel to test the CR929, and a large aperture lidar system for weather forecasting. Notably, the contracts for these joint R&D endeavors were signed between 2017 and 2019, while most of China’s major military aerospace R&D programs, such as the latest WS-series jet engines and the HQ-9 and HQ-22 SAM missiles, predated these collaborations by 5-10 years and their respective research entities were not found to have publicly known collaborations with Russian partners. Even though China could benefit tremendously from collaborating with Russia, Beijing seemed reluctant to engage in deep technological exchange in areas that could help it overcome one of the most significant technological bottlenecks in its military aviation industry. The techno-nationalist practice of keeping these systems away from foreign access is evident in these cases.
Implications
Two policy implications emerge from the above analysis. First, the troubled and transactional collaboration between Russia and China illustrates the vital role of trustworthy institutions in facilitating joint innovative ventures. Military-technological cooperation requires a robust institution to be effective and sustainable. It enables the partners to build trust, spell out consequences of opportunistic behavior, and encourage heavy sunk-cost investment for the long run when sharing sensitive technologies. Building such an institution naturally favors countries with similar domestic political systems, shared cultures, and well-aligned strategic goals, yet very few of which are directly applicable to the current Sino-Russian partnership. Partners engaged in military-technological collaboration must accept that sharing certain strategically valuable proprietary information is worth the tradeoff risk for long-term R&D. But if neither side wishes to embrace the vulnerability required to let the other side in on its technological know-how and does not want to establish trustworthy institutions, then joint technological innovation will remain an aspiration.
Second, while we may not see many effective joint weapons R&D programs between China and Russia, China may secure a steady stream of selected cutting-edge Russian weapons technology by other means. As Beijing continues to supply Russia’s war effort in Ukraine with low-tech systems, it gains considerable leverage over Russia in negotiating for the sale of cutting-edge weapons technology. In 2022, Russia raised the possibility of selling another batch of the S-400 SAM system to China following the 2015 deal that landed China’s first batch of Russia’s latest air defense technology. The repeated sale was likely an effort to secure more Chinese support as Russia struggled in the war in Ukraine. As a rapidly innovating second-mover, China can benefit from even the one-time-only transactions of advanced weapons to rapidly close its capability gap with the United States. Indeed, China does not need to match the United States system-to-system to gain a strategic advantage in the Indo-Pacific. The United States and its allies should continue to monitor the Chinese introduction and re-innovation of Russian technologies and maintain its innovative gap with China by fostering deep collaborative R&D with trusted allies and partners.
Elliot Ji is a Non-resident Fellow at the Institute for Future Conflict and Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at RAND Corporation. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in May 2025. He thanks the participants of the 2024 U.S. Naval War College Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute Summer Workshop for their valuable input. The views expressed in this article are based on personal open-source research that does not necessarily represent the position of the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.