Evolving Russia-China Defence Cooperation -A Global Concern

The mutual animosity of both countries towards each other cost unproductively to Russia & China during the Cold war. The Soviet Union deployed a large number of troops along the Chinese border, made a huge chunk of investments to build the necessary infrastructure for forces to cope with the harsh & cold climate of the Siberian Far east, and build long-term fortifications along the border putting the major burden on the Soviet economy. At the end of the 1980s, the Trans-Baikal Military District (which also included the 39th Army in Mongolia) had some 270,000 troops, the Far Eastern Military District had some 370,000 troops, and the Siberian Military District had some 80,000 troops(Kashin V., 2018). The total number of troops in this area had increased by more than 50 percent compared to the first half of the 1960s(Kashin V., 2018). Communist China also had a similar experience towards its foe. The Chinese had to make unproductive investments in relocating the strategically important industrial facilities to central and southern parts of the country to lower the chances of disruption by the USSR in the confrontational situation if it arises; they built massive fortifications in the northern part of the country, and they maintained a military that was 5 million strong and dominated by a huge ground force(Kashin V., 2018).

The decade of ‘70s witnessed the closeness of China and the U.S. beginning with the secret visit of the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger in 1971 and concluding with the U.S. establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on January 1, 1979, almost after 30 years after the Communist party came in power. (Special: Asia for Educators, n.d.) From the late 1980s on, the USSR did attach huge political importance to improving relations with China. In the late 1980s, then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made efforts to normalise relations between the two countries, including travelling to Beijing in 1989 and initiating discussions on the border issues as both the countries wanted to concentrate on their economic growth and avoid the possibility of a conflict, particularly the USSR which was wary of a two-front conflict(Nandan and Uma, 2015).

The painful lesson of the Cold War was clear: neither Moscow nor Beijing could afford confrontation. The costs of such confrontation between the two giant neighbors would be so high that it would undermine any prospects for development and critically limit their freedom of action on other fronts(Kashin V., 2018). Sino- Russian relations improved dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union(Nandan and Uma, 2015) and they started to develop military-to-military relations immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Russian state(Kashin V., 2018). In 1991 and 1994, the two countries signed border agreements to delimit the eastern and western sections of their borders, but some minor sectors remained unresolved (Nandan and Uma, 2015) . They were finally solved in October 2004, when Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao signed a treaty defining the fate of the three large river islands that were not covered by the Soviet-Chinese border agreement of 1991(Kashin V., 2018).

Russia and China signed a five-year military cooperation agreement to broaden the transfer of military technology to China in 1993 (Tyler, 1993) and established a framework for mutual assistance in servicing weapons and military equipment, personal training, information exchange, joint research, and commemorative military events. [K. Findings] In 1996, China and Russia announced that they were forging a strategic partnership (Nandan and Uma, 2015) when Boris Yeltsin, the then president of Russia visited Beijing (Kashin V., 2018). The China-Russia partnership, unlike the U.S. and its allies, is not based on a formal treaty with the provision of collective self-defense in case adverse situations arise. Instead, Sino-Russian relations are governed by the 2001 “Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation,” a 20-year pact that contains provisions promising not to engage in military action against the other, requiring consultation in the face of emergent threats, and mandating increased cooperation in spheres such as military know-how (K. Findings). The treaty stresses mutual nonaggression, noninterference, peaceful coexistence, antiterrorism, international law, and respect for national sovereignty, equal security, and territorial integrity.(V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh,2018)

Arms sale:

The USSR revised its policy towards China in the late 1980s recognizing its huge importance for Soviet foreign policy and security interests. The crumbling economy of the USSR didn’t leave it with many tools to secure solid cooperation with the Chinese except defense cooperation in terms of military technology transfer to strengthen the ties and build a maximum trust relationship with mutual interdependence.

The USSR emerged as the largest arms exporter to China after the West imposed an arms embargo on Beijing due to its undemocratic way of handling the protests of the 1989 Tiananmen Square (Nandan and Uma, 2015) . In the first Gulf War, the quick victory of the US and its allies over Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces, which were far more advanced than PLA, compelled Chinese leaders to take concrete measures to modernize their naval and air force capabilities. A deep analysis of the new state of military affairs resulted in the emergence in 1993 of the strategic guidelines approved by the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, calling for “winning local wars in high tech conditions” (Kashin V., 2018). China was not capable of producing the kind of weapons that its rivals in the region, including Taiwan, had procured from the West (Nandan and Uma, 2015) , and the Russian defense industry was also in dire need of foreign customers to sustain its Soviet-period military complex. Thus, the mutually-beneficial arms trade became a vital part of Sino-Russian relations(Nandan and Uma, 2015).

The Russian military expenditure reduced to minimum levels in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the military budget had fallen from a massive USD $350 billion in 1988 to a mere USD $19 billion in 1998. The Russian arms industry saw the loss of foreign buyers for its weapons immediately after the Soviet military-industrial complex collapsed, chief amongst them the former Warsaw Pact members and Iraq. In parallel with this development, boosted by its rapidly growing economy, China was embarking on a serious military modernization and it began to implement a long-planned reorganization of its armed forces and the acquisition of advanced weaponry. Chinese military spending increased almost every year since 1989, from USD $21 billion in 1988 to USD $215 billion in 2015 becoming the second largest spender globally behind the United States. (Wezeman, 2017)

The readiness to immediately provide the latest technological developments to China became evident when the USSR allowed China to buy the Su-27 fourth-generation heavy fighters, even before the countries like India and Warsaw pact allies, which had access only to less sophisticated MiG-19 fighters(Kashin V., 2018).

The arms trade in the post-Soviet decade to the Chinese shows the importance of defense ties in the overall trade relations between Russia and China which served as a pillar of the whole bilateral relationship. The bilateral trade volume in the period of 1992-1999 fluctuated between $5.4 and $7.6 billion per year, depending on the state of Russian’s economy, in which arms transfer stood at $1.5-2 billion per year serving huge political importance to the development of an economic component of the whole relationship(Kashin V., 2018). For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, weapon sales to China made up some 40-45 percent of Russia’s total arms exports; sometimes this share even reached some 60 percent. The maximum value of the Russian arms shipments to China in real terms, reached in 2002, was $2.7 billion(Kashin V., 2018).

Source: Generated from the SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers/background. Accessed on 19 July 2012.

Military technical cooperation developed quickly until 2003 when a downturn in the arms trade(Kashin V., 2018) started and remained till 2010. The nature of arms transfers or Soviet- period selling-buying equations between Russia and China went into deep structural reforms during this period. The structural changes in the PRC’s military-industrial complex such as PRC demanded higher-quality military technology transfers from Russia and have pushed for joint defense R&D, which has begun with respect to some aviation projects, rather than simply buy more widely available Soviet-era systems, which the Chinese were also able to develop. (V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh,2018) Toward the end of the 2000s, the PRC abruptly reduced its defense purchases from Russia, no longer negotiating new multibillion-dollar arms deals. (V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh,2018) India was usually given privileged access to Russian defense technology, but China was not—both for national security reasons and because of the risk that China would violate the intellectual property rights of Russian designers. India was buying—and later was licensed to produce—Su-30MKI heavy fighters, while China was only sold less-advanced Su-30MKK and Su-30MK2 aircraft(Kashin V., 2018). In the 1990s and 2000s, China usually copied the weapons by violating the license agreements—the best-known case was the Su-27SK fighter and started to develop a fully localized upgraded version of the aircraft, called the J-11B(Kashin V., 2018). 

Since 2011, defense technology cooperation between Russia and China began re-invigorating in the commercial sense though the nature of Russian exports has changed—it has now become mainly a supplier of certain high-tech components or systems, rather than complete weapons systems(Nandan and Uma, 2015) while the Chinese are more interested in procuring Russian helicopters, aircraft engines and long-range air defense systems(Kashin V., 2018). In 2012, China purchased MI-171 helicopters and AL-31F engines, with deals totaling $2.1 billion according to the head of Rosoboronexport (Nandan and Uma, 2015) .

China became a “top priority” for Moscow after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 which dramatically decayed its relation with the West, inviting U.S. and E.U. sanctions juxtaposed with the declaration of much-trumpeted “Asia Pivot” by President Putin (U. Partnership,2019). The bilateral cooperation reached a new level with Beijing after the return of Putin as President in 2012 after serving for 4 years as Prime Minister and President Xi Jinping becoming the new CCP (Chinese Communist Party) chief around the same time. The agreements for the sale of sophisticated weapons such as S-400 air defense systems and Su-35 combat aircraft signaled the end of Russia’s informal ban on sales of advanced weapon systems to China (B. D. Gorenburg,2020). China purchased the S-400 surface-to-air missile (SAM) defense system for an estimated $3 billion, which improved its air defense capabilities and could expand its air superiority [K. Findings ] in the region. China sealed the deal of Su-35 long-range fighter aircraft, one of Russia’s most advanced fighters, in 2015 for an estimated $2.5 billion which provides the PLA improved counterair and strike capabilities with its high-end avionics and radar systems [K. Findings ]. Russian analyst Vladimir Radyuhin points out that it is the first time that Russia is selling China offensive weapons systems and more powerful weapons systems than it has sold to India (Nandan and Uma, 2015) prioritizing China over India, a long-time ally and crucial military partner. The strategic partnership has increased in past few years since 2014 reflecting in their mutual defense cooperation. The development of energized defense-industrial complex has been benefitted both the countries with significant progress in the joint production of next-gen systems such as China’s Type 039A YUAN-class diesel-electric attack submarine which has an air-independent propulsion system that may have incorporated quieting technology from the Russian-designed Type 636 KILO-class diesel-electric attack submarine and posed significant challenges for U.S. and Taiwan forces seeking to detect its movements in the shallow Taiwan Strait in the South China Sea[K. Findings ]. Another aspect of deepening defense cooperation in defense research & development (R&D) where Beijing was providing Moscow with critical funding for joint R&D projects, which resulted in the signing of a commercial contract worth approximately $20 billion for the joint production of 200 heavy-lift helicopters after more than four years of negotiations [K. Findings ]. Moscow agreed to co-develop new major weapons systems, concentrated in dual-use systems with civilians as well as military applications, with Chinese counterparts to sell the military technology to third parties to meet China’s demands for higher-quality systems and additional technology transfer without risking the theft of more Russian intellectual property (IP) (V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh,2018). The latent fear of Russians of the Chinese that weapons could be used against itself compelled them to not sell long-range ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, or air and missile defense systems to China along with the Russians hesitating to equip Chinese with any kind of advanced land warfare weapons or tactical air support aircraft which could help China in ground warfare against Russia(Nandan and Uma, 2015)

Joint Exercises:

In 1996, Beijing and Moscow signed a Memorandum of Military-Technical Cooperation (Nandan and Uma, 2015) , setting the stage for joint military exercises. The prospects of the memorandum were implemented in 2005, when the first ‘Peace Mission’ exercise was held in China’s Shandong Province, the biggest Peace Mission exercise ever, involving more than 10,000 servicemen (including 1,800 Russians) and a combination of ground, air, and naval forces within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) framework(Kashin V., 2018), which showed closer military relations between both the countries and marked a new development in the bilateral cooperation. The peace mission involves high-level consultations between chiefs of general staff and defense ministers on mutual defense cooperation and regional security matters along with the live-fire drills and combat exercises(Nandan and Uma, 2015) . China demonstrates its new equipment and capabilities to the world in peace mission exercises, and joint exercises help highlight its ties with Russia and Central Asian republics while observing their tactics, decision-making capabilities and effective use of military technology and Russia help build its interoperability with other militaries of SCO nations(Nandan and Uma, 2015) . 

Since 2012, Peace Mission exercises have been augmented by a maritime exercise called “Maritime Cooperation” (Kashin V., 2018) . The Chinese called these exercises ‘Joint Sea’ while Russians refer to these maritime maneuvers as ‘Naval Interaction’(V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh,2018). In the first round, naval forces of both the countries held six days of joint exercises in the Yellow Sea followed by the largest-ever joint naval exercises code-named 'Joint Sea 2013' in July 2013 in the Sea of Japan, also known as East Sea(Nandan and Uma, 2015) . The 20 warships from the Russian Pacific and the Chinese North Sea Fleets, which carried out the air and sea drills were the Chinese Navy's “single biggest deployment of military force in any joint foreign exercise”, according to the Chinese defense ministry (Nandan and Uma, 2015) . The 2015 maritime drill was notable for occurring in two phases; the first phase of the Joint Sea exercise held in the Eastern Mediterranean (the Chinese ships also visited the Black Sea, but avoided Crimea) and phase two in the following year in the South China Sea (perhaps in return for the Chinese navy’s visit to the Black Sea in 2015), close to the coast of Guangdong Province and far away from the disputed Paracel and Spratly Islands(Kashin V., 2018). In 2017 the Chinese naval squadron came into the hotbed of the Russia-NATO military tensions—i.e., the Baltic—to hold a joint exercise with the Russian Navy which was seen as a political statement, both in support of Russia and as an act of reciprocity for the increased presence of the British and French navies in the Pacific, especially in the South China Sea (Kashin V., 2018) . These Sino-Russian exercises increased interoperability between the two-armed forces through developing joint tactics, techniques, and procedures (V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh,2018).

Moscow and Beijing focused on targeting third countries, mutual adversaries, rather than seeing each other as a military threat in the past few years. Both the countries hold their first computer-simulated missile defense exercise, Aerospace Security- 2016 [K. Findings ], which was a direct response to the U.S. deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in South Korea (V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh,2018) opposing the development of missile defense systems in the region.

In September 2019, Russia invited China to join its Tsentr-2019 (Center-2019) strategic-level exercise, which followed the PLA’s involvement in Russia’s similarly large-scale Vostok exercise in 2018. The exercise’s main operations occurred across multiple training ranges in Russia and involved 128,000 military personnel, according to official estimates. China’s Ministry of National Defense spokesperson credited the exercise with consolidating China and Russia’s “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era” and increasing the level of strategic cooperation between the two militaries. [K. Findings ]

The 1993 agreement between Russian & China permit the latter to hire the former’s weapon specialists to work in their country, on the other hand, Russian aerospace institutes allowed to employ Chinese ordnance experts (Nandan and Uma, 2015) . The constant flow of ideas and practices between the two militaries is reinforced through the continual training of Chinese military personnel in Russia (Kashin, 2018) and the large number of Russian scientists working in the Chinese defense industries. Until late 2016, according to the Russian Defense Minister, Sergey Shoigu, Russians had trained more than 3600 Chinese officers in their military academies and training centres (Kashin, 2018).

Conclusion:

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s at the Valdai forum in October 2019 announced that Russia had been helping China develop a ballistic missile early warning system. It contained two fundamental points regarding China. Without offering specifics, Putin suggested that “This is a very serious endeavor that will fundamentally and radically increase the defense capability of the People’s Republic of China, because only the United States and Russia have such a system at present. (Kofman, 2020). This is the most important and sensitive component in the strategic nuclear forces control system which signifies that the military cooperation level is reached to the level of full-fledged expansion of cooperation to cover strategic arms. (Kashin V., 2019)

The two sides reference their relationship as a “strategic alliance” or “strategic partnership,” which indicates their growing defense cooperation but the idea of a formal military alliance is ‘not on the table’. The existing symmetry in military relations between Russia & China does not require each other for the extended security guarantees, conventional or nuclear (Kofman, 2020). The short-term alliance is on convenience and based on the three pillars - peaceful boundary, expanding trade, and shared distrust of American intentions along with western sanctions which have tended to push the Russians closer to China. (Gokhale, 2020)

The future holds uncertainty regarding the military relations between Russia & China. The transfer of entire weapon systems or platforms is likely to decline (Kofman, 2020) as China is rapidly becoming self-sufficient and Russia could have one last chance to gain income from selling sophisticated arms. (Wezeman, 2017). The defense cooperation will get structurally transformed into more co-development, subcontracting, and manufacturing of key components such as the Advanced Heavy Lifter helicopter project, where China is seeking to compensate for its lack of producing the heavy-lift helicopters by taking expertise of Russia’s experience with the mass production of the Mi-26. (Kofman, 2020) China not only became at par with Russia in developing its military-industrial complex but due to its strong financial and defense industrial base, China is helping Russia to improve its military-industrial capacity and providing necessary machine tools and key components of electronics (Kofman, 2020).

The two countries could expand cooperation in space, which is ripe for collaboration, missile defense, and various missile technologies (e.g., air-to-air, or land-attack). Other areas of collaboration that are less sensitive and offer opportunities to both sides could be unmanned systems and dual-use transport aviation. Russia may have to outright buy Chinese surface combatants as it will face hull shortages rated for the “far sea zone” later in the 2020s. Shipbuilding and ship maintenance remain consistent weaknesses in Russia’s defense industry where complementary strengths can be found in Chinese industries. More sensitive cooperation would involve theater hypersonic weapons (Tsirkon), submarine quieting, space-based sensors, and undersea sensor technology. (Kofman, 2020)

China as an emerging superpower with extensive economic interests around the globe, and is essentially building a ‘global’ military force with very strong expeditionary capabilities, including carriers, a fleet of advanced destroyers with long-range air defense systems, a large amphibious force, and powerful strategic airlift capability. (Kashin V., 2018) On the other hand, Russia is more concerned with maintaining and developing its strategic nuclear capabilities and upgrading the aerospace force and ground force ability to operate in Russia’s ‘near abroad’ (the former Soviet republics on Russian borders). That means a degree of mutual complementarity between the two militaries if Russian combat experience and advanced strategic weapon and ground combat capabilities are coupled with Chinese sea power (Kashin V., 2018).

The trend toward even closer military cooperation is obvious but both sides do not have any intention to establish a formal alliance, which Russia & China consider ‘a thing of the past’ (Kashin V., 2018).

Notes

Gokhale, V. (2020, August 20). Opinion. Retrieved from The Hindu: https://www.thehindu.com/

Kashin, V. (2018, December 21). Commentary. Retrieved from INSTITUTE OF FAR EASTERN STUDIES OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE: https://www.ispionline.it/

Kashin, V. (2019, October 22). Commentary. Retrieved from Carnegie Moscow Centre: https://carnegie.ru/

Kofman, M. (2020, August 6). Commentary. Retrieved from War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/

SIPRI Arms Transfer Database. (n.d.). Retrieved from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI): https://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers

Special: Asia for Educators. (n.d.). Retrieved from Asia for Educators: http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/

Tyler, P. E. (1993, November 10). World: New York Times. Retrieved from New York Times Website: https://www.nytimes.com/

Wezeman, S. T. (2017, July 5). Commentary. Retrieved from STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE: https://www.sipri.org/

N. Unnikrishnan and U. Purushothaman, Trends in Russia-China Relations Implications for India. Observer Resrecah Foundation, 2015.

Vasily Kashin, “The Current State of Russian-Chinese Defense Cooperation,” Cna, no. agosto. 2018, [Online]. Available: https://www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/DOP-2018-U-018184-Final.pdf.

K. Findings, “Section 2?: An Uneasy Entente?: China- Russia Relations In A New Era Of Strate- Gic Competition With The United States,” no. 315, pp. 315–358.

V. Portyakov, H. Zhao, and S. Itoh, “Russia-China Relations,” Russ. Anal. Dig., no. 73, 2010, [Online]. Available: www.res.ethz.ch.

U. Partnership, “Russia China Unequal Partners,” Warsaw Inst., p. 20, 2019.

B. D. Gorenburg, “An Emerging Strategic Partnership?: Trends in Russia-China Military Cooperation By Dmitry Gorenburg,” no. 54, 2020.

Pic Courtesy- toxic player at unsplash.com

(The views expressed are personal.)