A Marriage of Convenience?
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, but the deal is asymmetrical — and Moscow may be paying for it.
Executive Summary #
The “no limits” partnership between China and Russia—declared in the lead-up to the Kremlin’s 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.
Visualization of assessed technology transfers between Russian and Chinese companies. Hover over the dots for more information on shipments.
(Source: Russian trade records, C4ADS data holdings, available upon request.)
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.
But there are important caveats to their cooperation. Most importantly, Beijing appears to have limited ACW-related cooperation with Moscow when such cooperation does not serve China’s techno-nationalist ambitions. China ultimately needs access to U.S. and Western markets, capital, and technology more than it needs Russia. U.S. policymakers should prioritize working with allies to accelerate science and technology innovation while engaging Beijing and Moscow separately to introduce friction into their exchanges of ACW-related technologies and expertise.
Differences and similarities between MLRS-launched UAV systems designed by SPLAV (Russia) and Norinco (China).
Source: SPLAV, “Презентация ОАО «НПО «СПЛАВ»” [“Presentation of OJSC NPO SPLAV”], November 19, 2012; “国产巡飞弹“飞龙”，主打一个战定发挥!” [“The domestically produced loitering munition "Flying Dragon" is designed for stable performance!”], 新华通讯社 [Xinhua News Agency], June 9, 2025.
