When Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in March, it was to firm up a new Sino–Russian strategic partnership crafted last year. Yet there is always a hierarchy in every alliance, and it is increasingly apparent that Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.
It wasn’t always so. From the founding of communist China (People’s Republic of China) in 1949 and up to the early 1960s, Beijing was definitely subordinate to the Soviet Union. Particularly in the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) looked to the USSR as an ideological brother-in-arms and an economic and administrative model to be emulated.
Just as important, China depended heavily on Soviet aid to underwrite industrialization and national economic development. During the 1950s, Moscow sent thousands of Soviet advisers, engineers, and workers to China, while also educating thousands of Chinese inside Russia. The Soviet Union built thousands of modern industrial plants across China, using Russian machinery, tools, and plans.
Moscow’s largesse wasn’t free. Most Soviet aid to China came in the form of loans, to be paid off by exports of food and raw materials back to the USSR. (These grain exports, by the way, worsened China’s great famine of the late 1950s.)
The USSR also supplied considerable amounts of military assistance to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), both in the form of arms transfers and, more importantly, through the construction of turnkey facilities that allowed the Chinese to manufacture a wide variety of Soviet arms. In fact, the vast majority of Chinese arms produced during the 1950s and 1960s were mostly copies of Soviet-designed weaponry, many of them among the most modern armaments then available.
During this period, for example, China produced T-54 and T-55 tanks; MiG-15, MiG-17, and MiG-19 fighter jets; the SS-N-2 Styx antiship missile (designated the HY-2 Silkworm by the PLA); the AA-2 air-to-air missile; and the Romeo-class diesel-electric submarine. In most cases, the USSR made these systems available for licensed manufacture by China within only a few years of deploying the weapons with the Soviet armed forces.
In particular, Moscow made its then most-potent fighter jet available to the PLA, the MiG-21. Despite the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, which partly derailed this program, the Chinese received enough MiG-21 airframes, kits, and technical documents to successfully reverse-engineer the aircraft as the Chinese J-7 fighter. The J-7, in turn, was subsequently produced in the thousands and exported around the world.
The second phase of Russian military-technical assistance occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the warming of diplomatic and economic ties between Moscow and Beijing. At the time, the CCP was desperate for advanced foreign military technology in order to modernize its armed forces, and the West had recently cut the country off over its massacre of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators during the Tiananmen protests.
Moscow gladly stepped in, and the 1990s and early 2000s saw another wave of Russian arms sales to China. In 1992, Beijing signed a contract for 24 Su-27 fighter jets, its first purchase of Russian military equipment in over 30 years. This was followed up by subsequent buys of additional Su-27 and Su-30 fighters and, later on, an agreement to license-produce 200 Su-27s at the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation in Liaoning Province.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China received more than $28 billion worth of arms between 1992 and 2010. In addition to Sukhoi fighters, Beijing bought four Sovremenny-class destroyers (armed with the Moskit/SS-S-22 supersonic antiship cruise missile [ASCM]), 12 Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines, and several dozen Mi-8/-17 Hip helicopters, along with Tor-M1 and S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, AA-11 air-to-air missiles, Il-76 transport aircraft, Kh-31 antiradiation missiles, and 3M-54 missiles. As a result, Russian arms soon constituted the most potent weaponry in China’s arsenal.
What a difference a few years make. Today, China’s economy is light-years ahead of Russia’s. China’s per capita GDP has skyrocketed since the early 2000s and now equals Russia’s. China has built thousands of miles of high-speed railways and dominates manufacturing spheres like shipbuilding and consumer electronics, while Russia is basically a third-world extractive economy based on oil, gas, and minerals.
Beijing also outstrips Moscow when it comes to next-generation research and development (R&D) in such areas as cyber, space, and robotics. In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), for example, Russian spending on AI R&D is estimated at around $360 million for the period 2020–2024. In comparison, Chinese investment in AI is expected to reach $26.7 billion in 2026. Russia will likely never be able to compete head-to-head in any “AI arms race” with China (or the United States).
Additionally, China’s military hardly needs Moscow any longer. China spends three times more on its national defense than Russia ($225 billion versus $85 billion), and the difference is glaringly apparent. Over the past decade, the PLA has deployed hundreds of fifth-generation fighter jets, nuclear submarines, and advanced warships, while Russia’s backward forces remain bogged down in Ukraine.
As a result, Chinese purchases of Russian arms have dropped dramatically, from over $2.5 billion annually in the early 2000s to less than $750 million in 2022. The bulk of these recent purchases were for Russian jet engines, which were subsequently integrated into Chinese combat aircraft, given China’s longstanding problems with building effective turbofan engines. Even in this regard, however, China is becoming increasingly self-reliant.
Today it is a weak Russia that desperately needs a strong China. Putin is now looking to Xi to supply Russia with the weapons it urgently requires to continue its war on Ukraine. As a result, the power dynamic between Moscow and Beijing has clearly shifted in favor of the latter. As David Ignatius of The Washington Post has put it, “The paradox of the Ukraine war is that Putin’s bid for greater power in Europe has made him weaker.” This, in turn, has made him more dependent than ever on China and Xi.
Little wonder, then, that Putin is increasingly the junior partner in the Sino–Russian “alliance.” It will not shift back any time soon.
