“This feeble sales record has nothing to do with the aircraft themselves. China has made great strides in improving its state-owned aerospace technology base, particularly in the military realm. China makes quality products, or at least products that are on par with the planes that the old Soviet Union succeeded in exporting in great quantities to various countries.”
Moreover, Chinese weapons are relatively cheap, reliable, and sold with few questions asked.
The reason, rather, according to Aboulafia, is that China’s neighbors “don’t like China.”
Take, for example, China’s J-10 fighter jet. It is what we call a “fourth-generation-plus” combat aircraft, featuring an advanced radar, a “glass cockpit,” fly-by-wire flight controls, and even a certain amount of stealthiness. It can fire long-range air-to-air missiles and even serve as a ground-attack aircraft. It is roughly the equivalent of an F-16C fighter, which is in wide use in more than two dozen air forces around the world, and it is most likely cheaper than the F-16.
One would expect that the J-10 would offer a lot of competition to Western combat aircraft producers, and yet, how many of these fighters have the Chinese exported?
Zero. Nada. None.
There are many reasons for buying arms from a particular supplier-state, beyond economics or military efficacy. Oftentimes, countries buy from a particular country in order to shore up political-military relationships, especially military alliances. A U.S. defense manufacturer supposedly quipped one time that “with every F-16 we sell, we throw in the U.S. Marines.”
Jokes aside, the United States—and, indeed, other Western arms producers, like Britain or France—can offer security guarantees (if desired) and other protections to its customers that China cannot. This simple feature of “hard power” still eludes China; as Aboulafia puts it, “Beijing lacks appeal as a strategic partner.”
At the same time, Chinese “soft power” is also lacking—and perhaps even receding. Soft power is generally defined as “attractive power”: the use of culture, diplomacy, and political values to raise a nation’s appeal to other countries. The goal, in this case, is to entice other nations to want to cooperate with Beijing.
But soft power requires trust painfully cultivated over time and carefully sustained. In the case of China and arms sales, this means that a customer must feel that it can depend on Beijing for services like repair and maintenance of weaponry, the supply of spare parts, training, and even technology transfer.
The challenge of soft power is not only that it can be lost quite quickly. And here is where Aboulafia’s retort—that countries simply do not like China—affects arms sales.
More importantly, Beijing’s bad behavior has provoked a backlash. Particularly in the United States, it has catalyzed a broad political coalition against China. Trump’s hawkishness toward Beijing has been picked up by the Biden administration.
In Congress, there is considerable bipartisan support for the Strategic Competition Act, which is directly aligned against the technological, economic, and military threat from China. In particular, it seeks to “counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally.”
Meanwhile, those calling for continued engagement with China increasingly come across as naïve. Beijing is more and more viewed as a key source of tensions and insecurities in the Asia-Pacific (and in other parts of the world), and rather than join it, nations in the region are actively hedging or balancing against it.
It may be that countries will have to continue to engage with China—it is simply too big to ignore. Nevertheless, future dealings with Beijing will likely be more gingerly and skeptical.
