he may meeting of the Russian-Chinese Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation has been postponed again, this time until autumn. In Moscow, they are saying that the change is due to changes in the personnel on the commission. In Beijing, they say it is due to the need to make improvements under current contracts. The real reason is most likely the substantial reduction in military-technical cooperation between Russia and China, which has lost exhausted potential in its current form.
Kommersant learned of the postponement of the commission meeting in the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation. “The reason is purely technical,” it was explained there, “a change of commission chairmen.” At the end of March, Sergey Ivanov, now first deputy prime minister, was replaced by new Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
Sources in the Russian defense industry have suggested to Kommersant that there is another reason the meeting is not being held. They say that they meeting was moved back by Beijing, which is demanding that improvements to Russian weapons be made under current contracts after Chinese testing. In particular, the test firing of a Moskit missile installed on a Project 956EM cruiser last year was a problem, as was the firing of a Club-S on a Project 636 vessel.
A source in the Russian government called claims made by the Chinese Defense Ministry groundless. “It was just a technical failure that the Chinese are taking advantage of to pressure us in negotiations on other topics. Both systems – the Moskit and the Club-S, have been tested and are in mass production,” the source said.
The endless postponement of the commission meeting must have more serious causes then. Military-technical cooperation between Russia and China, which has exhausted its potential in it current form, is being substantially reduced, if not completely cut out.
In the 1990s, many Russian defense enterprises were kept alive almost exclusively by Chinese contracts. Between 1992 and 2006, when total Russian arms exports amounted to $58.4 billion, China took delivery of about $26 billion worth military equipment and weapons. Today the situation has changed. “Russia has significantly expanded its arms deliveries geographically, so there is no loner a critical need for Chinese purchases,” explained Konstantin Makienko, an expert at the Center for the Analysis of Strategy and Technology. Last year and at the beginning of this year, large-scale agreements were reached with Algeria ($7.5 billion), Venezuela ($3 billion) and India ($2.6 billion) and contracts with Libya (up to $2.2 billion) and Syria ($2-3 billion) being prepared.
China has lost much of its interest in purchases of Russian military equipment. In the 1990s, Beijing did not have much choice. After the West imposed an arms embargo on China because of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, China had to satisfy its weapons needs with Russian orders. Having purchased a large amount of Russian weapons in the last 15 years, China no longer needs significant supplies. A sign of this was Beijing's pullout several months ago from negotiations for the purchase of four Zubr troop-carrying hovercraft worth $210 million. Negotiations on the delivery of up to 48 Su-33 anti-ship aircraft for $2.5 billion have slowed down. Up to 70 percent of Russian military exports went to China in the second half of the 1990s. In 2006, China's share had fallen to 40 percent, and it is expected to be 17-20 this year.
“The Russian military-industrial complex mainly supplied China with arms developed in Soviet times,” Andrey Karneev, deputy director of the Institute of the Countries of Asia and Africa, told Kommersant. “Now that reserve has been exhausted. The Chinese want to receive more modern systems from Russia. But Russia won't include missile technology in the sphere of cooperation for understandable reasons.” Alexander Lukin, director of the Center for Asiatic Studies at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations explained that “We have already armed China more than once. In the 1960s, those weapons were used against our border forces. That does not mean that nothing of the kind will happen again, but there remains a certain caution in relations with China, and so Russia doesn't want to sell it its newest weapons.”
The matter will not reach a full stop to Russian-Chinese military technology cooperation. “We most likely will supply parts for systems China has already bought for a long time, Karneev observed. In addition, Beijing is not ready to cut military technology cooperation with Moscow fully either. The United States and European Union have not removed the embargo on weapons sales yet. And Israel, under pressure from Washington, is also refusing to sell China its latest weapons.
