If people are worried that secrets could leak to the US, China shouldn't be selling any weapons to Saudi or other GCC states. Iran has some citizens that are potential recruits for spies. In the Arab kingdoms the actual government is an American and sometimes secret Israeli ally. They know that the US is protecting their regimes and China wouldn't lift a finger to defend the king of Saudi Arabia. So from an intelligence point of view, there's similar risks.
It's more a question of whether China wants to make more money selling planes to Arab countries or impose costs on western forces by arming Iran. Ideally of course do both
China has only ever sold ground force equipment to the oil rich Arab nations. Tanks, IFVs, lasers, artillery and in one rare example, also some short range ballistic missiles for one of them... a long time ago... and a very outdated missile similar to the ballistic missile sold to Turkey.
China has never sold any sensitive or high tech equipment to those nations - fighters, modern air to air missiles like PL-15. Even C4ISR equipment has never been offered due to opsec.
China has not only sold the DF-3 and
to Saudi Arabia, but
has provided significant technical assistance to Saudi Arabia's localized production of what I
suspect to be a DF-16 derivative.
Not quite as impressive as some of the PLA's UGF, but it shouldn't be too hard to reasonably guess who may have engineered such
:
TBF Beijing has been
indispensable in Riyadh's efforts to develop a ballistic missile capability principally intended for rivaling analogous Iranian threats.
Obviously, Tehran is not happy about this at all, even though the Chinese have not given the Saudis everything they've asked for. Otherwise, the Saudis would be locally producing something fancier than a DF-16 derivative already.
Regardless, this is one of the major reasons why the Iranians have reservations about importing Chinese arms. Even though China brokered the recent detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Iranians remain concerned that Chinese defense exporters could be persuaded to dump them in the event of a conflict against the Saudis.
This is likely why the Iranians reportedly asked to locally produce the J-10, however ridiculous that may sound given the state of their aviation industry. The Iranians learned the hard way trying to keep American arms serviceable against Iraq in the 1980s, and they don't want to risk repeating that even though China was
neutral enough during that conflict to arm both sides.
