A new working paper publication, “Chinese–Russian Military Industrial Cooperation in the 2020s: Towards True Joint Capabilities or Merely Transactional Great Power Politics?” by Lauri Heinonen can be accessed through Doria
In my new report “Chinese–Russian Military Industrial Cooperation in the 2020s: Towards True Joint Capabilities or Merely Transactional Great Power Politics?” for the Arctic Axis project of the Russian Military and Security Research Group of the Finnish National Defence University (FNDU), I study the military technological and military industrial co-operation between Russia and China. I mostly use academic research published in Russian in Russia and in Chinese in China.
The most important finding that I make is that the cooperation between Russia and China is less advanced based on Russian and Chinese sources than based on Western sources. Western sources tend to see the co-operation between Russia and China a serious threat to the international security. However, Russian sources are skeptical about the cooperation with China to the point of opposing it. Chinese sources tend to be happy about the cooperation of China with Russia but express worry that the Russians do not want to intensify the co-operation more.
An interesting feature of the reviewed Russian and Chinese academic literature is that they discuss military technologies of these countries, especially Russian military technologies like Russian military AI. Russian and Chinese tend to discuss Russian military affairs quite well, Russian sources tend to discuss Chinese military affairs to some degree and Chinese sources tend not to discuss Chinese military affairs that much.
However, there are not coming up many concrete examples of military industrial co-operation between Russia and China. While this partly reflects the sources used for the study, this is another indication of the general interpretation of the reviewed Russian and Chinese academic literature that Russia and China have many stated ideas and ambitions about military technological and military industrial co-operation that have, nevertheless, not materialized well.
While analyzing the most important military and dual-use technologies, firms and organizations and policies in Russia and China related to the military industrial sector, called military industrial complexes (MICs) in the report, I can give ideas for future research. I suggest that the Russian MIC has a dim outlook and the Chinese MIC has a more positive outlook. Additionally, I conclude that the level of military technological and military industrial cooperation between the countries is not at the level of the warm political rhetoric between Russia and China.
I also suggest ideas for future research related to more general questions of industrial capacity and financial resilience of the MICs in general. I also suggest a need to study inflation control mechanisms for a potential situation of military conflict or disruption of international production chains as well as a need to understand how countries can achieve and retain enough human capital for the needs of their MIC.
The author, Lauri Heinonen, is a project researcher in the Arctic Axis project of the FNDU. Additionally, he is a PhD student at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Russian Military and Security Research Group 