Suppliers to Russia’s military-industrial complex move production to China – report

Russian state-owned and private enterprises in the defense-industrial complex have stepped up efforts to relocate production processes, outsource technologies, and move solutions to China to meet the Russian defense industry’s urgent needs amid the war and stringent sanctions, according to a major research report published by the analytical organization C4ADS. Source: C4ADS

The center’s experts documented hundreds of shipments of high-tech dual-use products, components, and patents linking 52 Russian defense suppliers—including NPO Splav, Rubin Central Design Bureau for Marine Engineering, the Krylov State Research Centre, TsAGI, Sukhoi Design Bureau, and Almaz-Antey—with 21 major Chinese recipients, including giants China Shipbuilding, Norinco, Poly Technologies, and AVIC.

According to C4ADS’s analysis, military-technical cooperation between Moscow and Beijing in the field of advanced conventional weapons (ACW) is unfolding along three time horizons: short-, medium-, and long-term. In the short term, Russia’s defense industry is leveraging China’s integration into global supply chains to meet immediate needs for components and production capacity. In the medium term, joint R&D allows defense enterprises in both countries to validate existing weapons projects (such as loitering munitions and multiple launch rocket systems), reduce testing costs, and shorten the path from blueprint to mass production. Over the long term, joint publications and academic ties between Russian defense industry universities and Chinese institutions are fostering an institutionalized technology partnership.

This alliance is based on an asymmetric exchange: Russia provides the unique expertise of the Soviet engineering tradition, foundational scientific knowledge, and experience in aviation, naval, and missile technology, while China contributes massive industrial scale, advanced engineering, and financing.

C4ADS emphasizes that China strictly limits cooperation to the bounds of its own techno-nationalist interests, as access to US and Western markets, capital, and technology remains a higher priority for the PRC than supporting Moscow. According to the researchers, the emergence of this defense-industrial axis directly threatens the US monopoly on precision warfare technologies.

It was reported earlier that China supplies Russian military factories with machine tools, specialty chemicals, and gunpowder.

Recall that, based on the report by the Center for Defense Reforms, “Bring to bear: Taiwan’s Critical Imports to Russia”, the Taiwanese government tightened export controls on dual-use goods shipped to Russia, particularly machine tools used by Russia’s defense industry, as a result of which such shipments were completely halted. A number of other decisions have also been adopted to strengthen export controls on strategic high-tech products shipped to Russia and expand international cooperation in this area.