Piggy-backing on the bear
China is gaining troubling military know-how from Russia
It is learning how to improve its drones, nuclear subs and air defence
The help China gives Russia in the war in Ukraine has long caused dismay in Western countries.
Exports of ostensibly civilian components such as engines and electronics end up in drones and other weapons that kill Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, abetting Russia’s war of attrition.
Yet recently it is the other end of this trade that has stirred alarm in Western capitals.
China appears to be receiving training, intelligence and advanced military technology from Russia.
That could give China an edge in a future war over Taiwan, tilting the balance of power at the opposite extreme of Eurasia.
Since 2024 Chinese soldiers have undergone training in drone and urban combat at a military complex near the city of Volgograd in south-west Russia, people briefed on European intelligence tell The Economist.
That complex is used regularly by Russia’s 8th Army, the backbone of Russian operations in eastern Ukraine.
Its tactics are hardly a model to emulate.
Yet China has not fought a war since a brief border conflict with Vietnam in 1979.
To conquer Taiwan, it needs access to the latest battlefield lessons and data to compensate for its lack of combat experience.
It also has more leverage now to obtain some of the best military technology that the Kremlin was previously unwilling to share.
American and allied officials believe that may include upgrades to China’s air- and missile-defence systems.
They also fear that Russia is helping China produce stealthier nuclear submarines. China sees these vessels as critical for any war over Taiwan, which could escalate into a nuclear confrontation with America.
Drill, baby, drill
China demonstrated its nuclear ambitions on July 6th when, for the first time, one of its subs test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile.
On the same day China showcased the evolution of its military ties with Russia by launching joint naval drills that incorporated submarine, anti-submarine and drone operations, as well as air and missile defence.
Along with eight surface ships and two submarines, the live-fire exercises off eastern China involved naval and aerial drones.
The drills envisaged a “scenario of fighting unmanned systems”, said Rear Admiral Sergei Sinko, the leader of Russia’s contingent.
These were China’s and Russia’s first joint naval exercises to focus on drone and counter-drone warfare.
China has been especially keen to learn from the Russian navy’s experiences (mostly bad but better lately) in fending off Ukrainian naval drones in the Black Sea.
This was also only the second time, and the second year in a row, that the drills included a Russian and a Chinese submarine.
Zhang Junshe, a retired Chinese navy officer, said the involvement of one of Russia’s latest diesel-electric subs, which are extremely quiet when running on batteries, would help China practise sub-hunting.
China, too, used one of its newest homemade diesel-electric subs.
The exercises were followed by the two navies’ seventh joint maritime patrol in the Pacific in the past six years.
Russia is unlikely to intervene directly in a war over Taiwan, just as China has not in Ukraine.
Their defence ties stop well short of a mutual defence treaty.
But joint drills and patrols give China rare opportunities to learn from Russia’s battle-hardened forces.
What is more, “China can now ask things of Russia that Russia cannot ask of China,” says Lyle Goldstein of Brown University.
He notes that Chinese military journals suggest the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is especially interested in Russian data on American and allied weapons such as HIMARS rocket launchers, which Taiwan also uses.
Even a limited increase in such assistance could give China an advantage in a war over Taiwan, which would depend to a large degree on drones, submarines and missiles.
Russia could also provide intelligence and other ad hoc assistance without joining combat.
And Russian air or naval operations elsewhere in Asia could divert American and allied resources away from Taiwan during a crisis.
Another concern is the growing military co-operation among Russia, China and North Korea.
Even if the trio’s interests are far from aligned, each could “take opportunistic advantage of a regional crisis to advance its own objectives”, Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of America’s Pacific Command, told a congressional hearing in April.
China tries to play down its military ties to Russia to deflect Western criticism of its support for the war in Ukraine.
When Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, visited Beijing in May, a lengthy joint statement included only a brief section on defence, saying the two sides would expand joint exercises and patrols, strengthen military co-operation and “work together to address various risks and challenges”.
China has denied reports that it has trained Russian soldiers or sent Chinese ones to learn from the war in Ukraine.
But a growing body of evidence suggests otherwise.
Drones are a big concern.
China enjoys a huge advantage over any adversary as by far the world’s largest producer of civilian drones.
It also made an early start in military ones.
Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its armed forces had begun using Chinese-made equivalents of America’s high-end Reaper and Predator aerial drones.
China even exported drones to the Middle East and Africa, where they were used in combat.
And from around 2021, China started developing autonomous aerial drone swarms as a way to overcome American forces in a Taiwan conflict.
In the past four years, however, drone warfare has evolved with dizzying speed.
Ukraine pioneered the use of cheap first-person-view (FPV) drones, often based on Chinese commercial quadcopters bearing explosives.
As Russia adopted similar tactics, both sides found new ways to jam each other’s drones.
That led to a proliferation on both sides of “tethered” FPV drones linked to operators by fibre-optic cable.
Both sides have also experimented with AI-guided drones that lock onto targets even when jammed.
Iran, too, showed how large numbers of cheap drones could overwhelm air defences at close range and deplete stockpiles of far more costly missile interceptors.
Flood warning
America and many of its European allies have ready access to drone data and tactical lessons from the front lines in Ukraine, which they are incorporating into their own drone programmes.
Some of that expertise is also being shared with Taiwan, which launched a programme to build a domestic drone industry (without relying on Chinese components) in 2022.
American and Taiwanese military planners are working together to develop a new strategic concept, known as “Hellscape”, for thwarting a Chinese invasion.
That envisions flooding the Taiwan strait with relatively cheap air, submarine and sea-surface drones as an asymmetrical response to China’s vast air and naval forces.
China, too, is updating its approach to drone warfare.
It has access to data on the performance of Russian drones through the Chinese firms that supply most of them.
But as the war in Ukraine has progressed, the PLA has become keen to study how each side is using and jamming drones, as well as how infantry and other operations are adapting to an increasingly transparent battlefield.
“The Chinese understand the importance of Russian knowledge,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister and foreign-intelligence chief.
“They realised already that the nature of war is changing, and if you want to be actually ready for warfare, you need to learn from people having practical experience.”
The Chinese officers who have visited the complex near Volgograd are thought to have done a number of training courses based on the experiences of Russian forces in Ukraine.
They included aerial-drone operation, assaults on command posts and combat in settlements, trenches and forested areas.
Also covered was field medicine and the installation of anti-tank, anti-personnel and mixed minefields.
Those are all areas in which standard operating procedures have changed dramatically since the war in Ukraine began, mainly because of the proliferation of aerial drones.
There have also been unconfirmed intelligence reports of Chinese military observers within Russian-occupied Ukraine.
“The suspicion is that the Chinese have teams close to the front line that are learning and absorbing the lessons just operationally, how it works with drone operators, and then they provide data just exactly the way the Ukrainians do to Western manufacturers,” says Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre.
Russia is slower to innovate than Ukraine, but still “pretty nimble and adaptive”, he says.
“They have probably less competition but they have the ability to learn the lessons and scale up the solutions, and that is critical for the Chinese, for sure.”
Recent articles in the PLA Daily, an official military newspaper, suggest particular Chinese interest in Russia’s Rubicon drone centre, which was created in 2024 to centralise control over drone operations.
Rubicon played a big role in the recapture of the Russian city of Kursk, partly by targeting Ukrainian drone operators and supply lines, a PLA Daily article notes.
Public documents also hint at close co-operation between the Moscow Aviation Institute, Russia’s top drone-development outfit, and Chinese research institutes including the Northwestern Polytechnical University, which has developed drones for the PLA.
Submarines are another area of close co-operation.
China’s early models were mostly imported from the Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia.
In the past two decades, however, it has built a fleet of indigenous diesel- and nuclear-powered ones.
China’s navy, now the world’s largest, operates about 60 submarines, including six nuclear-powered ballistic-missile subs and six nuclear-powered attack vessels.
The rest are diesel-powered models, best suited to operating close to China’s shores as they are slower and have to surface regularly.
America, in contrast, operates about 70 submarines, all nuclear-powered.
Rear Admiral Michael Brookes, America’s head of naval intelligence, told a congressional hearing in March that by 2035 China could be operating 80 submarines, half of which would be nuclear-powered.
What is more, he expects newer models to incorporate “substantial advancements in nuclear-reactor design, sensor performance, weapons integration and noise-quieting technologies”.
That would allow China’s attack submarines to operate more freely throughout the Pacific, and thus to threaten American bases and ships in a war over Taiwan.
It would also make Chinese nuclear-missile submarines harder to find, enabling them to lurk undetected in “bastions” near China’s coast and, if needed, to strike the American mainland.
China’s navy will remain focused on the Indo-Pacific, Rear Admiral Brookes predicted, but by 2040 routine Chinese submarine deployments are likely to the Indian Ocean, Arctic approaches and possibly the Atlantic.
Some of the know-how China needs is likely to come from Russia, whose latest submarines are technologically superior to China’s and closer to American, British and French equivalents.
Admiral Paparo, the Pacific Command chief, told a congressional hearing last year, “Coming back to China is potentially submarine-quieting help as well as other help in some of the areas where Russia is strong.”
In fact, such aid may already have arrived: China launched the first of a new model of nuclear attack submarine, the Type 095, in early 2026 and is thought to have started building a new nuclear-missile submarine, the Type 096. Both are expected to include similar quietening technology to that used in some of Russia’s most silent submarines, such as its latest Akula-class models.
Quiet zone
“China appears to have access already to Akula-level quieting technology, which may be the most advanced level that Russia feels comfortable making available,” wrote Andrew Erickson, a professor at the US Naval War College in a recent paper.
Russia may still be reluctant to share the secrets of its very quietest nuclear attack submarines, the Yasen-class, which it sees as the “keys to the kingdom”, he said.
“Of course, China may nevertheless obtain at least some of what it seeks against Moscow’s will” through espionage, he added.
China’s spies have long targeted Russia’s defence industry, including the Rubin submarine-design bureau.
The Chinese authorities have also been trying to encourage Russian engineers to move to China.
Other assistance that Russian undersea experts could provide, through official or illicit channels, includes torpedo design and anti-submarine warfare.
In particular, Russia has gathered decades of data on the “acoustic signatures” of American submarines, which make it easier to hunt for them.
China also gathers vast quantities of such data, but started doing so much more recently and is less experienced at interpreting it, according to American officials.
A final realm of co-operation is air and missile defence.
In 2019 Mr Putin announced that Russia was helping China build a nuclear early-warning system: “It’s a serious thing that will drastically increase the defence capabilities of the People’s Republic of China.
Right now only the US and Russia have such systems.” Sergei Boyev, the boss of Vympel, a big Russian arms firm, confirmed at the time that it was “modelling” such a system for China.
Since then, neither side has said more in public about those plans.
But some Western officials and experts think that they have quietly progressed and may have gathered pace.
The Pentagon’s annual report on China in 2025 noted, “Russia continues to provide advanced technologies and expertise to support China’s defence and strategic goals, including for ballistic-missile defence.”
It also said that China had probably made progress in efforts to develop an “early-warning counterstrike” capability, whereby a nuclear strike on China prompts a counter-attack before the enemy’s missile detonates.
Russia has been able to do that for decades.
Further evidence emerged from a recent joint investigation by Le Monde (a French newspaper), Der Spiegel (a German one) and Insider (an online publication).
Based on leaked documents, this found that China and Russia had discussed plans to disable Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network and for Russia to share battlefield data in exchange for Chinese drones and AI.
It also found that they had signed an agreement in 2023 to develop a new air- and missile-defence system designed to stop American ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
The planned system would surpass even Russia’s S-500, its most advanced anti-ballistic missile system.
China may regard Russia’s air- and missile-defence systems with scepticism, given their recent failures around Russian cities and in Venezuela and Iran.
Its own interceptors now rival Russia’s.
But Russia still has greater expertise in early-warning systems for strategic missiles using over-the-horizon radars and infrared satellites.
An end to the war in Ukraine would reduce China’s leverage over the Kremlin, especially if Western sanctions on Russia are eased.
But a weakened Mr Putin would probably still need favours from China.
And Russia may also descend into chaos, triggering an outflow to China of its best military expertise and technology.
Either way, China stands to benefit in a manner that could alter the strategic landscape in Asia for decades to come.
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