Why growing China-Russia military ties worry the west

For two years, Chinese backing for Russia’s war in Ukraine has been western governments’ biggest concern about the two countries’ burgeoning relationship. But two weeks ago, US officials raised alarm over their co-operation in another key security theatre: the seas around Taiwan.

“We see them, China and Russia, for the first time exercising together in relation to Taiwan,” Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, told US lawmakers. “[We are] recognising that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t.”

The US has had to adapt to closer co-operation between the Chinese and Russian militaries, Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the same Senate hearing.

Even if Russian and Chinese forces were not capable of seamlessly operating together, “they would certainly be co-operative, and we need to take that into account in our force structure and planning”, Kruse said. “We are in the middle of that revision today.”

Their comments reflect how deep the military relationship has become under Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are meeting this week in Beijing.

Military ties have developed to span closer joint exercises and co-operation on missile defence. And while Russia and China do not have a mutual defence treaty, as the US does with its allies, analysts believe that does not preclude military co-operation with significant global impact.

“They don’t have to physically fight together to be effective in the warfighting sense,” Oriana Skylar Mastro, a professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, said in a study on Russian-Chinese military alignment published last month.

The joint training that Russian and Chinese forces have been conducting for almost 20 years has significantly deepened since 2018. They participate in each other’s national strategic drills and conduct regular naval exercises and strategic bomber patrols together.

Most joint naval and air activity has been happening close to Japan, where strategists have been watching their two neighbours’ growing military alignment with unease.

Russia might “take supportive military actions in co-ordination with China’s Taiwan operations”, Yoji Koda, a former commander of Japan’s Self Defense Fleet, said in a chapter of an upcoming book. Japan should be prepared to contain the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan by blocking strategic straits, he added.

The clearest evidence for a Taiwan connection can be found in joint drills such as Northern Interaction 2023, air and naval exercises built on Russia’s sobering experience in Ukraine, where its Black Sea fleet was hit by Ukrainian coastal defence missiles.

Ukraine’s success in sinking Russian warships from the shore was a textbook example of “controlling the sea from land”, said Lin Ying-yu, an expert on China’s People’s Liberation Army at Tamkang University in Taipei, pointing to Harpoon coastal defence missiles that Taiwan is getting from the US and its own anti-ship missiles. “It is exactly the situation Chinese forces would be facing in a Taiwan invasion . . . the PLA needs to learn from the Russians’ operational experience.”

Alexey Muraviev, a professor of national security and strategic studies at Curtin University in Perth, argued that Russia and China were well on the way towards building the communications structures needed for fighting side by side.

They have started sharing sensitive data such as maximum speeds of aircraft, “something you can only do with a formal ally under normal circumstances”, Muraviev said. He added that the exchange of operational data, likely to be occurring during patrols in which Russian and Chinese nuclear-capable bombers fly together near Japan, also suggested “strategic intimacy”.

According to China’s defence ministry, the two navies use a dedicated joint command and control system in combined exercises. Last year, Chinese and Russian admirals started commanding naval drills together aboard a PLA Navy destroyer. They have also switched from using Russian as the language of co-ordination to real-time communication through interpreters on ships on both sides.

Many western analysts believe the two militaries still have only rudimentary interoperability and argue their joint exercises do not reflect plans to fight together.

But even if that assessment is accurate, Russian support could give the PLA a crucial advantage in a potential conflict with the US.

The most critical factor could be Russian technology transfer for a missile defence early warning system, confirmed by Putin himself in 2019. Since then, there has been little public detail on progress apart from a statement on a contract awarded to a Russian supplier. But Chinese military scholars said joint work on a “missile shield” was ongoing.

If Moscow and Beijing integrate their missile defence systems, sensors on northern Russian territory could give China earlier warning of US intercontinental ballistic missiles, which have to traverse that territory to hit China, said Mastro at Stanford.

Asian defence officials said a joint early warning system would also allow China to launch nuclear weapons upon receiving warning of an impending nuclear strike. That would mark a shift from its strategy of using nuclear weapons only in retaliation against a strike that has already occurred — a change that nuclear experts believe Beijing has long contemplated.

An effective Chinese ballistic missile early warning system would “allow China to adopt a launch-on-warning posture for its strategic nuclear forces, further strengthening China’s deterrence posture”, said Paul Schwartz, an expert on the Russian military at CNA, a Washington defence think-tank, in a paper published in 2021.

However, Chinese technological advances mean advanced Russian weaponry is losing its sheen for Beijing, according to a source close to Russia’s defence ministry.

“China still has interest in some Russian aviation technologies used in the last generation of Russian fighters, as well as importing Soviet-model aircraft engines, because China’s own production is still lagging behind. But these are the final contracts, and in a few years Chinese interest will fall away here, too,” the person said.

“Now it’s more that Russia’s military is interested in advanced Chinese weapons systems and military technology, but there’s not been much progress here,” they added.

Beyond technology, Russia’s importance as a supplier for Beijing would increase significantly if China fought a war over Taiwan, according to Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the transatlantic security programme at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think-tank.

Overland shipments of energy, food and military goods from Russia could greatly blunt the effect of a US naval blockade on China.

Russia would probably not fight alongside China but take a similar stance to Beijing’s on Ukraine, offering political support as well as economic and military resources to help it withstand US pressure, Kendall-Taylor added.

She said that given how the war in Ukraine has played out, “Russia’s going to look very hard for ways in which it can aid China’s effort militarily without being directly involved in the war in an effort to maximise cost for the US”.