Военно-техническое сотрудничество и конкуренция России и Китая на современном мировом рынке вооружений как факторы российско-китайских отношений

Abstract

The study discusses the historical backgrounds to armaments cooperation between Russia and China and reveals its present-day characteristics against the background of growing competition in the mod-ern global arms market. The paper shows that arms exports are increasingly being used as an influential mechanism for international relations in general. For China, its military exports are an effective geopolitical tool in the face of growing strategic competition from the United States of America. According to Stockholm International Peace Re-search Institute, Russia controls over 23% of the global arms market. It supplies 70% of its arms to India, Vietnam, China, and Algeria. The Russian Fed-eration is actively seeking new relevant supply mar-kets since weapons are the country’s main export product along with energy. The authors sub-stantiate the thesis that Russian-Chinese arma-ments cooperation may have a negative impact on relations between the countries. However, globally Moscow and Beijing focus on compre-hensive bilateral cooperation. In conclusion, there is a list of factors that can strengthen Russian-Chinese relationships.