China is helping Russia ramp up its defense industrial base at such a large scale that Moscow is now undertaking its most ambitious expansion in military manufacturing since the Soviet era as it continues its war against Ukraine, according to senior Biden administration officials.
The support China is providing includes significant quantities of machine tools, drone and turbojet engines and technology for cruise missiles, microelectronics, and nitrocellulose, which Russia uses to make propellant for weapons, said the officials.
Chinese and Russian entitles have also been working jointly to produce drones inside of Russia, one of the officials said.
China doesn’t claim to have a communist economic system though. They understand perfectly well that they have a market economy. Their rationale for this apparent contradiction is that they believed they couldn’t grow quickly enough in isolation. They thought that by building a market economy they could trade with the western world and therefore rapidly develop. I think that gambit has clearly paid off. It’ll be interesting to see what decisions China makes once their economy is strong enough that the US cannot legitimately threaten it.