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The decline of a hegemon can create openings for lesser powers to expand their influence in the world-system. Is this what China is currently attempting to do? This paper contributes to this on-going debate by examining China’s arms transfer activities from a historical perspective. Using data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institu...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... and foremost, it placed a heavy financial burden on China's national treasury, especially through foreign aid programs (Zhang 2006;Yang 2009;Yang and Chen 2010;Che 2012). As shown in Figure 2, the weight of foreign aid on the Chinese government's public expenditure rose drastically in 1960, the year of the Sino-Soviet split, in spite of China's own struggling economy. In the heyday between 1971 and 1975, expenditure of foreign aid accounted for more than 5 percent of China's public expenditure, and more than 1.5 percent of its gross national product (GNP). ...
Context 2
... the mid-1970s, it became clear that it was unsustainable to finance a high level of arms transfers by the public budget. Indeed, the weight of foreign aid had already seen a sharp decline in the years before Mao's death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping's return to power in 1977 ( Figure 2). ...
Citations
... Some observers also point to expanding arms exports as a means to support China's emerging global strategy by extending China's political, and possibly military reach in the post-2000 period (Luo 2017). Our analyses thus suggest that accounts of rising Chinese global influence will need to be less attendant to the conventionally understood, "hard" forms of military power (i.e., direct military conflict) and devote more attention to "softer" forms of military power that use military institutions to support economic and political agendas. ...
... From the late 1970s, the Chinese military was encouraged to engage in commercial activities to make up for reduced support from the state's budget (Mulvenon 2001). This strategy generated serious disciplinary problems in the military but boosted China's arms exports (Karmel 1997;Luo 2017). ...
... In 1998 the Chinese leadership finally made the decision to prohibit the military from commercial activities. Since then, the central government also expanded the budget for military expenditure and introduced a series of reforms to bolster defense research and innovation (Cheung 2009;Luo 2017). ...
In recent years China has positioned itself as a global economic leader, working through its “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to not only expand its global economic reach, but to organize and lead global economic relations. China’s rise is largely understood in economic terms, but the history of global power dynamics suggests that such leadership is built on both economic and political-military foundations. This paper explores the structural relationship between China’s economic and political-military relationships with other states over the period 1993 to 2015. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources, we present a multi-dimensional analysis that measures the changing size of China’s economic and political-military networks, their shifting regional distribution, and the degree of coupling, or decoupling of economic ties from political-military ties. In describing these patterns, we conduct a similar analysis for the United States. This allows us to situate Chinese trends in the context of the structures of U.S. global power. Our analysis points to ways in which China’s global rise has been shaped through navigating U.S. global power. Our analysis also shows that China’s growing leadership in the global economy builds upon a set of existing political-military relationships that, while their scope and form are quite different from those that the United States built to support its hegemonic ascendency, are nevertheless critical for understanding the mechanisms by which Chinese power and influence has grown in the global political economy.
... До сих пор Китаю удалось расширить свои сети в регионах, которые являются маргинальными в мировом порядке под руководством США. Приведет ли нынешняя стратегия Китая к мировой гегемонии, остается неясно [56]. ...
China's role as an arms exporter to the Middle East has received little academic attention and its connection to the region's growing arms race and security dynamics remains to a large extent overlooked. Beijing is regarded as a newcomer to the Middle East arms market, and despite being the fourth exporter, China’s share was too small until the early 1980s. However, due to advances in science, technology, innovation, and manufacturing of advanced military platforms and technologies, China has progressed from being a significant importer of conventional arms to an increasingly competitive exporter of major weapons systems over the following decades.
China’s impressive economic performance and growing involvement in regions outside its borders have resulted in strengthened military-security ties (arms deals and weapons co-production) with some Middle Eastern countries (particularly Persian Gulf nations) as one dimension of its overall Middle East strategy. This study traces the trajectory of China as an arm’s exporter and examines the objectives of its cold war and post-cold war arms sales in the Middle East based on three assumptions: an indication of the country’s economic advancement, status establishment, and counterbalancing the influence of the USA and other western countries in the region. Moreover, given that China is competing for markets with one of its closest partners, Russia, it is worth investigating China’s strategic choices and their impact on regional power balances.
What characterises China’s weapons diplomacy and how does it unfold in the current security scenario in the Western Hemisphere? This article argues that Chinese arms deliveries have arrived in the region together with the expansion of commerce and trade routes as evidenced in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In Latin America and the Caribbean, states seek to buy weapons in light of contentious border hot spots and intrastate rampant violence. China is a wilful seller and, to accomplish this, it has developed a weapons transfer policy taking advantage of the post-hegemony of the United States. The article argues that Beijing’s successes could reverse due to the lack of interstate armed conflict, and the less belligerent military missions adopted by the armed forces. Yet, Chinese arms transfers in the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the developing world reveal a complex security governance regime where the military, industry, and diplomatic policy communities interact.
