Name: Why China’s $3.2 Billion Arms Trade is About More Than The Money
Uploaded: 2025-09-03T16:30:00Z
Duration: 4 min 58 s
Description: China sells billions of dollars worth of military equipment to more than 40 countries. But for Beijing, arms trade is not just a lucrative business.

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China sells billions of dollars worth of military equipment to more than 40 countries. But for Beijing, arms trade is not just a lucrative business. Photo: Huang Wei, Rao Aimin/Zuma Press

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250903/9f056cdd-57c4-414a-b757-157b712be23a/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

China sells billions of dollars worth of military equipment to more than 40 countries. But for Beijing, arms trade is not just a lucrative business.

Why China’s $3.2 Billion Arms Trade is About More Than The Money

Newscaster: New weapons unveiled like this intercontinental ballistic missile over 100 aircraft and more than 10,000 troops. The huge parade in the heart of Beijing marked president Xi Jinping's ambition to transform China from one of the world's biggest arms buyers into a maker of all the weapons it needs for itself and an increasingly formidable exporter on target to hit $3.2 billion across dozens of countries. Analysts believe China's motivation for this huge expansion goes beyond the financial, here's why. For much of its history, the People's Liberation Army or PLA relied on foreign military equipment, particularly from Russia like this jet fighter. But in recent decades, Beijing has invested heavily in state-owned and private sector defense companies.

Self-reliance is a fundamental part of what China does in terms of military technological development. It needs to be able to supply equipment and capability very quickly to the Chinese military, and if it relies on a foreign country to do that, then the ability of the PLA to respond to any contingency effectively and efficiently and quickly is compromised.

Newscaster: The parade, to commemorate 80 years since the end of World War II following the surrender of Japan, fits Xi Jinping's modernization push.

For China, this is a question of prestige. Over the last six years, China has made a lot of inroads in a lot of areas of military technology, and so this parade is an opportunity for China to demonstrate the growing power of its defense industry.

Newscaster: China's defense imports have been steadily dropping, reaching its lowest point in the period of 2020 and 2024. At the same time, Beijing has emerged among the world's top five arms sellers, but China's share of the global arms market has so far failed to expand much further.

We said at the time, okay, China's move very quickly into a strong position. We are likely to see China move into the top two or three exporters, but we haven't seen that because the scope of China's defense export customers is quite limited.

Newscaster: Chinese arms attract buyers in the global south for several reasons. The relatively low price, the wide range of products from drones to missile systems and military helicopters, fewer restrictions on how to use them compared to western arms and the many different ways of paying for the equipment.

China is able to sell its equipment to countries that have not much money, that don't have many options to buy from, perhaps because the US is not willing to sell to them. China is very adept at being able to stale military equipment for minerals or in exchange for energy or in exchange for gas or in exchange for many other things, but it's not able to sell its military equipment to mature markets who have a strong defense industrial base and are active in procuring equipment from the US and Europe.

Newscaster: Chinese arms are also still widely perceived to be inferior to Western arms. Defense experts say Chinese weapons are largely untested in combat and suffer from quality and performance problems. Some analysts add the quality of the arms that China is exporting is not the same it provides to its own troops. But in May 2025, during a short confrontation between Islamabad and New Delhi, Pakistan's Chinese-made aircraft reportedly managed to down India's French made military aircraft.

We still don't know really what happened, and so I take that with a pinch of salt, but what I would say is that as Chinese defense equipment has continued to increase in quality over the last 20 years, the quality that it exports has also increased, even though it is not as strong as some of the Western counterparts for sure.

Newscaster: Military parades are an opportunity for countries to show off their wares to potential buyers across the world, but China is not motivated by money alone.

The driver for China in exports is not the funds, it's the influence that it can gauge in the emerging markets through the exports. When China exports helicopters to Cambodia through the provision of soft loans, China does not do that because it needs the money. China does that because it can gain a strategic and diplomatic influence in the country through which it can exercise its power.

Newscaster: China also uses the parade to telegraph its position to the world.

It is a message to the US, to US allies in the region that, hey, China is an advanced military capability and China is able to act on its strategic requirements through its military and it better be taken seriously. That's the message really.

Why China’s $3.2 Billion Arms Trade Is About More Than the Money

Some days the high-speed news cycle can bring more questions than answers. WSJ’s news explainers break down the day's biggest stories into bite-size pieces to help you make sense of the news.