Is it true that Chinese buy weapons from Russia then renaming and claiming its theirs?
Russia was fairly happy to palm off its old war stock on China in the old days but since then it’s more complex. While China is now able to develop its own technology a great deal of its arms have Russian intellectual origins. It wasn’t some illegal reverse engineering hocum and the Chinese never claimed them as their own; they simply bought the rights to build mildly modified Russian designs and gave them their own designations for practical resasons. That Russia had designed a number of weapons well suited to the PRC (simple, rugged & low maintenance) helped. Where China bought the rights to manufacture more recent and advanced (70s onwards) Russian arms these designs tended to be “export spec” ie the best & most advanced technologies were held back for Red Army; a superficially similar but much inferior product was sold abroad. Hence the terrible performance of middle eastern T-72 tanks.
