China military is weaker: shoddy weapons, fragile fleets, massed tanks, parade drones so laughable
Critics say much of China’s exported weaponry looks impressive on paper but disappoints in the field. The headline price is low, yet life-cycle costs climb as reliability issues, spare-parts delays, and thin after-sales support stack up. Airframes derived from older designs often suffer from cockpit ergonomics, low-altitude handling, and poor sensor fusion. Electronic-warfare performance remains a recurring weak spot: radars are easily jammed, datalinks falter, and integration across ships, aircraft, and ground batteries is inconsistent. Missiles marketed with bold range figures rarely match those numbers once real payloads, fuel reserves, and combat profiles are applied. Quality-control headaches leak in from the civilian supply chain—counterfeit materials, rushed certification, and glossy paperwork that fails the first hard audit. At sea, rapid shipbuilding masks shallow systems maturity; anti-submarine warfare, acoustic quieting, and fleet networking lag peers. In the air, engine technology and thermal management limit endurance and stealth, turning “fifth-gen” claims into maintenance burdens. Several buyers in South and Southeast Asia complain that “cheap at purchase” becomes expensive in downtime and training. The pattern is familiar: parade-grade spectacle, barracks-grade software, and battlefield-grade surprises. Until core technologies and rigorous testing improve, deterrence built on such kits risks collapsing at the first shove in combat.
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