Vying for defense dollars: China's arms makers expand international marketing efforts.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The People's Republic of China not only is producing a wide array of weapons systems for its own forces, but also is exporting versions of its military hardware to other nations under the wary eye of the United States.

In the post Cold War era, countries are a lot more commercially oriented and do not sell solely to their ideological peers, explained David Isenberg, an arms control analyst with the British American Security Information Council in Washington, D.C.

"They are in it to make a buck and make a profit," Isenberg said. Despite intense competition in the international arms market, China manages to sell technologies that are less sophisticated than what other Western countries have to offer, Isenberg said, especially when it comes to systems integration.

Nevertheless, certain countries look favorably upon Chinas conventional weapons exports because "they are good enough," said Isenberg. The technology "is reasonably effective; it is reasonably easy to operate," he added. A lot of the buyers do not have the need for sophisticated technologies or can't afford Western-exported technology, so Chinese equipment "might look pretty good to them," he explained.

Chinese companies sometimes are at a disadvantage when striking deals, because unlike Western firms, they cannot offer "political sweeteners" and offset deals to customers, said Isenberg.

On the black list for arms proliferation, China in recent years has made efforts to comply with most arms control regimes especially those relating to nuclear, biological and chemical material, according to Isenberg.

While China has taken steps to regulate its arms manufacturers, it still has a long way to go, said Matt Schroeder, an analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, in an article entitled "Of Red Parakeets and Dragon Fire: The Nonproliferation Case for Maintaining E.U. Arms Embargo on China." A decision by the European Union to lift a 15-year old arms embargo to China has raised strong opposition in the United States. After clashes with the United States and Chinas adoption of a law to invade the island of Taiwan should it seek independence from the mainland, the E.U. increasingly has grown hesitant of lifting the controversial embargo.

In 1996, the U.S. intelligence community tagged China as the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction-related goods and technologies to foreign countries. While Beijing's efforts to stein these efforts have yielded some results...