How China is beating the US in new weapons race with a fraction of the budget

Large passenger jets and advanced chips, BeiDou satellites and the Tiangong space station: these large-scale science and technology projects could be part of China’s efforts to mobilise resources nationwide to speed up the development of new weapons, according to a study by researchers with China’s top defence university.China’s military modernisation has accelerated at a pace that unsettles many analysts in Washington. In the past decade alone, Beijing has rolled out a sequence of major defence technologies: electromagnetic catapult systems for aircraft carriers, new stealth fighter platforms, hypersonic weapons, directed-energy lasers and rapidly advancing military artificial intelligence systems.The tempo of development is striking not only because of its speed but because of the resources behind it. The United States spent roughly US$997 billion on defence in 2024, while China’s officially announced defence budget for 2026 stands at about US$277 billion. Even allowing for differences in accounting standards and purchasing power, China’s military spending remains far below that of the US.The disparity becomes clearer when focusing specifically on military research and development. The US Department of Defence allocates about US$140 billion annually to research, development, testing and evaluation (RDT&E) – roughly 15 to 17 per cent of the Pentagon’s total budget.China does not publish a detailed R&D breakdown, but most external estimates suggest that between 5 and 10 per cent of its defence spending goes towards military research – around US$20 billion to US$50 billion.Yet China continues to introduce a wide range of advanced systems across multiple technological domains. This has prompted a debate among defence researchers: how can a country with much lower defence spending sustain such a broad portfolio of military innovation?With his colleagues, Wu Ji, director and associate researcher with the science and technology department at the Institute for Defence Technology and Strategic Studies at the National University of Defence Technology, described what they called a “new nationwide mobilisation system”, which had been implemented in recent years to boost defence science and technology.