Beyond Armament: China’s New Security Doctrine and the Transformation of Its Defense Industry

China’s transformation in the field of defense in recent years has reached a point where many of the existing narratives about the country need to be reconsidered.

Discussions based mainly on military spending figures, the defense budget, or new weapons systems frequently covered by the international media tend to move the debate into a speculative direction. What is often overlooked, however, is that the defense industry has become part of China’s broader security and great-power strategy.

China’s evolving security and defense doctrine, which runs in parallel with its development strategy, therefore needs to be understood beyond a technical discussion centered on ammunition and weapons systems. Economic capacity, advanced and emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, civilian industry and military power increasingly need to be considered within the same strategic framework.

In this context, the transformation behind China’s growing military capacity can be understood through three interconnected pillars. The first is the combination of the gains China achieved through the modernization of its traditional industrial production with technology and new forms of information.

This transition from mechanization to informatization has also triggered a transformation closely connected to China’s national development strategy. Today, this can be observed across a broad spectrum of everyday life, from electric vehicles to digital payment and surveillance systems.

The second pillar complements this process: new information is increasingly transformed into a more intelligent and measurable form through artificial intelligence. This makes the strategic thinking behind these systems increasingly important.

It creates a process in which the system is first designed within an integrated framework and then translated into a system-centered military capability in the security and defense domain. The second and third pillars are therefore developing simultaneously. The third stage will increasingly emerge together with the social, political and economic consequences produced by intelligentization. The defense-industrial dimension of China’s new security doctrine is developing precisely on the basis of this transformation.

Expanding the Boundaries of Security

The main factor behind this transformation is the changing meaning of security in China. In official doctrine, the fundamental purpose of national defense is defined as protecting sovereignty, security and the gains of national development.

Security therefore extends beyond the defense of Chinese territory to maritime areas, outer space, the electromagnetic domain, cyberspace and China’s overseas interests.

This doctrinal understanding also shapes China’s approach to “active defense.” While China defines its security posture as defensive at the theoretical and strategic level, it leaves considerable room for offensive capabilities at the operational and tactical levels.

This also expands the role of the defense industry. China is increasingly seeking to build a military-technological ecosystem capable of protecting its increasingly global economic and strategic interests.

The 2026 defense budget is important in this respect. Central government defense spending increased to approximately 1.91 trillion yuan, representing an annual increase of 7 percent. Although this rate has remained relatively stable for years, the absolute level of defense spending continues to increase as the Chinese economy grows.

More importantly, China has explicitly stated that these resources will support the integration of mechanization, informatization and intelligentization, combat capabilities in new domains, advanced weapons systems and innovation in defense technologies. The increase in the defense budget should therefore be considered together with another question: what kind of military capability is China investing in?

From Platforms to Systems

Another important feature of China’s defense-industrial transformation is the gradual move beyond platform-centered military modernization. In the previous period, China’s primary objective was to develop fighter aircraft, warships, missiles and armored vehicles capable of competing with American, Russian or European systems.

In the current transformation, however, the objective is increasingly to create an integrated combat network in which these platforms can communicate and operate together. In 2026, China’s Ministry of National Defense identified the development of an “intelligent military system” and the systemic integration of different combat elements among the major objectives of military modernization.

This approach was also visible during the major military parade held last year. China displayed new intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonic systems, but it also presented naval drones, air-defense lasers, new combat-management systems, and cyber and space capabilities.

The fact that all three components of China’s nuclear triad—land, sea and air—were displayed together for the first time also indicated that Beijing is developing conventional modernization and strategic deterrence simultaneously.

From this perspective, the main product of China’s new defense-industrial approach is not simply the J-36 fighter aircraft, DF-series missiles or new aircraft carriers. More important is the emergence of an integrated combat network extending from sensors and satellites to artificial intelligence and command-and-control systems, and from unmanned platforms to precision-strike capabilities.

China, in other words, is building a broad defense-industrial ecosystem and increasingly placing this ecosystem at the center of its wider national defense doctrine.

Lessons from the Wars in Ukraine and Iran

One important characteristic of the transformation in China’s security doctrine is its systematic effort to learn from ongoing wars. For Chinese military planners, the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrated in particular the importance of low-cost drones, electronic warfare, distributed production and defense-industrial capacity in prolonged conflicts.

In 2026, the Iran war was added to this learning process. According to an assessment published by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense at the end of August, China has been studying not only the effectiveness of inexpensive drone swarms in Ukraine but also ammunition consumption during the U.S. war with Iran, the pressure placed on stocks of air-defense interceptors, the need for industrial mobilization, and problems related to alliance coordination.

An important doctrinal conclusion emerges from these experiences. Particularly from China’s perspective, the accumulated knowledge and engineering experience generated by decades of traditional industrial production must become increasingly scalable in the defense environment of the future.

If a system costing one million dollars can be neutralized by ammunition costing ten thousand dollars, or if expensive air-defense missiles can be exhausted by hundreds of inexpensive drones, the economics of warfare begins to change.

China’s enormous manufacturing capacity can become a military advantage precisely at this point. Producing the most advanced weapons remains an important part of China’s defense-industrial strategy. Yet mass production was also one of the features that distinguished China from many other developing countries during the reform era.

The same logic is increasingly relevant to defense production: the ability to manufacture large numbers of systems quickly, at relatively low cost, while maintaining both quantity and quality when necessary.

From Unmanned Systems to Robotic Warfare

Perhaps the most striking dimension of this transformation in 2026 can be seen in robotics and artificial intelligence. In addition to drone swarms, the Chinese military has increasingly begun to consider quadruped and humanoid robots as potential elements of the future battlefield. Publications by China’s Ministry of National Defense have described AI-enabled autonomous drone swarms as a “new face of warfare,” while also emphasizing the asymmetric combat advantage that can be created through the numerical superiority of small drones.

An even more striking development concerns humanoid robots. Military procurement documents and research that emerged in September 2026 indicate that the People’s Liberation Army has begun testing humanoid robots for tasks such as reconnaissance, sentry duty, logistics and urban warfare.

The Fuxi humanoid robot developed by Norinco, one of China’s major defense companies, and its potential use in reconnaissance and other dangerous missions demonstrate how this trend is moving into the defense industry.

China’s civilian industrial base provides a critical advantage here. Chinese companies accounted for approximately 95 percent of global humanoid robot shipments in 2025.

The economies of scale created in commercial robotics therefore provide a technological and industrial base that can potentially be transferred into the defense sector.

This is precisely where one of the most important features of the Chinese model becomes visible. Civil-Military Fusion provides perhaps the clearest framework for understanding how the boundary between China’s defense industry and its civilian advanced-technology sectors is becoming increasingly permeable. China’s national defense legislation similarly envisages the development of its defense science and technology system through civil-military integration, peacetime-wartime integration, innovation, and technologies that are “independent and controllable.”

Taiwan and the South China Sea: The Operational Domain

The most concrete operational manifestations of this technological transformation can be seen around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. For China, Taiwan represents the central scenario through which the operational logic of its emerging military capabilities can be observed.

Recent exercises have placed noticeable emphasis on “joint blockade and control” operations rather than simply rehearsing a large-scale amphibious invasion.

China has been using air and naval forces alongside its coast guard to practice scenarios aimed at cutting Taiwan’s external connections, controlling its surrounding air and maritime space, and suppressing command-and-control and air-defense capabilities during the initial stages of a potential conflict.

A similar strategy can be observed in the South China Sea, although here it operates across a more distant maritime environment and through a more sophisticated command-and-control structure. Artificial islands provide physical infrastructure through which China can translate contested legal claims into military and operational advantages.

In an area where sovereignty remains normatively disputed, Beijing is seeking to establish de facto military superiority. In doing so, it combines the logic of active defense with a technological transformation that connects the expanding information domain with physical operational space.

This reveals an important feature of China’s evolving security doctrine. The objective is not necessarily the physical destruction of the adversary, but rather to make the system that enables the adversary to fight—technically, legally and normatively—unable to function effectively.

Missiles, cyber operations, electronic warfare, space systems, unmanned platforms, and integrated naval and air capabilities can therefore be understood as different components of the same operational logic.

From Defense Industry to Security Architecture

China’s defense-industrial transformation should also be connected to the new security discourse emerging in its foreign policy. Xi Jinping’s September 2026 visit to Egypt was significant in this regard, particularly his call for Middle Eastern countries to oppose external intervention and consider a new regional “security architecture.”

The China-Egypt joint military exercises preceding the visit, together with growing regional interest in Chinese-made unmanned aerial vehicles, air-defense systems and other military technologies, suggest that the Global Security Initiative is gradually acquiring a more concrete material basis.

China is still not attempting to reproduce the U.S. model of global military bases and formal alliances. Its official defense policy continues to emphasize partnerships rather than alliances. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to interpret this as meaning that China is not developing into a significant military actor.

Beijing’s model is different. Economic relations, infrastructure investment, technology transfer, defense exports, joint military exercises and security diplomacy are increasingly becoming complementary instruments of Chinese foreign policy.

Conclusion: Industrial Power at the Center of China’s New Security Doctrine

Recent developments in China’s defense industry point to a much broader transformation. For Beijing, military power in future great-power competition cannot simply be measured by the number of weapons possessed by the armed forces.

Technological innovation, the scale of production, supply chains, artificial intelligence, robotics, space and cyber capabilities, and the ability to mobilize civilian industry under wartime conditions are increasingly part of the same security equation.

For this reason, perhaps the key concept in China’s new security doctrine is not simply armament, but integration. This includes the integration of civilian and military sectors, physical space with cyber and outer space, manned and unmanned platforms, and economic capacity with military deterrence.

The central question for the future of U.S.-China competition therefore goes beyond how many aircraft carriers or fighter aircraft China possesses. The more important question is the extent to which China can transform one of the world’s largest manufacturing ecosystems into sustainable military power.

The lessons drawn from the wars in Ukraine and Iran, military exercises around Taiwan, technological investments ranging from drone swarms to humanoid robots, and the steady increase in defense spending all point in the same direction. China is preparing for the future of warfare not simply by developing new weapons, but by redesigning the industrial and technological infrastructure of war itself.

To the extent that this transformation succeeds, China’s defense industry may become an important material pillar of the alternative security order Beijing is presenting to the world.

About the Author

Kadir Temiz

Clash Report

Kadir Temiz is the head of The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (ORSAM). He has specialized in East Asian affairs and Chinese foreign policy. He earned his doctorate from Boğaziçi University's Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History and conducted post-doctoral research at Peking University and Shanghai International Studies University. A former Fulbright scholar at George Washington University's IERES, Temiz is also the author of Chinese Foreign Policy Toward the Middle East.

All articles by Kadir Temiz