politics.
russia was pretty advanced in radar tech (they feilded the world’s first phase array radar in the mig31), and they still have many talented ppl even though many had been drawn abroad by the prospect of better pay. what the russians really lack is money.
china on the other hand has plenty of money. while china has made great stides and have some pretty good low/medium end electronic products, the higher end electronics like radar technology is culmulative. so the lack of investment before still need to be made up for, and no matter how much fast china’s economy grows, it cant make up for the decades of countinued investment the US and USSR did during the cold war very quickly, so it would take a while still for them to truely catch up.
joining forces would allow the two to develop very advanced radar sets. but it would need the russians to open up all its secrets (after all, its not much use joining forces to develop radar tech the russians already had), and thats not sth the russians are very keen to do.
the main reason being that the new radars will most likely only benefit china as the russians wont be able to afford to buy it for themselves. and since the new radar is a joint enterprise, china would most likely have equal rights and knowledge of it, so china would pretty much catch up to russia in terms of radar tech overnight.
this would have two major adverse effects for russia.
one, china would no longer see russian military equipment as attractive as they can now make better equipment themselves. this would effectively deprive russia of one of its biggest export markets.
two, since china will have more money to put into R&D, china would soon overtake russia in radar tech – and pretty much all military tech in extension. and thats not sth the russians are too comfortable to deal with.
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