China in the Indo-Pacific: July 2025
Chinese Military Hardware in Cambodia-Thailand War: Amid the highest level of border skirmishes between Cambodia and Thailand in decades, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported the use of Chinese-made weapons. Cambodia used multiple Chinese PHL-81 mounted rocket launchers, and the Thai military also accused Cambodia of possessing a Chinese-made PHL-03 multiple rocket-launcher system, which can hit more distant targets. China denied supplying the Cambodian armed forces with any new weapons or military support during the conflict. Chinese officials went so far as to ask a Thai delegation visiting Beijing to inform the Thai public that any Chinese weapons used during the war originated from past military cooperation agreements. Although Thailand is a U.S. treaty ally, it has increasingly sought out Chinese weapons. Between 2020 and 2024, China accounted for 43 percent of Thailand’s arms imports, followed by the United States and South Korea.
China’s Pressure on Myanmar Resistance Groups: Reuters reported that Beijing pressured the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnic militia that is part of a group of armies fighting the military regime, to halt its efforts to gain full control of Bhamo, Myanmar, from the junta earlier this year. Bhamo is a strategically important town located approximately sixty miles from Myanmar’s border with China. As leverage, China threatened an economic blockade of KIA-controlled areas. Kachin State supplies almost half of the world’s heavy rare earth minerals and China dominates global rare-earth processing. Specifically, Myanmar’s wealth of dysprosium and terbium is essential to the production of electric vehicles, wind turbines, and military equipment. According to a KIA official, Beijing offered to increase cross-border trade if the ethnic armed organization abandoned its attempt to seize Bhamo, which also serves as a logistics hub for the junta. A Bloomberg investigation found that China’s monthly imports of rare earth minerals dropped by 90 percent in 2025’s first quarter before rebounding in April. China’s demands of the KIA are part of a larger pattern of pressuring resistance forces to end their civil war against the junta. In April, China facilitated the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army’s handover of Lashio in Shan State to the junta.
Chinese Company Aids Junta Bomb-Making: In a new report, “Factory of Death: China’s Support for the Myanmar Military’s Production of Aerial Bombs,” the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, an independent advisory group of international experts, utilized testimonials and official documents to outline how China South Industries Corporation works with a weapons factory in central Myanmar to produce aerial bombs. Owned by the State Council of China, China South Industries Corporation provides technical assistance to the Defense Industry 21 factory, which is operated by the junta’s office of the chief of defense industries. The junta frequently uses aerial bombs against civilians in populated areas.
China Escalates Verbal Rhetoric Against the Philippines: Although China and the Philippines did not engage in any physical confrontations in July—a rare reprieve in the countries’ escalating maritime standoff—Beijing intensified its rhetorical condemnation of the Philippines’ activities in the South China Sea. First, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sanctioned the former Senate Majority Leader of the Philippines Francis Tolentino presumably for his assertive stance against China. In November 2024, Tolentino authored the Philippines Maritime Zones Act and the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act that reasserted the Philippines’ territorial claims in the South China Sea. Tolentino has also accused Beijing of interfering in the Philippines’ midterm elections and launched an investigation into alleged Chinese espionage.
Later in the month, the Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned the Philippine ambassador to voice its “strong dissatisfaction” with Manila regarding its more open embrace of Taiwan in recent months. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. recently said the Philippine military conceptualizes the Indo-Pacific as “one theater” and argued that “it would be hiding from the obvious to say that Taiwan’s security will not affect us.”
When questioned about U.S.-Philippine military cooperation at a July 29 press conference, the Chinese Foreign Ministry rebuked the Philippines again and demanded the Philippines “stop colluding with other countries” over maritime issues and “stop inviting external forces for support.”
China’s South China Sea Island-Building: New satellite intelligence from the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) demonstrates that China has built up a network of thirty-two square kilometers worth of island military bases in the South China Sea. The bases house harbors, large runways, over seventy-two fighter jet hangars, surface-to-air missile and anti-ship cruise missile emplacements, and radar-sensing infrastructure. Gregory Poling, AMTI’s director, said the buildup constitutes the “quickest example of mass dredging and landfill in human history.”
China-Vietnam Defense Training: China and Vietnam conducted their first-ever joint ground-force training at the Jianglong Chongzuo Training Base in Guangxi, China, on July 22. The Chinese Foreign Ministry stated that the training involved camouflage reconnaissance, unmanned aerial vehicle reconnaissance, live-fire shooting, and the rescue of the wounded.
China-ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting: Foreign Minister Wang Yi represented Beijing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from July 10 to July 12 for the China-Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers’ Meeting. Notably, the parties completed negotiations for a “3.0” upgrade to their existing free trade agreement, which will now cover the digital economy, green growth, and supply chain connectivity. Experts expect ASEAN leaders will approve the deal in October.
China also agreed to become a signatory to the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaty. In force since 1997, the agreement restricts nuclear activity in the region to strictly peaceful uses, including in exclusive economic zones and continental shelves. ASEAN has long sought to sign up the world’s recognized nuclear powers—the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom—to pledge its support. Some Southeast Asian states have voiced concern over the AUKUS agreement, a deal between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to share technology for nuclear-powered submarines. China has alleged that AUKUS undermines nuclear nonproliferation standards.
Finally, China proposed structuring its engagement with ASEAN along four pillars of cooperation: promoting international fairness, safeguarding regional peace, fostering win-win economic ties, and cultivating cultural inclusiveness.
While attending the China-ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, Wang also met with Mohamad Hasan, the foreign minister of Malaysia, who serves as this year’s ASEAN rotating chair. The pair announced a bilateral agreement waiving visa requirements for citizens of the two countries, which took effect on July 17.
Chinese Exports to Southeast Asia Soar: Chinese exports to the region rose sharply in July, illustrating how China is adapting to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats against Chinese transshipments through Southeast Asia. Chinese exports increased by 7.2 percent compared to July 2024, as Chinese companies accelerated shipments to Southeast Asia before Trump’s 40 percent tariffs threatened to take effect.
China Hosts Foreign Ministers for SCO Ministerial Meeting: On July 15, Wang hosted a delegation of foreign ministers from member-states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) for a ministerial council meeting in Tianjin, China, ahead of the organization’s upcoming summit at the end of August. Alongside representatives from Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, both India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar attended the conference. The event marked the first instance of the two South Asian leaders sharing a platform since the four days of armed conflict between India and Pakistan in May.
On the sidelines of the formal proceedings, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with the foreign ministers of all attending countries in Beijing. Xi emphasized the SCO’s role in facilitating a “just and equitable global governance system” that recognizes the trajectory of the Global South in the face of increasing competition between great powers. In a joint press conference with SCO Secretary-General Nurlan Yermekbayev, Wang stressed the organization’s five-pronged focus on the “Shanghai Spirit” as a governing motivation for engagement between members and with the world, improving cooperation on regional security concerns, facilitating member-states’ economic development, consolidating “good-neighborliness” between members, and upholding “fairness and justice” within the international system.
Amid renewed concerns in New Delhi about growing cooperation between Beijing and Islamabad, those messages resonated across the subcontinent in starkly different ways. Although neither party identified each other by name, Jaishankar’s firm reminder of the “three evils” that the SCO stands to combat—“terrorism, separatism, and extremism”—and Dar’s warnings against the normalization of the “arbitrary use of force” indicate that tensions have not entirely cooled between the two nuclear powers since the spring. Those remarks follow India’s refusal to sign a joint communique released by the SCO after a meeting of member-states’ defense ministers last month on the grounds that it “suited Pakistan’s narrative” of the recent conflict. Local news sources from both countries touted the outcomes of their respective ministers’ visits as successful, with Islamabad reportedly set to “strengthen strategic dialogue” on “key areas of mutual interest,” including bolstering engagement along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Chinese Leadership Hosts Indian Foreign Minister: The pre-summit meeting coincided with a longer visit to China for Jaishankar, the first for the Indian foreign minister in five years. On July 14, Jaishankar met individually in Beijing with Vice President Han Zheng, Wang, and Minister of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Liu Jianchao. (Liu, a career diplomat who analysts had previously tipped as a potential successor to Wang, was inexplicably detained for questioning by state authorities in August 2025.) Press releases from both countries’ foreign ministries underscored a high-level focus on improving bilateral ties, a professed mutual goal that has faced friction due to skirmishes across the shared Line of Actual Control (LAC) dividing China and India in eastern Ladakh, India, New Delhi’s strategic cooperation with Washington, and Beijing’s close relationship with Islamabad.
Given Xi’s absence from the 2025 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) Summit earlier in July, a true test of the evolving “Dragon-Elephant Tango” between China and India will be pushed to the end of August, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reportedly attend the SCO Summit in Tianjin, China.
China and India Consultations on Border Affairs: Barely two weeks after Jaishankar’s two-stop tour in China, a delegation from Beijing arrived in New Delhi to participate in the thirty-fourth meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC). On July 23, Indian Joint Secretary for East Asia Gourangal Das presided over the convening alongside China’s Director General of the Boundary and Oceanic Affairs Department Hong Liang. Thousands of troops from both countries have been deployed along the de facto LAC since 2020, when an unprecedented shift in Chinese positioning led to a deadly clash in the Galwan Valley that set a new record for heightened tensions between the two Asian giants.
A press release from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlighted a series of “common understandings” reached by the two parties, while India’s Ministry of External Affairs published a statement emphasizing the meeting’s advancement of “effective border management” toward “sustaining peace & tranquility.” Wang and Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval will meet to discuss the border issue again during the next round of special representatives’ talks later this year (most likely in December, which would mark a year since the twenty-third Meeting of Special Representatives in 2024). Alongside the regularly occurring WMCC meetings, Modi and Xi revived the special representatives dialogue at a meeting in Kazan, Russia, last year to accelerate disengagement along the border in Ladakh.
Chinese-Made Jet Crashes in Bangladesh: A Chinese-made F-7 fighter jet operated by the Bangladesh Air Force (BAF) crashed into a school in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on July 21, drawing renewed scrutiny to a pattern of malfunctions and tragedies associated with the outdated model. The Bangladeshi military’s Inter-Services Public Relations confirmed in an official statement that the aircraft suffered a “technical malfunction” in midair. The crash claimed the lives of thirty-five, including the pilot, and left more than one hundred students, parents, faculty members, and civilians in the vicinity with serious injuries.
The BAF has faced criticism in the past for conducting training exercises over densely populated urban areas and its history of reliance on Chinese equipment. A report by the Dhaka Tribune has noted that of the eleven BAF crashes recorded over the past twenty years, seven have involved Chinese-made aircraft. Despite international standards deeming them obsolete, models such as the Chengdu F-7 implicated in the July 21 crash remain a “core component” of the BAF due to their affordability. Dhaka acquired the majority of its stock of F-7s after 2011; China discontinued production of the model for domestic use in 2013. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former BAF officer noted: “Chinese aircraft are one of the main reasons behind these repeated crashes, yet the Air Force continues to use them due to various constraints.”
China has made diplomatic overtures since the crash, deploying several specialty medical teams and committing humanitarian assistance to those affected by the incident. On July 24, a team of five burn specialists from Wuhan Third Hospital were deployed to assist with the treatment of victims at the Bangladesh Institute of Burns and Plastic Surgery, while experts from the Second Affiliated Hospital of Kunming University conducted a remote video consultation with doctors on the ground in Dhaka. Following a handover of “2,000 necessary medicines and surgical equipment” supervised by Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Yao Wen, the diplomat affirmed that China would “continue to provide assistance within its capacity based on Bangladesh’s needs.”
