Arms Trade & Geopolitics Sector – Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić recently confirmed, during a visit to an air base, that Serbia will purchase China’s HQ-9 long-range air-defense missile system. The purchase is a single arms deal, but its significance runs beyond the transaction: the HQ-9 will join the Chinese FK-3 medium-range and HQ-17AE short-range systems Serbia already fields, forming a tiered long-, medium-, and short-range air-defense network — making Serbia the first European country to field an integrated Chinese air-defense architecture.
It is easy to slot this into one of two ready-made narratives: one (common in Chinese media) that it marks China “breaking open” NATO’s hold on European defense; another (common in Western analysis) that Serbia is merely settling for Chinese gear out of political necessity. Both capture part of the truth, and neither is complete. The real picture is a mix of performance and politics — and grasping it means first discarding a premise that Western framing tends to assume: that Chinese equipment is only a fallback for when Western gear is unavailable.
The performance side: Chinese gear is no longer “second best”
In the past, “country X buys Chinese weapons” was almost reflexively read as “because they’re cheap, or better options weren’t available.” That premise is being shaken by combat data, and the strongest evidence comes from the May 2025 India-Pakistan air battle.
Here the claims from different sources need to be kept in layers, because this is exactly where the information is most muddled:
China’s official line is the most restrained. In January 2026, China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) listed the J-10CE’s “first combat success” among its top ten defense-industry news items of 2025. The official wording: in mid-May, the J-10CE “shot down multiple aircraft in air combat without any losses of its own” — note that Beijing said “multiple,” gave no specific number, and named neither the adversary nor the aircraft types.
Pakistan’s official claim is higher: it says five to six Indian aircraft were downed, including three French-made Rafales.
Western independent confirmation sets a more conservative floor. The loss of at least one Rafale is backed by hard evidence — wreckage was found inside India, and France indirectly confirmed a Rafale loss; most Western analyses currently confirm one to two losses.
With that evidence ladder laid out, one uncontested core fact emerges: whatever the exact number, the J-10CE shot down advanced fighters including the Rafale, with no losses of its own. It was the first combat loss of a Rafale, and the first time a Chinese export fighter defeated a frontline Western fighter in actual combat. For a country weighing an arms purchase, that fact carries more weight than any paper specification — it turns “buying a Chinese fighter” from a value choice into a combat-proven one.
This is precisely the side Western framing underrates in the Serbian case. In announcing the HQ-9 purchase, Vučić said explicitly that “other things are being procured from China,” and hinted that Serbia would still need new fighters after its French Rafales are delivered — with Serbian media speculating the J-10CE or FTC-2000G as candidates. If those reports hold, Serbia would not be looking only at price: a fighter that has just downed a Rafale in combat is hard currency.
The political side: also real, but not the whole story
That said, attributing Serbia’s choice entirely to performance falls into the opposite bias (the “breaking NATO’s monopoly” Chinese narrative does exactly this). Political and cost factors are real and present:
Serbia is surrounded by seven NATO countries, yet its relationship with them is fraught — the memory of NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia is a collective trauma. In that position, buying Russian weapons would trigger Western sanctions (this was a main reason it dropped the Russian S-400), while buying Western ones leaves it dependent: France, for instance, refuses to integrate Chinese missiles onto the Rafale over intellectual-property limits — meaning that to use the Chinese CM-400AKG air-to-ground missiles it already has, switching to a Chinese fighter is nearly the only option. And Chinese gear is cheaper, without the political conditions attached to Western arms. These are real drivers.
So the accurate statement is: performance and politics are intertwined, with the weighting varying by system. For the HQ-9, performance advantage and political-cost calculation may each count for about half; when it comes to the J-10CE, that Rafale-downing record shifts the weighting noticeably toward performance.
What the West really worries about is the “ecosystem,” not any single weapon
It is worth noting that the Western defense community’s unease with this deal lies less in the performance of any single weapon than in the “closed ecosystem” of Chinese arms taking shape in Serbia. Serbia already fields Chinese air defense, armed reconnaissance drones, air-to-ground missiles, and glide bombs; if a Chinese fighter lands, it would be the first European state to hold a combat system relatively independent of NATO’s data links. Modern war is fought as a system, and a country inside a NATO cordon assembling a non-NATO system carries real symbolic weight — the Western concern has its own logic, and there is no need to deny it.
But proportion matters here too. Vučić’s strategy is not to “pivot east” and confront NATO; it is a textbook multi-vector balance: buying French Rafales and keeping cooperation with the EU on one hand, shoring up his defense floor with Chinese systems on the other. This “buy from both East and West” approach is, at bottom, using arms procurement as leverage in a geopolitical game, ensuring his security is not wholly controlled by any single power or alliance. Reading it as Serbia “choosing China’s side” oversimplifies it.
What it adds up to
Serbia’s HQ-9 purchase, and its possible acquisition of Chinese fighters, is neither a triumphant “China ends the Western arms monopoly” nor a resigned “small state forced to settle for second-rate substitutes.” It reflects a more real and more notable shift: the actual performance of some high-end Chinese equipment — marked by the J-10CE’s combat record against the Rafale — has reached the point where both performance and politics are genuine reasons to buy. Where buying Chinese once rested mainly on price and political space, performance itself is now a factor on the scale.
For a country in Serbia’s position, that means one more real option; for the global arms market, it means Western dominance at the high end faces, for the first time, a competitor whose performance also holds up. The shift is real — but it is the beginning of multipolarity, not the end of a monopoly. The proportion lies precisely between those two.
Sources: Based on the Serbian president’s public statements and Hong Kong press reporting; the layered information on the J-10CE’s combat record draws separately on China’s SASTIND official wording (“multiple aircraft, no losses”), Pakistani official claims, and Western independent analysis and evidence (France’s confirmation of a Rafale loss, wreckage recovery); SIPRI arms-trade data and Serbia’s equipment inventory draw on open sources. The specific figures claimed by different parties diverge and are attributed accordingly. Range and other specifications are open-source estimates.
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