Pakistan’s Military Success over India in its Four-day Clash Showcased Chinese Weaponry: US House Panel
The report states that “Pakistan’s use of Chinese weapons to down French Rafale fighter jets used by India also became a particular selling point for Chinese Embassy defense sales efforts”.
New Delhi: A new report from a US Congressional panel has brought fresh focus to Operation Sindoor, stating that Pakistan’s success in its four-day military clash with India earlier this year was due, in large part, to advanced Chinese weaponry. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, in its 2025 Annual Report, has highlighted how Beijing used the crisis as an opportunity to test, trial, and promote its state-of-the-art defence exports.
The India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025, following a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, marked one of the most intense military engagements between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in decades.
The Commission’s report states that “Pakistan’s military success over India in its four-day clash showcased Chinese weaponry”. Even though Beijing may not have been the instigator of the conflict, the panel says that China “opportunistically leveraged the conflict to test and advertise the sophistication of its weapons, useful in the contexts of its ongoing border tensions with India”.
The report states that “Pakistan’s use of Chinese weapons to down French Rafale fighter jets used by India also became a particular selling point for Chinese Embassy defense sales efforts”. As evidence, the panel notes that “in the weeks after the conflict, Chinese embassies hailed the successes of its systems in the India-Pakistan clash, seeking to bolster weapons sales.”
The report highlights that “this clash was the first time China’s modern weapons systems, including the HQ-9 air defense system, PL-15 air-to-air missiles, and J-10 fighter aircraft were used in active combat, serving as a real-world field experiment.”
The Commission warns this demonstration serves both Beijing’s commercial ambitions, wherein “Chinese Embassy officials convinced Indonesia to halt a purchase of Rafale jets already in process, furthering China’s inroads into other regional actors’ military procurements.”
The report places this event within China’s broader regional strategy, documenting how Beijing has increasingly supplied military hardware to Pakistan while strengthening intelligence and operational links, underscoring its broader implications for India.
In another section, the report notes that “fundamentally, there has been an asymmetry in the degrees to which China and India prioritize establishing a long-term solution to the border dispute.” Underscoring the fact that “India wants a sustainable solution to the border issues that is not seen as a concession and that assuages domestic political pressure to stand up to China,” it posits that “China leverages high-level, well-publicised dialogues to reach partial resolutions”.
The bipartisan commission is not sure “whether China’s and India’s 2025 commitments are a short-term function of India’s desire to hedge against tumult in trade negotiations with the United States or are a long-term shift toward normalisation in bilateral relations.”
This article went live on November nineteenth, two thousand twenty five, at thirty-one minutes past two in the afternoon.
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