The volume of military sales from Russia to China dropped off sharply in 2007, according to the latest numbers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute — which has been tracking trends in the international arms trade for more than half a century. Though these figures can vary and are estimates only, this significant drop is congruent with larger trends and trajectories inside the People's Liberation Army. The decline is not terribly surprising; 2006 saw the completion of delivery on big-ticket items such as Kilo-class diesel-electric patrol submarines and Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers (the first batch of two is estimated to have cost $1.5 billion alone), completed or built from scratch in Russia. Such expensive items can significantly skew annual import figures. But after a decade of broad military acquisitions from Moscow (the Pentagon pegs Russian sales to China from 2000-2005 at around $15 billion), there is more to this dip than an expensive 2006. China has been one of the principal beneficiaries of permissive Russian sales, receiving more late-model S-300PMU2 strategic air defense systems than any other country and becoming the only export recipient of the SS-N-22 Sunburn supersonic antiship missile — just to name two benefits. Two aspects of this relationship are now in play: what more Russia wants to offer, and what more it has to offer. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Kremlin quickly began lining its coffers by making high-end sales to Beijing, including Su-27 Flanker fighter jets and an earlier model of the S-300. Despite lulls and surges, that level of sales steadily increased through 2006. However, though Russia has helped China equip and defend itself and counterbalance the United States, potential issues loom between the Chinese and the Russians. The Kremlin has more advanced and longer-range systems on the horizon. But it already has helped give the Chinese a very real boost in military capability that they could not have received elsewhere. While there are ties (logistical and otherwise) that bind such an arrangement together, Moscow also has given Beijing the capability to act more independently for its own interests — even if those interests conflict with the Kremlin's. Meanwhile, China has spent the last decade emphasizing technology transfer and increasing domestic manufacturing capacity. Beijing now manufactures a copy of the Su-27 known as the J-11, which is increasingly composed of parts manufactured completely in China. It has done the same thing with the HQ-9, a copy of the S-300 series. China has worked concertedly to get to the point where it can manufacture late Soviet technology, tailored to Chinese industrial considerations and resources. In addition, China is now manufacturing a completely indigenously designed and built jet fighter known as the J-10. In other words, Beijing is now in possession of not only the technology but the ability to make much of it all on its own. Thus, Russia and China are reaching a divergence. Each still has much to offer the other: Russia knows its own technology better and already has more advanced variants than China; China has shown that it is more than willing to pay for them (and such funds still make for a significant contribution to Kremlin coffers). But those advances are largely evolutionary, and China has consistently made increasing its military-industrial complex's independence an important criterion in making purchasing decisions. In many cases, Russia has also not yet demonstrated the ability to manufacture its latest technology in meaningful numbers. And tellingly, for the most part, more wholesale orders of completely Russian designed and manufactured big-ticket items such as the Sovremenny warships do not appear to be under negotiation or on the horizon. Russian exports to China will continue to fluctuate, but it now appears that China might have already taken most of what it wants — or thinks it can get — from Russia.