In July of this year, a PLA officer sort of denied that the People’s Republic of China was supplying weapons to its client state, Cambodia, as Cambodia and Thailand resumed fighting over their border (The Independent, July 26, 2025).
Senior Col Sheng Wei, deputy director of the Asia division of the Office of International Military Cooperation (OIMC) of China’s People Liberation Army, said all the Chinese military equipment currently possessed by Cambodia are “the result of historical cooperation projects”.
“Since tensions began along the Thailand-Cambodia border, China has not provided any military equipment to Cambodia for use against Thailand. Please do not believe fake news generated by malicious actors,” Col Sheng Wei said, according to The Straits Times….
Amid speculations of China providing weapons to the Cambodian army, a Chinese delegation meeting Thai officials in Beijing requested that its clarification be communicated to the Thai public in the interest of regional stability and trust.
The delegation said the Chinese weapons in the Cambodian armoury are from past military cooperation agreements, adding that no new military support has been provided.
A couple of months later, The New York Times reported that weeks before “China urged Cambodia and Thailand to end their border war in July…it had sent rockets and artillery shells to Cambodia” (September 29, 2025).
The Chinese military planes touched down in Cambodia over three days in June, weeks before a simmering border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand exploded into war.
The aircraft were Y-20s, known as Chubby Girls in China for their wide body and ability to carry heavy cargo. They made six flights to the southwestern city of Sihanoukville, bringing rockets, artillery shells and mortars, according to Thai intelligence documents reviewed by The New York Times, a shipment that has not been previously reported.
The Chinese weapons were packed into 42 containers and stored at the nearby Ream Naval Base, the documents said. Days later, Chinese-made ammunition was moved from the base hundreds of miles to the north, to Cambodia’s contested border with Thailand, according to the documents.
Asked for comment on the Thai intelligence reports, a senior Cambodian official did not deny many of the basic details about the shipment.
Of course, all this Chinese supplying of Cambodia with weapons could be construed as being among the “historical cooperation projects” that Sheng Wei was talking about. Everything before the present instant is history.
Giving Sheng’s remarks as generous a spin as possible, we may say that he merely denied that China had sent any new shipments of weapons to the Cambodians during the most recent resumption of the border conflict. There’s no reason to believe this carefully narrow claim either; but it’s so narrow that whether the Cambodians were getting Chinese weapons only weeks before the conflict broke out last summer or until two days after it broke out or whatever hardly matters.
The Times noted that Thailand also relies heavily on weapons from China, “which has cultivated close strategic and economic ties” with both countries, but seemed to conclude that Cambodia had been the aggressor in the latest stage of the conflict. The reporter also quoted a “conflict expert” who proposed that the Chinese government think harder about how its weapons are being used in Asian counties, since the deaths of Asian civilians as a result of the use of Chinese weapons are not good for China’s image.
The mystery of the exploding tank barrel
Also not good for the PRC’s image is exploding tank barrels. During the most recent weeks of Cambodia-Thailand fighting, a China-supplied tank being used on by the Royal Thai Army suffered a “a sudden rupture of the tank’s 125mm main gun barrel, which rendered the vehicle inoperable and caused extensive secondary damage” (Indian Defence News, December 13, 2025).
Lei of Lei’s Real Talk believes that the incident of the exploding barrel is related to the disappearance and perhaps downfall of one General Xu Xuegiang, in charge of development and procurement of military weapons. Rumors of trouble for Xu, who has reportedly missed the Fourth Plenum and other important meetings during the latter part of 2025, long antedate the tank incident. But perhaps Lei means to suggest that problems with PLA weapons have been ongoing.
Lei says that evidence of purges and chaos in the PLA and most recently its Air Force indicate that China is in no shape at present to fight a war, not with coveted Taiwan or anybody else—at least not a full military war. The mainland’s other kinds of warring never seems to wane.
Also see:
Britannica: Thailand-Cambodia Conflict
