China manufactures and exports a broad range of air defense missiles. China had been producing relatively small numbers of obsolete SAMs based on Soviet systems since the 1960s. In the late 1980s, efforts began to develop several low-to-medium altitude SAMs suitable both for domestic requirements and for export. Chinese exports in this area have been very modest, amounting to about 3% of the market in the developing world. To date, these new missile programs do not appear to have been particularly successful, and in the 1990s, China turned again to Russia for air defense technology particularly for more sophisticated high altitude systems.
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