"China has been a significant proliferator in the past, but there now is a sense that some of this is coming back to haunt it and that international proliferation is something now seen as a challenge that China's foreign policy has to address," said Adam Ward, an East Asia security expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
By Lindsay Beck
BEIJING, Sept 27 (Reuters) - China lacks the ability to enforce export controls on technologies used to produce weapons of mass destruction, undermining its claims to be a responsible global power, an influential U.S. research group said on Tuesday.
The findings reinforce what analysts say is a feeling in the United States that China is not doing enough to stop proliferation of weapons to countries like Iran, which is under international scrutiny over its nuclear programmes.
The RAND Corporation report says that while China has stepped up regulations on exports of WMD-related technologies in the past decade, it is still hampered by a lack of financial resources and qualified people to properly implement and enforce its own rules.
"These limitations suggest a lack of political will by the leadership to seriously implement nonproliferation export controls," said the report by RAND scholar Evan Medeiros.
Earlier this year the United States imposed sanctions against eight Chinese companies, saying they had aided Iran's weapons programmes. It was one of about a dozen times that Washington has taken such measures against Chinese firms for alleged proliferation.
China said the punishment was not backed by evidence and that it has laws to prevent proliferation.
But the RAND report said laws were only half the battle.
"The government's ability to detect, catch, investigate and penalise export control violators is significantly underdeveloped," it said.
The report said remaining challenges included a lack of incentives for compliance by Chinese enterprises and the need to educate new companies arising from rapid privatisation about their obligations.
But analysts said in light of the crises over nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea, political will might be growing in China to crack down on companies engaged in proliferation of weapons-related technologies.
"China has been a significant proliferator in the past, but there now is a sense that some of this is coming back to haunt it and that international proliferation is something now seen as a challenge that China's foreign policy has to address," said Adam Ward, an East Asia security expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
China has been playing host to six-party talks aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear programmes, a role it sees as key to efforts to brand itself as a world diplomatic power.
It also abstained from a vote at Saturday's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency requiring Tehran to be reported to the U.N. Security Council over its atomic plans despite initially being strongly opposed to the resolution.
Nonetheless, as of April only two cases of export control violations in China had been made public, the RAND report said.
Chinese Commerce Ministry "officials also appear to be unwilling to pursue investigations against large and influential Chinese state-owned enterprises", it said.
