China will spend an extra 12.6 percent on its armed forces this year, the government announced on Friday, adding to Washington's fear that the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait is tilting toward Beijing.
The sharpest rise for three years, it will give political ammunition to US Congress members who have threatened a trade war with the EU if Brussels goes ahead with its plan to lift its arms embargo on China later this year.
The National People's Congress is expected to approve a military budget of 247.7 billion yuan (US$29.9 billion) at its annual meeting, when security issues are unusually high on the agenda. The nearly 3,000 members will also debate a law threatening Taiwan with punitive action, including, ultimately, a military attack, if it pushes for independence.
This is nothing new, but China is increasingly capable of backing its words with action.
With its 2.5 million soldiers, the People's Liberation Army is the world's biggest armed force.
But in recent years the government has tried to put more emphasis on technology than manpower.
Pensioning off hundreds of thousands of personnel and buying new equipment has been expensive.
For the past decade the defense budget has been growing by double figures, outstripping even the super-charged economy.
This is a source of increasing alarm in the US, which is committed to defending Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province and its main military target.
Last month CIA Director Porter Goss said that the strategic balance in the Strait was shifting toward China.
Last year, he said, Beijing increased the number of missiles stationed opposite Taiwan, deployed several new attack submarines, and began building 23 amphibious landing vessels.
Senior US officials are once again publicly treating China as a strategic competitor.
Since the beginning of the year, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has expressed concern about the expansion of the Chinese navy
And the US and Japan have broken with diplomatic niceties for the first time by mentioning Taiwan as a shared concern in the latest review of their security alliance.
Moreover, the increasing global importance of China's armed forces lies behind US anger at the EU proposal to lift the arms embargo it imposed on China after the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in favour of democracy in 1989.
Although the EU has promised a strict code of conduct to minimize the impact of the change, Washington is afraid that the EU will allow sales of advanced communications and electronic equipment that could strengthen China's ability to take Taiwan by force.
Members of the US Congress said last week that they might retaliate by restricting European access to US military technology.
China's response has been to play down the threat posed by its army.
Jiang Enzhu, the spokesman for the National People's Congress, insisted that, compared with other big countries, China spent a "very low" proportion of its economic output on the military.
But Beijing's determination to recover Taiwan, if necessary by force, is certain to be given legal force by the adoption of an anti-secession law during this year's congress.
Although China insists that the proposed legislation will not undermine recent improvements in relations with Taiwan, many people on the island are afraid that these legal and military moves are in a dangerous direction.
"There is growing concern in Taiwan and the US that the balance is tilting," said Arthur Ding (
"With a growing economy, China is more able to afford advanced weapons systems. In the long term, things are moving their way," he said.
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