Beijing rejects US criticism of China's military secrecy

China yesterday rejected criticism by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that its military is too secretive, saying that it poses no threat to other countries.

"China's military is defensive in nature and we have no history of invading other countries and do not pose a threat to other countries," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (劉建超).

"The US, as the world's largest military power, has no reason to criticize China on this issue," Liu said.

China has fought a number of military conflicts on foreign soil since the founding of the communist state in 1949 but categorizes them all as defensive actions. They include battling US and South Korean forces on the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s, fighting Indian troops in a 1960s border dispute, and invading Vietnam in 1979. Beijing has also threatened to invade Taiwan if Taipei refuses to unify with China.

At a defense conference last weekend in Singapore, Rumsfeld criticized China for not being more open about its military budget.

Last March, Beijing announced it was increasing its defense budget by 12.5 percent, to about US$29.9 billion, twice as much as in 2000.

That figure is generally considered an underestimate. It excludes key areas such as foreign weapons procurement and support for the military's nuclear stockpile. The actual budget could be two to three times higher.

Meanwhile, two state-run newspapers reported yesterday that the military plane that crashed last weekend, killing all 40 people on board, was a surveillance aircraft carrying nearly three dozen electronics experts.

The Ta Kung Pao on Monday said the crash was the People's Liberation Army's worst-ever aviation disaster, although that was impossible to confirm due to the intense secrecy surrounding China's military.

The paper, along with the Wen Wei Po, said 35 of those killed were electronics experts and that the five other victims were the plane's crew.

General Guo Boxiong (郭伯雄), the vice chairman of the Communist Party commission that oversees the military, is heading the crash investigation.