China’s official military budget will grow by about 10 percent in the coming year, a legislative spokeswoman said yesterday, amid unease among Beijing’s neighbors about its growing might and territorial ambitions.
The increase to about US$145 billion in spending would mark the fifth year in a row of double-digit increases, despite the country’s slowing economic growth, which fell to 7.4 percent last year from 7.7 percent the previous year.
The spending reflects China’s growing power and desire to assert itself in the region and globally. However, Beijing says the bigger budgets are aimed only at modernizing and improving conditions for China’s 2.3 million-member People’s Liberation Army.
Photo: Reuters
“China has a tougher road to travel than other large nations in terms of national defense modernization. We can only rely on ourselves for research and development of most of our military technology,’’ National People’s Congress spokeswoman Fu Ying (傅瑩) told a news conference in Beijing.
“Meanwhile, we need to ceaselessly improve conditions for our soldiers,” Fu said.
Fu said that China’s military posture remains strictly defensive and that it has never used “gunboats”’ to advance its trade interests.
China’s official military spending is still less than a third of the US defense budget, a proposed US$534 billion this year along with US$51 billion for the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but it comes against a background of anticipated flat or falling US spending on its armed forces in coming years.
The Pentagon and global arms bodies estimate China’s actual military spending may be anywhere from 40 to 50 percent more because the official budget does not include the costs of high-tech weapons imports, research and development, and other key programs.
Neighboring countries have come to expect Chinese defense increases, said Alexander Neill, a senior fellow for Asia-Pacific security for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“There’s the expectation that it’s not likely to plateau in the next few years, but will generally sit around that level, commensurate with the PLA’s reform and modernization goals,” Neill said.
China’s low inflation could make this year’s increase close to or bigger in real terms than rises in recent years. Last year’s increase was 12.2 percent.
The planned increase of about 10 percent — to be confirmed today at the opening of the National People’s Congress’s annual session — is in line with the overall increase in government spending planned for this year, Fu said.
China’s neighbors may gain a degree of reassurance from the dip in the growth rate, said Ni Lexiong (倪樂雄), a military expert at Shanghai’s University of Political Science and Law.
Growth of less than 10 percent would likely “be not enough” to meet the PLA’s modernization goals, Ni said.
However, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) anti-graft drive, which has netted some top generals, could bring benefits to the military through a reduction of waste and losses from corruption, he said.
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