China spent about US$15 billion, or 7 percent of its defense budget, on exercises in the western Pacific last year, according to a previously unpublished Taiwanese estimate, showing Beijing’s investment in military activity around Taiwan and its neighbors.
The internal research by the military, reviewed by Reuters, offers a rare look into a slice of China’s defense spending as Beijing has ramped up its military presence amid rising tensions in the region.
China claims Taiwan as its own and is also locked in disputes with several nations over sovereignty of large parts of the South China Sea and the East China Sea.
Photo: Reuters
“This reveals the logic of allocation of their resources,” a senior official briefed on the research said. “They are spending a huge amount of resources trying to gain control of the west of the first island chain.”
The official, and two other people briefed on the research, declined to be identified for this story because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The first island chain is a collection of archipelagos running roughly from Indonesia in an arc to northeast to Japan, encompassing the South China Sea and East China Sea.
In a statement to Reuters, the Ministry of National Defense declined to comment on the figures.
“But the Chinese Communist Party’s enormous military investment in recent years indeed has a negative impact to the peace and stability in the region, which is not conducive to global prosperity and development,” the ministry said.
The Chinese Ministry of National Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
Zhang Youxia (張又俠), vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and China’s second-highest-ranking military official, in April said that the sea should not be an arena where nations can flex their “gunboat muscles.”
Carrying out “maritime containment, encirclement and island blockades will only plunge the world into a vortex of division and turbulence,” he said, in an apparent reference to the US and its allies.
The Ministry of National Defense compiled the reports in May based on surveillance and intelligence on Chinese military activity in the Bohai Sea off northeast China, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the western Pacific.
The reports tallied China’s naval and air missions there last year, then estimated how much fuel and other consumables would cost for each hour of activity. The total was 110 billion yuan (US$15.4 billion), including maintenance, repairs and salaries, the reports and the officials briefed on the research said.
The research was designed to help Taiwanese decisionmakers understand how China allocates military resources across regions, as well as to gauge what Taipei perceives as a “gap” between Beijing’s intentions and its capabilities, three officials briefed on the reports said.
Comparing the cost of the exercises with the state of China’s economy, they said, helps Taipei assess the risks for both Taiwan and China.
The 110 billion yuan figure amounts to about 85 percent of Taiwan’s defence budget last year, Reuters calculations showed.
It is about 7 percent of China’s reported military spending of 1.55 trillion yuan last year, although diplomats and experts say that number is often opaque or not fully inclusive. China in March announced a 7.2 percent rise in defense spending for this year to 1.67 trillion yuan.
“It’s like a black hole,” retired navy Lieutenant Commander Lu Li-shih (呂禮詩) said, adding that individual spending programs were not broken out in China’s defense budget.
“You can gauge the trend, but you can’t tell what the detailed items are,” Lu said.
Both Washington and Beijing have significantly increased the volume of military exercises across Asia amid roiling tensions, though China’s drills still lag in scale and complexity, a study has found.
China’s Global Times newspaper last year said that sending carrier groups into the waters of the western Pacific was not only about flexing muscles around Taiwan, and that China’s navy needed to get used to operating far out at sea.
Four experts said the reports’ methodology was feasible and could provide valuable information, although they cautioned that it necessarily included some guesswork.
They also said direct comparisons on military exercise spending were difficult; no data was available, for instance, on how much the US spent on such activities last year, but the US Department of Defense has proposed spending US$9.9 billion next year on the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, created to counter China’s military buildup.
China has stepped up military incursions and war games near Taiwan.
Chinese aircraft, including J-10 fighter jets, H-6 bombers and drones, last year made more than 9,200 flights in the region, amounting to about 29,000 hours in the air, the report showed.
The Chinese navy made more than 70,000 sailings, including aircraft carriers and destroyers, amounting to a total time at sea of more than 1.7 million hours.
About 40 percent of the Chinese naval journeys were made in the highly contested South China Sea, about 20 percent were in the East China Sea bordering Japan and South Korea, and nearly 15 percent were in the Taiwan Strait, the report showed.
China also launched “punishment” drills around Taiwan in May, sending heavily armed warplanes and staging mock attacks shortly after President William Lai (賴清德), who Beijing considers a separatist, took office.
During the two-day “Joint Sword 2024A” war games that month, Chinese air and naval forces were estimated to have spent about US$13.17 million on fuel and consumables, according to another Taiwanese defense report reviewed by Reuters.
The estimated spending for that exercise did not include personnel and maintenance, which are usually about three times the cost of fuel and consumables, the three officials briefed on the research said.
BACK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: The planned transit by the ‘Baden-Wuerttemberg’ and the ‘Frankfurt am Main’ would be the German Navy’s first passage since 2002 Two German warships are set to pass through the Taiwan Strait in the middle of this month, becoming the first German naval vessels to do so in 22 years, Der Spiegel reported on Saturday. Reuters last month reported that the warships, the frigate Baden-Wuerttemberg and the replenishment ship Frankfurt am Main, were awaiting orders from Berlin to sail the Strait, prompting a rebuke to Germany from Beijing. Der Spiegel cited unspecified sources as saying Beijing would not be formally notified of the German ships’ passage to emphasize that Berlin views the trip as normal. The German Federal Ministry of Defense declined to comment. While
‘UPHOLDING PEACE’: Taiwan’s foreign minister thanked the US Congress for using a ‘creative and effective way’ to deter Chinese military aggression toward the nation The US House of Representatives on Monday passed the Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act, aimed at deterring Chinese aggression toward Taiwan by threatening to publish information about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials’ “illicit” financial assets if Beijing were to attack. The act would also “restrict financial services for certain immediate family of such officials,” the text of the legislation says. The bill was introduced in January last year by US representatives French Hill and Brad Sherman. After remarks from several members, it passed unanimously. “If China chooses to attack the free people of Taiwan, [the bill] requires the Treasury secretary to publish the illicit
A senior US military official yesterday warned his Chinese counterpart against Beijing’s “dangerous” moves in the South China Sea during the first talks of their kind between the commanders. Washington and Beijing remain at odds on issues from trade to the status of Taiwan and China’s increasingly assertive approach in disputed maritime regions, but they have sought to re-establish regular military-to-military talks in a bid to prevent flashpoint disputes from spinning out of control. Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, and Wu Yanan (吳亞男), head of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command, talked via videoconference. Paparo “underscored the importance
CHINA POLICY: At the seventh US-EU Dialogue on China, the two sides issued strong support for Taiwan and condemned China’s actions in the South China Sea The US and EU issued a joint statement on Wednesday supporting Taiwan’s international participation, notably omitting the “one China” policy in a departure from previous similar statements, following high-level talks on China and the Indo-Pacific region. The statement also urged China to show restraint in the Taiwan Strait. US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and European External Action Service Secretary-General Stefano Sannino cochaired the seventh US-EU Dialogue on China and the sixth US-EU Indo-Pacific Consultations from Monday to Tuesday. Since the Indo-Pacific consultations were launched in 2021, references to the “one China” policy have appeared in every statement apart from the
RSS