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billion, or 7 percent of its defense budget, on exercises in the western Pacific last year, according to a previously unpublished Taiwanese estimate, showing Beijing’s investment in military activity around Taiwan and its neighbors.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.
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