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CHINA PLANS LOWEST DEFENSE BUDGET RAISE IN 10 YEARS

Bloomberg News, March 4, 2010

China plans to boost defense spending by 7.5 percent this year, the slowest pace of expansion in a decade, as the government seeks to allay concerns about the country’s growing military might.

The increase to 532.1 billion yuan ($78 billion) compares with a 14.9 percent rise in 2009. China’s defense budget had been expanding by at least 10 percent a year for the past 10 years.

“The Chinese government has always paid attention to controlling the size of our defense spending,” National People’s Congress spokesman Li Zhaoxing, a former foreign minister, told reporters in Beijing today. “China is committed to a policy of peaceful development.”

China’s military spending is second only to the U.S., which aims to spend $636.3 billion this year, and is more than double India’s budget of $32.1 billion.

“While this year’s increase is down a bit, we are still talking about an increase that is much bigger than Western nations and one that allows for a significant military build-up to continue,” Andrew Davies, director of Operation and Capability at Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said in a telephone interview.

China’s military spending in 2007 accounted for 2 percent of its gross domestic product, according to the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. That compares with 2.4 percent for India, 0.9 percent for Japan and 3.5 percent for the U.S. China’s spending for 2010 announced today amounts to 1.8 percent of GDP.

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