MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

China surprises with a slower growth of its 2010 defence budget policy

The PLA has 2.3 million personnel, more than any other nation

China announced a slowdown in the growth of its much-watched defence budget. The planned increase of just 7.5% on last year's military spending is the smallest hike after more than two decades of annual double-digit increases.

Parliamentary spokesman Li Zhao-xing unveiled the figure, as is traditional, the day before the annual session of the National People's Congress (China's Parliament) opens. This year's number is almost half of last year's growth rate of 14.9 %.

From publicly available data, China's military spending has increased by double digits every year since 1989. Defence spending this year accounts for 6.3% of China's total budget, a smaller proportion than in previous years, Mr Li said.

The hike of 37.12 billion Yuan (7.6 billion USD) over last year's spending will go towards China's military modernisation, to help it meet “various security threats”, he said. Mr Li, a former foreign minister, offered no reason for this year's cutback.

The budget for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) showed Beijing was not seeking confrontation, Li told a news conference. “Our defence spending is relatively low. China adheres to a path of peaceful development”.

China has 2.3 million personnel in its armed forces, more than any other nation. The government has sought to slim numbers and lift troop quality by offering better benefits.

But some foreign analysts were surprised by the figure after more than two decades of nearly unbroken double-digit rises in China's defence budget, and said the announced numbers were unlikely to show the growing power's real military spending.

“All the evidence suggests that they are on a very powerful trajectory of expansion in substantive terms, and they seem to use this figure for political purposes almost, to send signals,” said Ron Huisken, a China defence expert at the Australian National University in Canberra.

”I think the (Chinese) armed forces will be dissatisfied,“ Ikuo Kayahara, a retired Japanese major-general who teaches security studies at Takushoku University, said.

”The world has been criticizing China for increasing its defence budget by more than 10 percent every year,“ he said. ”China may be reacting to this by trying to show that it is not focused only on expanding its armed forces.“

But the Chinese press reported that a PLA officer had called for a rise in 2010 military spending that would send a defiant signal to the United States after Washington moved forward in January with plans to sell 6.4 billion USD in arms to Taiwan.

Another PLA officer, teaching at an elite university for training officers, has stirred controversy with a book urging China to build the world's strongest military and displace the United States as global ”champion”.