Author: John Pomfret
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: March 6, 2001
Aiming to cope with what it calls
''drastic changes'' in the world's military situation, China has decided
to increase defense spending this year by 17.7 percent, its biggest expansion
in real terms in the last 20 years, according to Finance Minister Xiang
Huaicheng.
Xiang said in a speech today that
the increase would go mainly for pay raises for officers and enlisted men
and ''to meet the drastic changes in the military situation around the
world and prepare for defense and combat given the conditions of modern
technology, especially high technology.'' The speech was delivered to the
National People's Congress, China's legislative body, which opened its
annual session Monday in Beijing.
The defense spending jump, calculated
in real terms, dwarfs recent yearly increases. It comes as China is experiencing
zero inflation but faces a record budget deficit, which experts say gives
such an increase added significance as a measure of government priorities.
PREPARING TO SPAR WITH U.S.
The budget increase reflects a deepening
belief here that China must prepare for a conflict with the United States
if it wants to recover Taiwan, an island that Beijing considers part of
China but whose defenses the United States has pledged to help. This assumption
has been coupled with a sense that the People's Liberation Army is falling
behind the West in the race for a high-tech military.
New spending would address two other
chief concerns, analysts say: a realization that the military must pay
higher salaries and train more if it wants to be a force in the world,
and a recognition of shortfalls in the military budget since the government
forced the army to divest itself of most of its business interests in 1998.
Xiang said this year's publicly
acknowledged defense budget would reach $17.195 billion, higher than that
in India, Taiwan or South Korea. Analysts generally estimate the real figure
is at least three times as high, which would put China almost on a par
with Japan's $45 billion but nowhere near the U.S. military budget of about
$300 billion.
James Mulvenon, a Chinese security
specialist at the Rand Corp., noted that the Chinese military received
larger percentage increases in its budget in the mid-1990s but that those
came at a time of runaway inflation, making them smaller in real terms
and less significant as an expression of government policy.
FEAR OF 'NEW GUNBOAT POLICY'
''This is the biggest increase I
have ever seen,'' Mulvenon said. ''In an environment of increasing central
budget deficits and continuing revenue problems, these types of increases
highlight the amount of fiscal pain China's leadership is willing to endure
to maintain the loyalty of the military.''
Mulvenon said the Kosovo bombing
campaign, in which air power and missiles forced Yugoslavia's army out
of Kosovo, was a major catalyst for the budget increase, adding to the
shock felt by the People's Liberation Army after officers witnessed the
weapons used in the Persian Gulf War. The allied victory in Yugoslavia
constituted a major part of the ''drastic changes'' enunciated by Xiang.
Underlying this concern, analysts
said, is a view spelled out in a defense white paper issued in October
that the United States is now China's main threat and a roadblock on the
path to regional military supremacy and reunification with Taiwan. That
document accused Washington of ''practicing a new gunboat policy and neo-
economic colonialism'' and remarked that the U.S. plan to create a shield
against missiles would seriously destabilize the security of the Asia-Pacific
region.
This view has been reinforced recently
in several key essays by senior PLA strategists. The deputy chief of staff,
Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai, wrote in a recent edition of China Strategic Studies,
for instance, that the forces of ''war, hegemony and power politics are
increasing.''
U.S. AS POTENTIAL ADVERSARY
''This is very bleak assessment
of the global security environment,'' said David Shambaugh, a specialist
on the Chinese military at George Washington University and the Brookings
Institution.
Shambaugh said that over the past
few years China has embarked on a military modernization program that puts
the U.S. military front and center as a potential adversary because Beijing
believes Washington opposes China's dream of reuniting with Taiwan. China
has bought advanced destroyers and state-of-the-art anti-ship missiles
from Russia to counter U.S. aircraft carriers. It has purchased advanced
Russian fighters, the Su-27 and Su-30, and it is upgrading its submarine
fleet and attempting to improve the accuracy of its missiles.
Money for foreign military purchases,
about $1 billion a year, comes from an off-budget fund run by the Central
Military Commission. In the 1990s, China spent an estimated $6 billion
on foreign military purchases. Taiwan spent $20 billion during that time.
Mulvenon said this year's budget
increase for the PLA largely confirmed what U.S. security experts had heard
about a debate in China over the 10th Five-Year Plan that occurred in the
spring of 1999 as the Kosovo campaign unrolled and China's embassy in Belgrade
was hit by U.S. missiles. The Ninth Five-Year Plan, formulated in 1994,
set defense increases at about 10 percent per year, adjusted for inflation.
Now, he said, the next five years will bring increases of between 15 and
20 percent a year.
As a result, for the first time
in more than a decade, China's military spending is growing faster than
its expenditures on science and technology, which increased by 14.5 percent
this year, Xiang said in his speech.
