Agence France-Presse,
BEIJING: China announced Wednesday its defence spending would rise by 14.9 percent in 2009 but insisted its expanding military power posed no threat to the rest of the world.
“China's defence expenditure for the year will increase modestly,” the spokesman for China's parliament, Li Zhaoxing, told reporters.
The defence budget for 2009 is 480.686 billion yuan (70.2 billion dollars), an increase of 62.482 billion yuan from the previous year, he said.
The rise is slightly smaller than last year's increase of 17.9 percent.
The United States, Japan and their allies have long expressed concern about China's military build-up, warning that the Chinese government has not been transparent on its intent behind the expansion.
Li said these concerns were misplaced.
“China's limited military powers will be solely used for the purpose of safeguarding its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said.
“This will not pose a threat to any country.”
He emphasised that China's military spending was small relative to the size of its population and national territory, accounting for 1.4 percent of China's gross domestic product.
This compared to 4.0 percent for the United States and 2.0 percent for the United Kingdom and France, he said.
Li said the increase was due in large part to the need to ensure that living standards for its estimated 2.3 million service men and women rise along with the rest of society.
However, he said it also would be used to upgrade the military's information technology and its ability to engage in disaster response and anti-terror missions.
The figure given by China has “little association with reality”, said Ralph Cossa, head of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He said military-watchers widely estimate actual defence spending is three to four times larger than what Beijing says.
“The question is: what's included in the figure? The transparency of what China is spending this money on is what is really hard to gauge,” Cossa told AFP.
The Pentagon in recent years has raised concerns over China's development of cruise and ballistic missiles, its testing of an anti-satellite weapon in 2007 and an apparent rise in cyber-espionage by the Chinese military.
China has typically responded to the transparency demands by saying it posed no military threat to other countries and alleged some in the West were trying to pump up fears of a “China threat.”
