China's Military Spending to Rise

China's Military Spending to Rise

China Says Military Spending to Rise 12.6 Percent, Tries to Calm Fears of Taiwan Attack

By ELAINE KURTENBACH Associated Press Writer
The Associated PressThe Associated Press

BEIJING Mar 4, 2005 — China on Friday announced a 12.6 percent increase in military spending for 2005 but tried to allay fears that a proposed anti-secession law would prompt an attack on rival Taiwan.

The rise in military spending adds to a series of double-digit annual increases as Beijing modernizes its forces to back up threats to invade Taiwan, which the communist mainland claims as its territory.

The increase was announced by a spokesman for China's parliament, which is due to enact the anti-secession law during an annual session that begins on Saturday. No details of the law have been released, and Taiwanese leaders say it could serve as a pretext for an attack on the island.

The spokesman rejected such fears.

"This law is not at all a law on the use of force against Taiwan, let alone a war mobilization order," Jiang Enzhu said at a news conference.

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Taiwan. China has been involved in a very long program to modernize their military. They have been going about it in several ways. First they have raised defense spending. Second, they have actually cut the size of their military. they figure its easier to creat a smaller modern military than have a huge throng that isn't good for anything other than human wave attacks. Lastly and this is far more discrete is that they are selling weapons to anyone who will buy them including American civilians (Norinco makes guns that are sold in the US)they then take those profits and funnel it into the military. The sneaky thing about this is that money isn't included in the money that the government gives to the military. So no one really knows how much the Chinese spend on defense. FYI The Chinese not only sells wepons to teh world but the PLA also owns factories which make everyhting from toys to clothes and sells them. This money is also funneled into defense spending.

That the rest of the world catches up the US in military technology. In things such as fighter planes, bombers, and missile technology. When China starts to make weapons as good if not better than the US for a much cheaper price, there goes the super power status. Not to mention the profits made selling weapons to other countries.

I am not so much worried about this as much as I am the fact that Shrub gave away the super power economy status to China and India whild pissing time away in Iraq.

But they do want to be alert for any reason to defend their interests in their near neighbor, the Caspian oil basin.

They have a good and large defense force with pretty modern equipment. Now it is utterly and totally dwarfed by the PLA but there is one snag for China, the Straits of Taiwan. China only has enough lift capability for one division, though they have been trying to rectify that for years now they would need more than they have to take Taiwan. Their other options would be to blockade Taiwan but that would get them into deep shit with us. The Chinese Navy is large but no where near the size or the capabilities of the US Navy, Their other option would be to bombard and bomb the hell out of Taiwan. That they could do easily but again its got problems. One if you bomb the living hell out of Taiwan you lose its econimic power and you have a lot of Taiwanese that would probably want revenge and cause all sorts of trouble. Meaning a large garrison that would probably have to come from the mainland and be mantained. Also its bad press and it might get a lot of countries that may have stayed on the sidelines involved. The best way to do it for China and come out a winner is to woo them back into the fold.

I know they howl about it a lot, but it sounds like a flag-burning amendment...gets the people all hot on your side but you never actually have to accomplish anything.

was significant ten years ago, but china's rapid modernization is making it irrelevant. Meanwhile Taiwan is heavily invested in mainland industries (all that cheap labor) and like HK, its 'gateway' status is rapidly becoming meaningless. De facto unification is a reality, de jure is only a matter of time. China, unlike the US, tends to think and act in a reality with a time-frame of decades and centuries rather than weeks and months. The battle for taiwan has been fought and won, we just haven't figured it out yet.

Total defense spending by China will be around 30 biliion dollars. We will spend close to 500 billion this year. China's military spending is 6% of ours. Who is the military threat? Who is the planet's rogue nation?

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I furget who said that - but anyhoo

The United States has military in over 100 countries,

How many countries does China have forces in? :shrug:

How many wars China got going?

And China is learning thing from Murikkkan losses like running around in a war zone with poorly armored Humvees etc.

They are getting free mega-training just watching the USA fumble around in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Probably got training films of Murikkans in "How NOT to fight a war",

Or would those be sitcoms?

The $$ numbers don't matter much when one of the countries is pissing away billions on wars they can't win, and the other is quietly designing and building weapons, and streamlining their military.

The US meantime, is trying to implement "fix-it" measures to keep using unsuitable equipment, depleting and demoralizing it's experienced forces, and dragging in any citizen with the least bit of military experience to fill their declining enrollment numbers.

And I suspect not much of the Chinese Military Budget is going into the pockets of the likes of Haliburton et al.

The other 400B is on the rest of the stuff we do. I don't think I disagree with much of what you are saying except that China, at 30B/yr is not going to catch up to us anytime soon. They are seriously lacking in air and naval forces and more critically on the joint operations total battlefield awareness stuff we have spent a trillion or so developing over the last decade or two.

We are very good at pissing away billions, but when you are outspending everyone else by 10-1 you have a lot of billions to piss away before there is even the inkling of equivalency. The real threat to US military superiority is that we will do to ourselves what we like to convince ourselves we did to the Russians: we will bankrupt and destroy our own society in an endlessly escalating arms race. The odd part is that we are essentially racing against ourselves.

Those short term corporate profits are much more important than our national security ten years down the road from now.