China's Defense Spending Thread

[plawolf]

Well I think that unless one picks apart all defence budgets and apply the same standards, its a pointless exercise taking the official Chinese defence budget and adding on additional stuff.

China may well have items in its defence budget that other governments lump under other departments and budgets.

I think the lion share of the SIPRI difference would have come from tacking the PAP budget onto the PLA one.

That's like adding most of America's police, Homeland, ATF, FBI, and any other government agencies that employ specialist armed officers' SWAT costs to the US defence budget.

Given the western bias to China's space programme, they probably added China's civilian space programme costs onto the PLA budget as well, which would be like adding NASA to the US defence budget.

Probably same deal with R&D. So unless they also added the likes of LockMart, Boeing etc's R&D budget to their version of the US defence budget, you are increasingly in comparing apples to oranges territory with all the additional line items they are arbitrarily tacking onto the PLA budget.

 

[AndrewS]

I would go towards the side of somewhat lower defense spending for China, because there is so much domestic development still left to do and because in the long-run, a large and wealthy economy is what will provide China with true economic and military security.

 

[AndrewS]

On the Chinese defense budget, one would think that SIPRI would try to apply common standards.

I think including the PAP in the military budget is reasonable, as many countries rely on the military to do such tasks eg. USA/UK/Aus/etc etc

 

[Lethe]

SIPRI is not some scaremongering anti-China outfit. They make similar adjustments for the defence spending of other nations too, including the United States. Are those adjustments going to be perfect and result in an exact like-for-like comparison? Of course not. But SIPRI's is the most consistent methodology around. For making comparisons between nations, there is no better source.

 

[antiterror13]

you should read the rules before posting any

 

[weig2000]

SIPRI is not some scaremongering anti-China outfit. They make similar adjustments for the defence spending of other nations too, including the United States. Are those adjustments going to be perfect and result in an exact like-for-like comparison? Of course not. But SIPRI's is the most consistent methodology around. For making comparisons between nations, there is no better source.

No, SIPRI is not anti-China. They're a private institution collecting and analyzing defense-spending related data across the world for many decades and they publish their methodology, although the methodology itself can be debatable.

The problem is often with the mass media; they often quote the number without giving proper context and often compare apples to oranges to serve their purpose. For example, we could say China spends anywhere between 1.3% and 2% of its GDP on defense, depending on the how one accounts for the various items; we could also say the US spends anywhere between $560 billion and $1 trillion on defense how various items are accounted for. These all understandable.

What's troubling is that media often report something like this: the US spends $560 billion on defense a year; China's official defense spending is $140 billion, but western experts say the real defense spending is can be as high as $210 billion, substantially higher than the official number.

Do you see the pattern here? Each sentence is arguably correct in itself, but put together they convey a very different message - for the vast majority of the reader/audience out there.

 

[LesAdieux]

Fu Yin, the spokewoman for the national people's congress, told reporters today: "China's defense spending will up 7-8% in 2016".

 

[Blackstone]

Fu Yin, the spokewoman for the national people's congress, told reporters today: "China's defense spending will up 7-8% in 2016".

So if SIPRI's 2014 China defense spendings at about 2.06% is correct, then we're looking at around 2.1% or so GDP in 2016.

 

[antiterror13]

Fu Yin, the spokewoman for the national people's congress, told reporters today: "China's defense spending will up 7-8% in 2016".

I doubt it ... I'd expect 15% increase.

But 8% increase would mean US$12B! ... more than most countries spend on defense, in fact only 16 countries have more than US$12B defense budget

 

[delft]

Fu Yin, the spokewoman for the national people's congress, told reporters today: "China's defense spending will up 7-8% in 2016".

This number can be well compared with other increase percentages of China's defence spending while leaving comparison between countries as uncertain as they have always been.