By Wei He

The second session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC) announced that China is to increase its defense budget by 14.9 percent in 2009. The planned defense budget is 480.686 billion yuan, a rise of 62.482 billion yuan from last year. Recently China's annual increases in military expenditure have become a hotly debated issue.

Firstly, China's defense expenditure has always been appropriate and limited. Only in recent years has China increased its military spending by a large margin. It may seem that China is spending too much on defense. But if one looks at the issue from a historical rather than an exclusive and one-sided perspective, one can see that China's defense expenditure is quite moderate. From a historical point of view, it can be clearly seen that China's increases in military spending have been mainly used to compensate for price rises.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China increased its defense spending by an average 1.23 percent annually from 1979 to 1989. Military expenditure rose by 15.8 percent each year from 1990 to 1997. But considering that the consumer price index grew 9.7 percent year on year for the same period, China's defense budget only increased 6.1 percent each year. China's price index stabilized after 1998 but past lack of investment means China's defense and arms industry has lagged behind.

China's defense spending will rose by 14.9 percent, and account for 6.3 percent of the country's total fiscal expenditure in 2009. By comparison, in the past few years China increased its spending on education by 22.5 percent, medicare by 20.9 percent, social security and employment by 23.1 percent, environment protection by 22.3 percent, and housing projects for low income families by 199.6 percent.

China spends less than the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia and Japan in military spending in terms of a number of indexes: ratio of defense spending to GDP or national expenditure; national per capita defense spending, or per-serviceman or woman spending.

Defense spending by country in 2008

	US	UK	France	Russia	Japan	China
Defense spending(billion in US dollar)	716.5	67.3	44.6	36.8	41.4	60.9
Ratio to GDP(%)	5.0	2.4	1.5	2.1	0.9	1.4
Ratio to national expenditure(%)	24.7	5.5	8.9	13.1	4.3	6.7
National per capita defense spending(in US dollar)	2,365	1,103	719	257	323	46
Per-serviceman or woman spending(in US dollar)	519,600	343,400	124,500	32,500	152,400	26,500

Secondly, China's increase in military spending is absolutely reasonable. China is a socialist country which has not yet achieved unification. China has a huge territory, a large population, more than 22,000 km of land boundaries, 32,000 km of coastlines and 300 square km of ocean territory. Therefore the task of protecting its national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity is extremely difficult. In order to consolidate China's national defense and to build a strong army it is imperative, appropriate and reasonable to moderately increase its spending on defense.