China Spends Even More on Its Military While Pentagon Yawns

China Spends Even More on Its Military While Pentagon Yawns:

The former U.S. military chief, Adm. Mike Mullen, shares a laugh with Chinese Gen. Chen Bingde, Chief of the Peoples Liberation Army's General Staff, in Beijing. Photo: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

At a time when the U.S. is cutting its defense budget by 2.5 percent, China’s far less advanced military is getting flooded with cash. Beijing announced that it will boost its annual defense budget to $106 billion, an increase of 11.2 percent. Cue the freakout — from everywhere but the Pentagon.

The spokesman for China’s National People’s Congress, who made the announcement on Sunday, said the increase in military spending represented “reasonable and appropriate growth.” It means that China’s defense budget has doubled in just six years. And there’s speculation that China’s actually spending more on its military than it’s announced.

That gets Capitol Hill spun up, but China is starting from a low baseline. It has only 14 refueling aircraft, the linchpin of a globe-spanning air force, and is just now building its first aircraft carrier after buying a clunker from Ukraine. For the time being, China’s ability to challenge American naval and air power rests with heavy purchases of cheap missiles, including its new “carrier-killer” DF-21D.

“China’s official defense budget has again increased at a greater rate than its economy,” notes Abraham Denmark, who studies Asia at the Center for Naval Analysis. “The introduction of a Chinese aircraft carrier and other emerging capabilities in the sea and air demonstrate that the People’s Liberation Army is starting to reap the benefits of decades of significant investment.”

But the announcement doesn’t get any more detailed than the flat number. China doesn’t break down its defense budget into how much it’s spending on what systems, and it used to ludicrously claim to spend equally on its ground, sea and air forces. Presumably, it’s spending more cash on stealth aircraft, the carrier and the missiles, but that’s pure speculation.

China’s budgetary opacity begs a central question, argues Denmark, who thinks the real number for Chinese defense spending is probably closer to $150 billion. “What will China do with its military?” he asks. “Will it use its newfound power to work alongside the U.S. and other powers to provide international public goods? Or, will it seek to use its military to revise the international system, beginning with the Asia-Pacific region? These questions are coming from the U.S. and around the region, and they can only be answered by Beijing.”

Don’t expect much of an answer. Chinese Vice President (and presumed heir apparent) Xi Jinping visited the Pentagon last month and pledged greater cooperation between the two nations’ militaries. But he didn’t come bearing the direct military-to-military hotline that the Pentagon wants, to stop potential misunderstandings from becoming crises — or, worse, wars.

Yet the Pentagon, consistent with the posture reflected in its annual reports on the Chinese military, isn’t sweating it. Defense Department spokesman George Little said the U.S. military expected the big increase in defense spending. And even with the cash infusion, Little noted, China’s military costs “roughly a fifth of the current U.S. defense budget.”

“The important thing for us, of course, is to continue to forge ways of developing even more cooperative [military-to-military] coordination with Beijing,” Little continued. “The key for us is to try to increase transparency in the relationship.”