Making Sense of China’s Defense Budget Slowdown

Dean Cheng / March 09, 2010

The PRC announced this past week that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) budget would increase by about 7.5% in 2010. This marks the first time that the PLA budget has had an increase of less than 10% in nearly a decade. But don’t jump the gun. It is far from clear that it represents anything with implications for China’s long-term challenge to US predominance in the Asia Pacific.

Chinese defense spending figures are notoriously unreliable, important more for the political signals they send than actual spending. The scale of the announcement, roughly halving the rate of increase for this year’s defense budget compared with last year, is perhaps no more than a signal the Chinese government will be spending noticeably less on specific defense-related projects than it has in previous years. (more…)