Western double standard demonizes China's military budget growth

The double-standard deeply rooted in some Western countries' minds makes them biased when they look at China, which, according to their imagination, should better be a giant market and concurrently a military dwarf.

No wonder the newly revealed 10.1-percent increase of Chinese military budget in 2015 draws ire from them.

However, their outcry of "concerns" and "worries" is misplaced and unfounded at least for three reasons.

First of all, comparatively speaking, the current Chinese military spending is by no means a big one for a country that has the world's largest population and a territory of over 9 million square km to defend.

Through tinted glasses, some Western countries and media could see nothing but threat regarding China's military budget. Or so to speak, they neglect on purpose the fact that the budget in 2014 was less than 1.5 percent of its GDP, and lower than the average level of 2.6 percent worldwide.

They also deliberately ignored that China's per capita military spending in 2014, a key figure that their own military experts hold as an important index in judging a nation's defense budget, is even less -- only one twenty-second that of the United States, one-ninth of Britain and one-fifth of Japan, which does not even have a regular army.

So, to portray China as a threat on the basis of its less-than-supposed military budget is nonsensical.

Second, unlike Britain and Japan that have alliance to share military technology, China's defense modernization is naturally to be more difficult, as it has to rely mostly on itself to start from scratch, which surely demands a relatively high military expenditure.

This self-dependence reality is further strengthened by a weapon embargo groundlessly forced on China by the European Union and the United States. In this sense, the West is a catalyst for China's relatively "big" military budget.

Third, the balance of power, touted by Western politicians as an iron law in their political bible, is unstable in East Asia, with Japan approving its largest ever military budget in January.

No Western countries could keep closed eyes on its neighbor's surging military ambition, for the sake of balance of power and its own national security, let alone a neighbor of recidivous trouble maker.

By the same token, a responsible and major stakeholder like China needs sufficient strength to prevent a possible conflict or war lodged by miscalculating, hot-headed neighbors, and maintain a stable and peaceful Asia-Pacific region and the world as a whole.

For all that, China's expanding military budget is a justifiable and normal uptick. Depicting it as a new story of China threat neither does any good to the mutual trust between China and the West, nor strengthens the moral high ground of the West.