Scholar disputes Jane's report on Chinese military

A Chinese military scholar on Monday disputed a global research group's report on China's defense budget growth, saying the motivation of the report was to play up China's military threat.

The IHS Jane's report said China's military budget will double by 2015, making it more than the rest of the Asia Pacific region's combined.

China's military spending will reach 238.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 compared with 119.8 billion in 2011, according to the report.

Li Zhaoxing, spokesman for the annual session of China's national legislature, announced in March last year that the country's defense budget in 2011 was 601 billion yuan (91.5 billion U.S. dollars)， an increase of 12.7 percent from that of 2010.

China's defense budget in 2010 increased by 7.5 percent from that of 2009, according to official statistics.

Professor Ma Gang with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) National Defense University said the IHS Jane's report was sensational and lacked a rational and factual basis.

"The report's prediction that China's military budget will gain an annual increase of 18.75 percent in the upcoming five years was purely speculative," Ma said.

"The facts have proved that China's military budget increase has gone up and down over the past years and will not always keep growing fast," Ma said.

The Chinese government has repeated that its military budget increase over the past decade made up for restrained military construction in the 1980s.

According to China's official record, the country's military budget increase ratios in the past six years were 14.7 percent, 17.8 percent, 17.5 percent, 18.5 percent, 7.5 percent and 12.7 percent.

However, from 1979 to 1989, China's military spending had experienced an average annual decrease of 5.83 percent.

Chen Bingde, the PLA's Chief of the General Staff, has said that China's military hardware lagged 20 years behind that of the U.S. and other military powers.

China's military budget for 2011 accounted only 1.5 percent of the country's gross domestic product, in comparison with U.S.'s 4.8 percent and the U.K.'s 2.7 percent.

More over, the proportion of China's military budget in the country's total fiscal budget had dropped from 8.66 percent in 1998 to 6.94 percent in 2009.