China’s defense budget is the second largest in the world, after the United States. The Swedish think tank Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) recently released a study on the reassessment of China’s military spending, making methodological adjustments to how it investigates the “gray areas” that Beijing does not include in its official statistics.
The report, published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on China’s actual defense spending, concluded that China, the world’s second-largest military spender, should spend 1.66 trillion yuan (about $240 billion) on defense in 2019, according to Deutsche Welle, Jan. 16.
Beijing, for its part, publishes official defense budget figures every year, with military spending of about 1.2 trillion yuan (about $175 billion equivalent) in 2019. But it is widely believed in the West that this official figure does not include all the spending China spends on the military. Since the late 1990s, many analysts have pointed out that much of China’s spending on military operations is not accounted for in the official figures.
The graphs and charts provided in the report show that SIPRI’s new assessment of China’s military spending over the years is significantly higher than Beijing’s official figures, even after correcting for statistical methodology. The report also notes that despite methodological adjustments and improvements to estimates of China’s actual military spending, Beijing’s secrecy and lack of transparency regarding spending in specific areas remains a concern. Much uncertainty remains regarding some military construction spending and subsidies to military industrial companies. Going forward the agency will focus more on mining information from publicly available Chinese sources to further improve the accuracy of its assessments.
In addition to the steady growth in defense spending, China’s share of the global arms export market is also growing. According to a SIPRI report released in early January 2021, a total of four Chinese weapons companies were ranked among the “Global Top 25” based on military trade data for 2019, with three of them ranked in the top 10. China’s share of the global arms trade reached 16 percent, second only to the United States. According to the agency’s statistics, four Chinese companies – China Aviation Industry Corporation, China Electronics Technology Corporation, China North Industries Corporation and China South Industries Corporation – saw their sales increase by 4.8 percent in one year.
Recent Comments