China’s military spending will grow at its fastest pace in four years to 2023 and take a larger share of the economy, underscoring Beijing’s emphasis on security over development.
Defense spending will rise 7.2 percent in 2023, more than the 5.7 percent in general public spending, according to a draft budget presented to the National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp legislature.
The defense budget points to a widening gap between China’s military and economic development, reversing a more than two-decade trend in which the expansion of defense capabilities has taken a back seat to economic growth.
This is due to the Communist Party leadership’s strained relations with the US, the lack of progress in bringing Taiwan under peaceful control, and the many international conflicts that Beijing sees as threatening its interests.
“If from Beijing’s perspective the threat environment increases or remains the same, we will see the defense budget and decouple growth for good,” said Meia Nouwens, a Chinese military expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “I think we’ll see more decouples in the future.”
China is facing “high winds and turbulent waters in the international environment”, Premier Li Keqiang said in his work report to the NPC. NPC spokesman Wang Chao said the increased military spending was “appropriate and reasonable” and “necessary to meet complex security challenges and to fulfill our responsibilities as a major power.”
Although China’s military spending is only one-third of the US level, it has increased fivefold in the past two decades according to the US think-tank CSIS, and now exceeds the next 13 largest military spenders in the Indo-Pacific combined. . Beijing has rattled its neighbors with an increasingly assertive military, holding unprecedented exercises last August to punish Taiwan for hosting US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and asserting its claims in the South China Sea against the Philippines and Vietnam.
China’s proposed increase in 2023 defense spending is 2.2 percentage points above the government’s 5 percent growth target, a bigger gap than in the draft budget a year ago, when Beijing first proposed an increase in military spending above its growth target. The proposed defense spending also exceeds development-related budget items such as education, social security and scientific research.
Defense spending budgeted for 2023 accounts for 5.7 percent of total government spending, the third annual increase in the segment after more than 20 years of continuous decline.
Analysts say that the commissioning of China’s third aircraft carrier, expected this summer, the rapid production of new destroyers and fighter jets, as well as investments in space technology and artificial intelligence for missile targeting systems are likely to be the main areas of spending this year.
The Chinese government provides little detail on defense spending beyond the breakdown of personnel, training and maintenance, and equipment. “The lack of transparency makes it almost impossible to track procurement or changes in military activity,” said Nan Tian, a researcher who tracks China’s military spending at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
“Increased training and patrolling activities of the People’s Liberation Army, for example around Taiwan, will certainly generate additional costs, even if only for fuel, but the data provided by China does not show how this will be done.”