Ajay Banerjee
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, April 29
In what outlines a growing militarisation in Asia and also China’s rapidly expanding prowess, Beijing is spending more dollars on defence than what India, Japan, Australia and South Korea do collectively.
The spend on defence means the annual outlay on modernisation, warships, planes, missiles etc, besides running expenses like fuel, repairs and salaries.
The data released today by Swedish think-tank Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), titled “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2018” says: “China, the world’s second-largest (behind US) military spender, allocated $250 billion to the military in 2018, which accounted for 14 per cent of all global spending.”
China’s spend is much greater than the collective spend of $182.9 billion of India ($66.5 billion), Japan ($46.6 billion), South Korea ($43.1 billion) and Australia ($26.7 billion). India, Japan, Korea and Australia are, respectively, the fourth, ninth, 10th and 13th largest spenders on defence in the world. The report said: “In 2018, China’s military expenditure rose for the 24th consecutive year, and its spending in 2018 was almost 10 times higher than in 1994.”
Though the annual rate of growth of China’s military spending has slowed steadily since it reached a post-2009 high of 9.3 per cent in 2013, it has a growth of 5 per cent in 2018, which was the lowest annual increase since 1995.
China has followed a policy of linking growth in military spending with economic growth, said the SIPRI report.
The SIPRI data says military spending in Asia and Oceania was $507 billion in 2018 and accounted for 28 per cent of the global military spending. “Five of the top 15 global spenders in 2018 are in this region: China (2nd), India (4th), Japan (9th), South Korea (10th) and Australia (13th)”.
It is the only region in which annual growth has been continuous since 1988, and the 46 per cent increase between 2009 and 2018 was by far the largest of any region. “The increase was due primarily to the rise in Chinese spending, which in 2018 accounted for 49 per cent of total spending in the region, compared with 31 per cent in 2009,” the report said.
The People’s Liberation Army is 2.3-million strong and Beijing has separate ongoing boundary disputes with Japan and India besides overlapping territorial claims with six other countries in the hydrocarbon-rich South China Sea.
Beijing claims 90 per cent of the 3.5-million sq km of this sea, while the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan claim parts of those waters. The US is keen to have code of conduct in the South China Sea.
from The Tribune http://bit.ly/2WbZiBv
via Today’s News Headlines
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