China calls for U.S. to stop all distribution of annual Pentagon report
China’s communist government denounced the Pentagon’s latest annual report on China’s military as distorting Beijing’s military development.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters that the continued dissemination of the report promoted what Beijing calls the "Chinese military threat" theory and a distortion, according to a report for Geostrategy-Direct by East-Asia-Intel.com.
"China unswervingly sticks to a path of peaceful development and pursues a national defense policy which is purely defensive in nature," he said.
"We urged the U.S side to respect this basic fact," he noted, adding that Washington should halt publication of the report to avoid further damage to relations between the two nations and their militaries.
Richard Fisher, a China military specialist with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said most of the past Pentagon reports were watered down due to interagency compromises and as a result “are not nearly as detailed as they could be.”
The latest report is an improvement but fails to address key issues like China's pursuit of 5th generation combat aircraft, the potential for its ASAT program to yield a surprise ABM capability, and its potential to use its moon program for military purposes.
“China's anger at the DoD PLA reports basically sums up the fundamental contradiction between China's dictatorship and U.S. democracy,” Fisher said. “The U.S. report is a serious and rigorous attempt to tell the truth about a dictatorships which is essentially threatened by such truth.”
