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“We have made big strides in raising the levels of armaments,” said Senior Col. Fan Jianjun of the PLA General Armaments Department at the press event. “But there’s still quite a large gap with the levels of the world’s developed countries, and we still cannot fully adjust to the needs of protecting national security and unity and better fulfilling our international duties.”
The white paper put China’s defense expenditures in 2007 at 355.5 billion Yuan (around $51 billion), or 7.5 percent of U.S. military spending for the same year. Moreover, the country’s military outlay in 2007 represented only 1.38 percent of GDP, compared with 4.5 percent for the U.S.
However, Western experts on the PLA have noted that China’s real defense budget is at least three times the publicized figure. Moreover, most PLA units are able to utilize R&D facilities in supposedly civilian departments that deal with aviation, aeronautics and electronics.
Defense Ministry spokesmen claimed that China could not afford to slow down modernization of weaponry because it had to fight “containment” — a code word for threats coming from the U.S. and such Asian allies as Japan — as well as pro-independence movements in Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.
The spokesmen also noted that some of the newly developed weapons would star in a huge military parade scheduled for Oct. 1, which marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.
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