China's official military budget for 2009 will rise 14.9 percent on last year, an official said on Wednesday, defending the boost as a modest one to help improve equipment and conditions, and guard social stability.
Parliamentary spokesman Li Zhaoxing said the increase would bring the defence budget for the year to 480.7 billion yuan ($70.24 billion), up 62.5 billion yuan on 2008.
He said the People's Liberation Army's latest double-digit budget rise would mainly go towards raising conditions and high-tech ability, and "enhancing the military's emergency response capabilities in disaster relief, fighting terrorism, maintaining stability and other non-warfare military operations".
Defence spending will be 6.3 percent of the overall national budget, Li, a former foreign minister, told a news conference a day before the national parliament opens its annual session.
"Compared to previous years, this is a modest fall in the proportion," he said. "China's limited military strength is to protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity and would not threaten any country."
Beijing's projected rise in military spending is lower than in 2008, when the PLA budget rose 17.6 percent on 2007.
But China's latest rise could nonetheless stir jitters in regional capitals and in Washington, where the Obama Administration is looking at ways to hold down Pentagon expenses.
"It is a bit surprising that they (China) have maintained this level of spending despite the global economic crisis. Fifteen percent is certainly not modest," Rory Medcalf of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney told Reuters.
"There certainly is a sense of concern in countries like India, Japan, Vietnam, and even Australia, about a much more powerful China and what this is going to mean in the future."
The United States defence budget for the fiscal year 2009 is $515 billion, a 7.5 percent rise on the previous year. That does not include multi-billion dollar outlays for Iraq and Afghanistan and some spending on nuclear weapons.
TAIWAN 'THREAT'
China's slightly lowered defence-spending growth will also be little comfort to Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing has warned it will use force to stop embracing full independence, said Andrew Yang, a prominent military expert at the Taipei-based China Council of Advanced Policy Studies. China considers the island a breakaway province.
"They keep maintaining this high percentage of increase, and given that they've deployed more than 1,000 missiles in coastal regions, that certainly poses a great threat to Taiwan," Yang said of the mainland forces.
China has been cautiously extending its military experience beyond its borders by contributing to peacekeeping forces, participating in joint exercises, and most recently sending naval ships to patrol pirate-menaced seas off the Somali coast. And some of the extra spending may go to naval modernisation.
Zhao Guojun, a senior Chinese naval commander, said on Tuesday that "China naturally wants to build a strong navy" including, eventually, an aircraft carrier, the China News Service reported.
Many foreign analysts believe China's real military outlays are much more than the official budget. But Li said his government had "no such so-called invisible military spending".
Li did not explain how the extra spending would be used against terrorist threats and to protect stability.
China is worried about unrest in its western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang. But the government maintains a separate People's Armed Police anti-riot force to enforce domestic control.
A U.S. defence official, David Sedney, in Beijing for talks last week, told reporters then that Washington saw nothing wrong with China modernising its military but wanted more clarity about its objectives.
Medcalf, the Sydney-based expert, said China's formal defence budget did not include research costs and purchases from abroad.
"This puts their real defence budget well over $100 billion, clearly the second-highest military spender in the world after the United States," he said.
