Photo: World Affairs Board
Salvatore Babones, National Interest: China Can't Afford to Keep Challenging America on Military Spending
A more modest Chinese military footprint will likely emerge in 2017 or 2018.
China's Budget Starts to Bite
China plans a 7 percent boost to military spending in 2017. Even that may be more than it can afford.
On Saturday, China announced a 2017 spending growth target of 7 percent in nominal yuan terms. That represents a real yuan increase of less than 5 percent. Or, assuming that the People’s Liberation Army buys its tanks wholesale, applying China’s current producer price inflation index of 6.9 percent leaves no growth at all.
In 2016, China’s official military spending rose 7.6 percent. Adjusted for inflation, that’s barely 5 percent. In U.S. dollar terms, it’s barely 3 percent. In real U.S. dollar terms, adjusted for inflation, it’s hardly any increase at all. Put simply, China’s defense spending is essentially flat.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: Their finances are getting squeezed .... but a 7% boost in military spending is still huge.
2 comments:
The Australian government is currently conducting 15 min surveys over the phone in regards to how we feel with the threat from China, North Korea, the disputed South China Sea, and backing our current allies from attack(basically asking if we were ok with full scale war), our position with the trump administration(if we feel he is a threat), if we were willing to act on a Russian invasion of a Baltic state, to rate free trade and rate our level of trust with several countries around the globe with Israel being one of them.
This call was quite unnerving, as it leads me to believe there is more than meets the eye with politics world wide. A storm is brewing.
I think a fuse was lit back with the 911 attack, the big powers have all been building up their Armed Forces, conflicts and deployments are expanding, I personally believe were in for a hell of a storm, and it won't be fun for anyone.
Post a Comment