Re: DDG 052C Thread
- remember that the public expenditure is much smaller then the real expanditure, so we have no ideia of how much china spends on defence. They may have actually increased the budget, having in mind the recent stimulus package...
I read several articles "analyzing" China's announcement of a 7.5% increase in the military budget this year, which was much smaller than in recent years. None of them even pretended to study China's military development. They skipped this part and went right into speculating as to what "signal" China was trying to send. Was China trying to appease Japan, or just generally trying to sound less confrontational?
Of course different countries include different things in the military budget. The US does not include money for wars, for example (Iraq and Afghanistan have a separate budget). Nukes are under the Department of Energy too. Meanwhile, the Pentagon claims that China does not include all foreign purchases of military hardware and some other stuff. And of course, any state can lie outright about this. But nobody questioned the veracity of Chinese reports on the budget increases when they were 17% plus for two years in a row. If China was trying to "appease" this year, was it trying to piss everybody off during the entire preceding decade?
I choose to believe (generally speaking) the 7.5% figure because it makes sense to me.
On some internet discussion (possibly SDF, but I think it was elsewhere) somebody mentioned that as the PLA has been in the process of converting from a conscript army into a professional one due to the required skillset, and that it has had to raise salaries considerably. There are quite a few college graduates in the PLA these days. This person asserted, or speculated, that this changeover, at least in the quality of the recruits, has already taken place. This is consistent with a smaller budget increase.
Another fact that is consistent with the slower bugdet growth is the slowing down of naval construction over the last couple of years which I mentioned above. A couple of years ago there was a lot of speculation/rumors about new destroyers on this forum, but it has died down. It terms of surface combatants, the last new type was the 071, and even construction of 054A's, which has kept going for a couple of years, seems to have ended.
I put these things together above, and also the "announcement" about no foreign bases, to try to argue that it is a DELIBERATE CHOICE which is probably not predicated on availability of engines, but on the need to develop the navy in a balanced way, step by step.
As to the stimulus package, what I noticed is a) the announced military budget increase was 14.5% last year, actually lower than the pre-stimulus increases of the previous two years and lower than the overall budget increase. It was expressly NOT part of the stimulus then. b) Everything else in the stimulus, at least officially, was actually PRODUCTIVE investment or temporary consumption boosters. There was no "make work", and relatively little support for legacy export industries (toys, furniture, shoes, etc). Certainly no jump in new navy ships, as we have seen.
