China’s Military Spending to Double by 2015

China’s defense budget will double by 2015, making it more than the rest of the Asia Pacific region’s combined, according to a report from IHS Jane’s, a global think tank specializing in security issues.

Beijing’s military spending will reach $238.2 billion in 2015, compared with $232.5 billion for rest of the region, according to the report. That would also be almost four times the expected defense budget of Japan, the next biggest in the region, in 2015, the report said.

The new report was released as China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, arrived in Washington at the start of a four-day visit to the U.S. that is seen as a prelude to his expected promotion to Communist Party chief in a once-a-decade leadership change in the fall.

Mr Xi, who is also Vice Chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission, is due to visit the Pentagon on Tuesday after meeting his counterpart, Joe Biden, and Presdent Obama at the White House earlier in the day.

Ahead of the visit, he and other Chinese officials had expressed concern about the U.S. decision to refocus its military strategy on Asia last year, and complained of a “trust deficit” between Beijing and Washington.

China says that its military spending does not pose a threat to any other country, and has repeatedly pointed out that it still represents a tiny fraction of U.S. defense spending. But the new research highlights what U.S. officials are worried about: That China is rapidly increasing its military spending without being sufficiently transparent about its strategic intentions in the region.

Many of China’s neighbors have been alarmed in the last year or two by what they see as Beijing’s more assertive stance on territorial issues, especially over the South China Sea.

China says its defense budget for 2011 increased by 12.7 percent to about $91.5 billion, but many defense experts believe its real military spending is much higher.

IHS Jane’s put the figure for 2011 at $119.8 billion, and predicted it would increase by an average of 18.75 percent annually until 2015.

“China’s investment will race ahead at an eye watering 18.75 percent, leaving Japan and India far behind,” said Paul Burton, senior principal analyst of IHS Jane’s Defence Budgets.

He added that Taiwan’s defense spending was expected to have overtaken Singapore’s by 2015, while Vietnam and Indonesia were also forecast to increase military expenditure at a rate that exceeds GDP growth.

Rajiv Biswas, chief Asia Pacific economist for IHS Global Insight, was quoted saying: “Beijing has been able to devote an increasingly large portion of its overall budget towards defence and has been steadily building up its military capabilities for more than two decades.”

He continued: “This will continue unless there is an economic catastrophe. Conversely Japan and India may have to hold back due to significant economic challenges.”

Responding to the report, the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid published by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, did not dispute IHS Jane’s projections but warned against Western powers “with an axe to grind” using China’s military budget to promote the idea of a China threat.

The aim of China’s defense modernization “is safeguard national unity and security,” the paper said (in Chinese). Adhering to the policy of coordinated development of national defense and the economy, investment in national defense has always occurred on a moderate and reasonable scale.”

– Jeremy Page

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it would increase by an average of 18.75 percent annually until 2015.

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i doubt the budget would rise annualy by an average of 18,75. China economy is slowing.
it will be around 10%.

they probably don't mean real increase but increase adjusted for inflation and exchange rate, when converted in dollars. Usually total GDP and total budgets aren't calculated in real numbers but then year figures. So if chinese total GDP keeps growing at 15-20% per year, like it has during the last decade, the military budget may indeed follow suit. Though, realistically, chinese military budget has always grown a little behind the GDP, and so it probably will in the future. I'm guessing between 10 and 15% this year.

An estimate with two digits behind the decimal point is simply idiotic. Official Chinese defense budget has been raised on average at about 12% per year. Add 3% average devaluation of the dollar and you get 15% growth in dollar terms. But China is still spending about a third in terms of GDP and a sixth in real terms. This report is clearly directed at the US and timed at the visit of Xi.

China 's territory is more than double the size of the rest of Asia combined and China's population is about 25% of the entire global population (way more than that of the rest of Asia combined). So theoretically, China's defense budget should be at least a quarter of the entire global defense budget and at least twice as much as the rest of Asia combined, in order to adequately protect the interests of the nation and its people.

The report is clearly intended for an US audience in order to justify their own military spending.
What are the reactions of China's neighbours? Japan, Taiwan and India are the neighbours that have the ability to significantly react if they feel threatened by this increase (India to a lesser degree).
Japan has plenty of money and a good position for a very navy focused counter to any Chinese developments they consider a threat.
Taiwan would only need to focus on air defence for deploying sophisticated area denial (assassin's mace against the master's of assassin's mace, would be really a strange world).
And India would move troops and training to the mountains.
Any such reactions?

Considering the right amount of Chinese military spending, vesicles (sorry, same image as Hendrik) sees things much too simplistic. It's not about spending a certain amount, but about financing a suitable structure for pursuing and defending national interests. The national interests are under constant development due to the ambitions of the government and the demands of the people and by extension their economy. An increasingly export-import connected China would be ill-served by thousands of tanks on their Russian border (now their friends, unlike the Late Soviet Union), but needs all blue and green water capability they can get in order to provide the military backing for a political stance that ensures their continuous interconnection with other economies under beneficial conditions.

Instead of crunching total numbers, it's much more interesting what structural ambitions for a military capability this spending is meant to pursue. Any information on that?
I'd invest heavily into know-how in order to be able to produce in great numbers equipment with multiple capability options that can be upgraded and modified at least every 5 years due to our amazing development of electronics (Last time I visited one of the arms factories in my neighbourhood, they told us that they had followed the US and stepped up development cycles to 4 years, including modification cycles). Having a punch in a modern conflict relies heavily on rapid adaptability, combining a fine tuned standing scientist, engineer and technician corps with suitable capabilities and know-how to rapidly translate modifications and developments into debugged production line output (WWII showed the way how things run in a conflict of first rate powers. Japan showed how a critical weakness in that field can cost dearly.). And you need people capable of utilizing your tools of mayhem. Rather than looking at money expenditure, I think real danger for the US would loom by increasingly high recruitment and training standards, because even with poor weapons you can outperform a richly decorated moron.
Any news on that issue? I know, such news would really not sit well with an US audience and rather not serve political goals, but be real information.

vesicles said:

So theoretically, China's defense budget should be at least a quarter of the entire global defense budget and at least twice as much as the rest of Asia combined, in order to adequately protect the interests of the nation and its people.

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That's nonsense. Armed forces aren't prepared based on the size of a country's population or land mass. If that doctrine is followed, Canada is woefully under defended and Singapore has a suspiciously large military (maybe it's plotting to attack its neighbours!)

You have to look at your neighbours. China is surrounded by countries that are poor and/or have unthreatening militaries. Mongolia isn't going to invade like Genghis Khan did. Nor do I see Kazakstan, Nepal, Burma or any of the other SE Asian states to be a threat. Russia has no designs on Chinese territory. Even India isn't going to start a war with China.

And even if I agreed with you, that would require a very, very large army. Yet China is cutting back on troop numbers to spend on aircraft and a navy. That would suggest that the Chinese government itself is not worried by its land mass or population when it comes to defence.

Mr T said:

That's nonsense. Armed forces aren't prepared based on the size of a country's population or land mass. If that doctrine is followed, Canada is woefully under defended and Singapore has a suspiciously large military (maybe it's plotting to attack its neighbours!)

You have to look at your neighbours. China is surrounded by countries that are poor and/or have unthreatening militaries. Mongolia isn't going to invade like Genghis Khan did. Nor do I see Kazakstan, Nepal, Burma or any of the other SE Asian states to be a threat. Russia has no designs on Chinese territory. Even India isn't going to start a war with China.

And even if I agreed with you, that would require a very, very large army. Yet China is cutting back on troop numbers to spend on aircraft and a navy. That would suggest that the Chinese government itself is not worried by its land mass or population when it comes to defence.

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It's quite amusing that you are missing the picture even though you have pretty much joined all the dots.
- No serious land threats
- Cutting back on army numbers
- Re-focusing on air force and navy

Could it possibly be that that is because China's chief external threats are sea-based?

I guess South Korea, Japan and America are all "poor and/or have unthreatening militaries".

It's funny that when you talk so fondly of encircling China, or a possible Taiwan war, you love to play up how all those US allies are powerful military powers in their own right, but when it comes to talk about China's defense budge, you cannot seem to be able to look past mongolia or Kazakhstan.

The article itself is patently absurd to start with.

Firstly, it uses it's own estimates for China's current defense spending which is significantly higher than China's official rate, and does not both to explain how they got to the figure they did.

To that shaky foundation, they add their own, again unexplained estimates for future Chinese defense spending rises. That is about as baseless as you can get. Might as well have said " we think China's defense budget will double by 2015 so used a current baseline and annual increase figures required to make it double by 2015".

This is just scaremongering without even the pretense to make it look even half credible.

I feel like invoicing IHS Janes for the time I wasted reading this trash.

Mr T said:

That's nonsense. Armed forces aren't prepared based on the size of a country's population or land mass. If that doctrine is followed, Canada is woefully under defended and Singapore has a suspiciously large military (maybe it's plotting to attack its neighbours!)

You have to look at your neighbours. China is surrounded by countries that are poor and/or have unthreatening militaries. Mongolia isn't going to invade like Genghis Khan did. Nor do I see Kazakstan, Nepal, Burma or any of the other SE Asian states to be a threat. Russia has no designs on Chinese territory. Even India isn't going to start a war with China.
And even if I agreed with you, that would require a very, very large army. Yet China is cutting back on troop numbers to spend on aircraft and a navy. That would suggest that the Chinese government itself is not worried by its land mass or population when it comes to defence.

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for the same logic ..... How about the USA ... any it's neighbour would attack/invade the USA ? .. so your logic is obviously flawed

There is of course scare mongering, but in essence the US is a sea- and airpower with global power projection capability and China is developing a blue water capability and has made her intent for a naval green water power projection on Taiwan under certain conditions explicitly clear. There is the current sea power, whose greatest weakness is internal (loss of tax base by hijacked politics), and a new power intent on rising to the level of a great sea power that is neighbour to a number of medium sized sea powers, China. China is increasingly interconnected with the world on an economic level and interconnection, especially exchanging raw materials and bulk goods, is by waterway. It's logical that China tries to protect these links to others.
Now comes the problem:
If you tell an US audience that China wants to invest more money to protect their economic connections, their answer is I don't care as long as Wall Mart sells that cheap stuff.
If you tell an US audience that China wants to invest more money into a military that will invade Taiwan, their answer is, let the Taiwanese build their own countermeasures. It's not worth that much of my paycheck to fight for some strange island of Chinese.
If you tell an US audience that the Chinese invest more money that starts to seriously approach US military expenditure, their answer is, hey, wait a moment, the last one who tried that were the Soviets. The Soviets were very hostile to US and threatened US with lots of problems, including armageddon in my backyard. No, I don't want that. Can't we outspend and outtechnology them with some kind of SDI-next generation? And whoops, another flush military spending with over-expensive gimmicks like the F-35 (air combat capable? survivability? expensive and small bomber?).

You really shouldn't blame Jane, they need to make a living and someone pays for that (who gets money from defence contracts).