We all knew that, which is why i was calling for a significant military spending increase
This is one instance where American critics might actually be warranted when they accuse China of understating defence spending.
Just look at all the new hardware China has been pumping out in the last two decades. Even with troop numbers reductions and ‘China price’ to offset things, it’s frankly hard to believe they could have added so many new top of the line platforms across the board as they have been able to manage with the official defence budget.
Unlike the west, China will not outright lie, so what’s more likely is that the additional costs are spread around rather than all being marked as military spending.
Take the naval modernisation and expansion as maybe the most obvious example where the official defence budget spending could be vastly understated.
Because the bulk of the warship building happened during the lean years after the 08 financial crash when world commercial shipbuilding contracts dried up, it would not be unreasonable for China to apportion a significant proportion of the costs of the new warship construction as job retention welfare programme expenditure to help the shipyards keep highly skilled and difficult to replace workers employed during those years.
This can essentially apply across the board throughout the supply chain, since most if not all of them are Chinese SOEs.
So the SOEs could deliberately undercharge other SOEs in the supply chain and recoup the difference in the form of other government budgets to keep the costs going against the military budget down to avoid showing a huge spike in defence spending in real time.
