Beijing Swings Defense Spending Toward Equipment

摘要

The world has seen plenty of evidence this decade of the swing in Chinese defense policy from manpower-heavy to equipment-heavy spending. Now Beijing is quantifying what it has done. The share of defense funding allocated to equipment rose relentlessly to a record level of 41.3% of spending in 2016 from 33.2% in 2010, according to figures revealed in a July 24 white paper entitled "China's National Defense in the New Era."A drop to 41.1% in 2017 may indicate an approximate long-term level has been reached. Yet that modernization is far from finished, according to the white paper, issued by the information office of the state council, the country's cabinet. "The PLA [the People's Liberation Army] has yet to complete the task of mechanization and is in urgent need of improving its 'informationization,'" it says, using a Chinese term that encompasses intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, networking and exploitation of data.