BEIJING — China’s official military budget will rise by just 7.5 percent in 2010, a government spokesman said Thursday, a rate that is about half the official increase in recent years and the first to fall below 10 percent since 1989.
The announcement by Li Zhaoxing, a spokesman for the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, gave no explanation for the slowdown. Some analysts speculated, however, that China’s huge economic stimulus program and other efforts to address unemployment and welfare had eaten into monies that in a normal year would go toward defense.
It is also possible that China reduced the growth of its publicly acknowledged defense spending to help allay international concerns about its rising power.
While China’s government has disclosed more information about military spending in recent years, much of its spending remains secret, and, in the past, military experts in the United States and elsewhere have said Beijing’s real military spending is at least double the announced figure. A 2009 Pentagon report estimated China’s total military spending to be between $105 billion and $150 billion. While growing rapidly, China’s military spending is still dwarfed by that of the United States, which has about $719 billion in outlays this year for national defense.
American military spending amounts to about 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — compared with about 1.4 percent for China — and, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, accounted for 48 percent of the entire world’s military spending in 2008.
At a news conference before Friday’s opening of the legislature, Mr. Li said that the government had always tried to limit military spending and that it had “set the defense spending at a reasonable level to ensure the balance between national defense and economic development.” The legislature must approve the government’s 2010 budget at its session this month, but the vote is a formality.
A budget report submitted to the legislature said the government had earmarked about $77.9 billion for the military in 2010, an increase of about $5.4 billion from actual spending last year.
Military spending in 2009 had been forecast to expand by 14.9 percent over the 2008 total, but Reuters reported that spending grew at a slightly greater rate because the military spent about $2 billion more than anticipated.
On Thursday, Mr. Li said that the budget increase would go toward “enhancing the military’s capability to meet various security threats,” advances in China’s military affairs and addressing the needs of the armed forces. Some of the money will be spent to raise the living standards of military officers in line with improvements in national living standards, a spokesman for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a government advisory body that is also meeting in Beijing, said this week.
The slower growth could be linked to the maturing of costly weapons programs that have reached the end of expensive development cycles, said David Shambaugh, the director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University and a noted expert on the Chinese military. But he said it was equally possible that the smaller increase followed an internal debate over “guns or doufu” — the dietary staple known commonly in the West as tofu.
“Given other demands on state expenditures from various sectors — the stimulus, unemployment, insurance — to continue giving the military 15 percent increases year on year does cause some Chinese to raise questions,” Mr. Shambaugh said in a telephone interview. “There have been complaints from some other sectors that it has been distorting expenditures. Maybe some of those arguments have come home to roost.”
China's military spending will increase by 7.5% for 2010, the first single-digit increase since 1989, a spokesman for the Chinese parliament, Li Zhaoxing, said.


Mr. Li said that China would spend 532.1 billion yuan ($77.9 billion) on the country's military over the course of 2010, an increase of about 36.9 billion yuan ($5.4 billion) over 2009's spending.  Regardless of the increase, China still spends significantly less on its military as a proportion of its gross domestic product (GDP) than other countries around the world.  China spends about 1.4% of its GDP on the military, while the United States spends about 4% of its GDP on the military.  The US, which accounts for 48% of the world's military spending, has frequently encouraged China to be more transparent about its military spending, a challenge which China said it was meeting.

At a press conference, Mr. Li said that the increase was in response to various security threats to China, although the nature of the threats were not specified.  He did, however, say that, "The only purpose of China's limited military strength is to safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity."  He also said that the government has limited military spending to the best of its ability, and had tried to ensure a balance between the military and other needs.

According to US military analysis and official Chinese reports, China has been steadily increasing military spending since the late 1980s, when the country began a program of improving its entire armed forces, including developing and producing weapons and equipment. The US Pentagon issued a report in 2009, saying that military spending had increased by an average of 12.9% annually since 1996. Based on this, analysts say that the earlier large spending increases could explain the slower increase for 2010. China in the past few years has seen dramatic spending increases in other sectors, especially costs related to the global financial crisis, and these sectors have complained about the amount of military spending.  As one analyst, David Shambaugh from George Washington University, put it, "There have been complaints from some other sectors that it has been distorting expenditures. Maybe some of those arguments have come home to roost."