‘China’s defence spend more than $30 billion’ General Says
The Financial Express  | March 11, 2005
 

MARCH 10: China's defence-related spending is higher than the $30 billion military budget for 2005 announced by the government on March 4, a Chinese general in charge of developing weapons systems said.

“You can’t put all the projects under the same defense budget,” Lieutenant General Hu Shixiang, also deputy director of China's space program, said in an interview yesterday in Beijing. “There are military uses for many civilian scientific research projects.” Hu declined to give an estimate for total spending.

China will raise military spending by 13% this year, the biggest increase since 2002, as the Chinese parliament prepares to pass a law that would sanction the use of force to prevent Taiwan from declaring independence. China's actual defense spending is as much as four times the official figure, Taiwan-based military analyst Andrew Yang estimates.

“We must spend more in order to prevent Taiwan independence,” said Major General Kui Fulin, deputy director of the People's Liberation Army General Staff. The Chinese army wants a bigger military budget, Kui said.

China on March 7 unveiled a draft law that would allow the use of force against Taiwan, a self-governing island off the southeast Chinese coast, in the event that efforts to secure peaceful reunification are exhausted. China and Taiwan have been ruled separately since the Communists won a civil war in 1949.

China’s anti-secession law is “disconcerting”, Admiral William Fallon, US Pacific Forces Commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 8. The US, Taiwan’s chief defence ally, opposes the European Union’s proposed lifting of an arms embargo on China, imposed after the government crushed pro- democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“Military spending rises in accordance to the nation’s economic growth,” said General Kui, who spoke in an interview at the National People's Congress in Beijing.