Defense budget increase is lowest in 32 years

The defense budget for the 2020 fiscal year will see the lowest year-on-year increase in more than three decades, according to a draft budget report released on Friday.

The central government proposed an annual defense budget of about 1.27 trillion yuan ($178 billion), a 6.6 percent rise on the last budget, according to the draft to be deliberated on at the third session of the 13th National People's Congress.

The budget's growth rate is the lowest since 1988, when a 3.81 percent increase in the defense budget was proposed.

Last year, China raised the defense budget by about 7.5 percent year-on-year, setting military expenditure at nearly 1.19 trillion yuan. All of the budgeted money has been utilized, the Ministry of Finance said.

The building of national defense and the military has made remarkable achievements since last year and the armed forces displayed loyalty, responsiveness and their capability during the fight against the novel coronavirus outbreak, Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday while delivering the Government Work Report to the NPC.

He said the military will continue safeguarding the nation's sovereignty, security and development interests and deepening reforms.

Li also pledged to improve the military's logistic support and research and development capabilities, push forward innovation in defense technology and further boost the civil-military integration strategy.

Zhang Yesui, the spokesman for the NPC session, said China's military spending is transparent, without any concealed items.

"Since 2007, China has reported its military spending to the United Nations each year," he said at a news conference on Thursday.

"Everything, from where the money comes from to how it is used, is accounted for. So there is no such thing as 'hidden' military spending."

China's defense policy is defensive in nature and its defense spending is proportionate and restrained in terms of total size, per capita expenditure and proportion of GDP, he said.

The proportion of defense spending as a percentage of the country's annual GDP has been kept at about 1.3 percent for many years, much lower than the world average of 2.6 percent, Zhang said.

"Compared with the world's largest spender on military affairs, the money China used for national defense in 2019 was only one quarter of that country's expenditure," he said."When it comes to per capita terms, ours was one 17th of theirs."