China's military spending is no threat to others

Editor's note: At the first news conference of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress on Monday, a Bloomberg reporter asked about the growth rate of China's military spending this year, saying some in the Asia-Pacific are always concerned over this and viewed it as a threat. Xiakedao, the official WeChat account of People's Daily, comments:

It is true that China's military spending has been rising in recent years, but we can see that China has been very restrained on this issue if we look at its growth rate over these years. According to the published budget draft, China's defense budget this year will be 1.19 trillion yuan ($186 billion), a growth of 7.5 percent. That is down from last year's 8.1 percent. In fact, this is the fourth consecutive year that China's military spending has had a single-digit growth since 2016.

According to Zhang Yesui, the NPC spokesman, China's military spending accounted for about 1.3 percent of its GDP in 2018, while the proportion was above 2 percent in some major developed countries. And although China is the world's second-largest military spender, it still lags far behind the United States, which has a defense budget of $716 billion this year.