The Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed on Wednesday that the so-called trilateral arms control negotiations with Russia and the United States will take place without China.
China’s position is clear and understood by Russia and the wider international community that interested in the results of the trilateral talks, indeed. For China, its commitments to preserving world peace, security, upholding international arms control and non-proliferation regimes remain the priorities. That Asian nation’s position is the same and well known by the international community, CGTN reported quoting spokesperson Geng Shuang.
Talking on the trilateral negotiations and its partakers, Chinese spokesperson has reiterated the US’ intentions to ‘earnestly fulfil its special responsibility in nuclear disarmament, respond to Russia’s call to extend the New START, and further cut down its massive nuclear arsenal, thus creating conditions for other nuclear-weapon states to join multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations’.
Meanwhile, China stands ready to work with all parties to:
- strengthen communication and coordination within such frameworks as the conference on disarmament and the mechanism of five nuclear-weapon states;
- discuss a wide range of issues concerning global strategic stability;
- earnestly safeguard multilateralism and multilateral disarmament mechanisms.
In fact, the national defence strategy is defensive in its nature. Moreover, it has remained unchanged, said Mr Geng. Such a defence approach is only reasonable and legitimate to increase input into the national defence sector proportionally as China’s economy keeps expanding.
“China’s military expenditure is measured and appropriate, gauged whether by its total amount, by its proportion in GDP and the fiscal revenue, or by military spending per capita,” Geng underlined.
Under current circumstances, the ratio of China’s military spending to GDP has been on the decline, below the 2% standard of NATO members. On the other hand, the U.S. military budget has been increasing steadily and substantially in recent years.
“It reached 716 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, equaling the sum of the next 10 biggest military spenders behind it and accounting for 3.4% of its GDP. The U.S. government has recently submitted a 705.4 billion U.S. dollars’ worth of military budget request for fiscal year 2021 to the Congress, 28.9 billion U.S. dollars of which will be spent to modernize its nuclear forces,” Geng noted.
