The increase in China’s military spending is dictated, in part, by the growing instability and uncertainty of the security situation within the country, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said on Saturday.
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China will increase its military budget by 7.2% in 2024, to 1.665 trillion yuan (about $231.24 billion at today’s exchange rates), according to a draft budget released on Tuesday. The Chinese government work report, also presented on Tuesday, emphasized that China should comprehensively strengthen military training and combat training in 2024, and actively conduct military training in simulated real-life combat situations.
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“The instability and uncertainty of the security situation in China is growing, and the tasks of the military struggle have become difficult and diverse,” Wu Qian said, commenting on the increase in military spending, his words were quoted by the official account of the Chinese defense department on the WeChat social network.
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Wu Qian added that the current world is far from peaceful and the army needs to be strengthened. He noted that age-old changes in today’s world are accelerating, international political disputes and military conflicts are breaking out in many parts of the planet, and the internal situation in the fight against separatism “is complex and difficult.”
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China systematically increases its defense budget every year, while the country does not participate in wars and adheres to the defensive nature of its military doctrine. In 2023, China increased national defense spending by 7.2%, to 1.55 trillion yuan (about $220 billion).
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The situation around Taiwan worsened significantly after the visit of then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing in this step US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
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Official relations between the central government of China and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
