China defends military spending, claims it poses no threat

Mar 7, 2006, 14:59 GMT

Beijing - Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing on Tuesday defended China's rising military budget, claiming that China's rapid development would pose no threat to other nations.

Li said China had 'transparent' military policies and that the strengthening of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was 'completely defensive in nature'.

'The Chinese people are unswervingly pursuing a path of peaceful development,' he told reporters on the sidelines of the annual National People's Congress (NPC), the nominal parliament of China's ruling Communist Party.

'China's development does not pose a threat to any country,' he said.

But Taiwan's Defence Ministry cried foul, saying China has in the past decade deployed 784 missiles targeting the island.

'The missiles are deployed at six of its missile bases along its southeast coast with four equipped with Dongfeng-11 missiles that have a range of 600 kilometres capable of reaching Taiwan,' said Chen Chang-hua, intelligence officer of the defence ministry.

The defence ministry made public for the first time a satellite photo showing the Leiping ballistic missile command in Jiangxi province.

'With those weapons, the mainland is capable of launching five rounds of attacks for consecutively 10 hours at our airports' runways, power generation plants and military logistic units,' Chen said.

Military spokesman Liu Chih-chien called on the Taiwanese public to be wary of China's increasing military threats against Taiwan, reminding them of the 1996 missile crisis across the Taiwan Strait, during which China staged seven rounds of missile tests to try to intimidate the island.

In the first round, its guided missile reached the sea 70 nautical miles off Taichung in central Taiwan, while guided missiles in the fifth round even landed at 20.3 nautical miles off Keelung in northern Taiwan and Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, Liu said.

'The public should not relax their alertness over the military threats from the mainland,' he added.

China on Saturday said it had increased its military budget for this year by another 14.7 per cent, to 283.8 billion yuan (35.1 billion dollars), following similar large increases in recent years.

Many Western critics claim China's real military spending is much higher than its budget figure, with some US analysts estimating actual military spending at up to three times the budget figure.

Much of China's military hardware is deployed against Taiwan, the island that Beijing regards as a renegade province.

Tension rose late last month after Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian scrapped a council tasked with eventual unification with mainland China.

Li said Chen had taken a 'dangerous step' towards formal independence for the island that China regards as a breakaway province.

'This is a serious provocation to the one-China principle universally observed by the international community and to the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,' he said, echoing statements by other Chinese leaders.

State media quoted Guo Boxiong, a vice chairman of the party's Central Military Commission, as telling military delegates to the NPC that the 2.5 million PLA soldiers were ready to 'resolutely protect national unification'.

'We resolutely oppose 'Taiwan independence' and will never allow 'Taiwan independence' secessionist forces to separate Taiwan from China under any name and by any means,' the official Xinhua news agency quoted Guo as saying.