Members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in parade formation. The Chinese government has announced that the military budget for 2011 is about $92 billion, up 12.7 percent from 2010.
When you think about it, $1 billion is what the total amount is brought into New Zealand from tourism in a normal year. So that’s a heck of a lot of military spend, China is looking at investing in.
Edward Wong writes in the New York Times today, “While the security situation in Asia and the Pacific was generally stable, it was becoming “more intricate and volatile.”
World leader in military technology - In December Adm. R F. Willard, the commander of United States Pacific Command, told a Japanese newspaper that China had a working design for an antiship ballistic missile that could strike at aircraft carriers and could soon be ready for deployment. The missile, known as a “carrier killer,” has become a symbol in Western military circles of the Chinese army’s technological advances.
China’s ideological position shared transparently - “China pursues a national defense policy which is defensive in nature… China will never seek hegemony, nor will it adopt the approach of military expansion now or in the future, no matter how its economy develops.”
News source, New York Times. Photograph by Joe Chan for Reuters.
~Posted by Horiwood.Com, Hollywood California USA. 3.31.11~