China is to accelerate military spending in 2006, the government said on Saturday amid renewed tension across the Taiwan Strait, a potential regional powder keg. Beijing would spend 14.7 percent more on defence in 2006 than it did last year, a spokesman for the national parliament said.
China's official defence budget would rise to 283.8 billion yuan ($35.3 billion), spokesman Jiang Enzhu told a news conference ahead of the annual meeting of the National People's Congress opening on Sunday.
Last year China spent $30.2 billion on its military, he said, an increase of 12.6 percent.
Jiang said this year's extra money would go to raising wages and welfare of military personnel, improving their professional training, and coping with rising oil and other costs.
China also "needs to modestly increase spending on some armaments and improve the defensive fighting capacity of the military", he said.
The rise is the latest of a succession of double-digit increases in military spending. US defence officials and many defence analysts have said Beijing in fact spends much more on military equipment and forces than the official budget shows.
But Jiang said the rise was modest compared with the military spending of the United States and other powers, and as a proportion of the budget China's defence spending had remained steady.
The amount would be 7.4 percent of China's overall budget for 2006, he said.
"China's defence budget has risen in recent years along with the development of its economy," Jiang said. "But the proportion of the budget given over to defence spending is much the same as in past years."
Developed countries spent bigger chunks of their national economies and budgets on defence, with the United States devoting 17.8 percent of its budget to the military, he said.
"China will insist on a course of peaceful development, and China has neither the intention or ability to vigorously develop armaments," he said.
But many analysts say a major focus of Beijing's rising military budgets has been Taiwan, the self-ruled island China says is its territory and must accept eventual reunification.
This week, China and Taiwan entered another bout of tensions after Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian suspended a council and guidelines on reunification with the mainland. Jiang called that "a step on the path to Taiwan independence".
Jiang repeated Beijing's long-held line that China hopes for peaceful reunification, "but we will absolutely not allow Taiwan to be split from China".
China has said that, if necessary, it would recover Taiwan by force.
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