China on Sunday, March 5, announced a draft budget for 2023 which will see the country’s annual defense budget rise to 1.5537 trillion yuan ($224.79 billion), an increase of 7.2 percent, remaining single-digit for the 8th consecutive year. Liu Xuanzun reports in Global Times.
Source; Global Times
The proposed defense budget growth was made public in a draft budget report issued at the opening of the annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s top legislature, on Sunday, March 5. It marks that China maintains a single-digit growth in the defense budget for the eighth consecutive year since 2016, and a steadily increasing pace since the start of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. The growth rate was 6.6 percent in 2020, 6.8 percent in 2021 and 7.1 percent in 2022, Liu Xuanzun writes.
A 7.2 percent increase in the defense budget means only a 0.1 percentage point higher compared with 2022, and it is not high at all taking China’s national defense needs and economic development into account, Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Sunday. China’s GDP growth rate in 2022 was 3 percent, so the defense budget growth is set to be restrained and reasonable, Song said.