The announcement comes before the Communist Party’s annual parliamentary and political meetings in Beijing.
Defying pressure for a strong increase in defence spending, China said on Saturday that its military budget this year would grow by about seven percent, its slowest pace since 2010.
Last year, with the economy slowing, the defence budget recorded its lowest increase in six years, 7.6 percent, the first single-digit rise since 2010 after a nearly unbroken two-decade run of double-digit increases.
With the administration of new US President Donald Trump planning a 10 percent boost in military spending in 2017, and worries about potential disputes with the US over the South China Sea and the status of Taiwan , some in China had been pressing for a forceful message from this year’s defence budget.
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« It’s not enough, » a source with ties to senior Chinese officers told the Reuters news agency. « A lot of people in the military won’t be happy with this. »
China’s military build-up has rattled nerves around the region, particularly because Bejing has taken an increasingly assertive stance in its territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas and over Taiwan, which it claims as its own.
