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In June 2023, Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska warned Congress that the Chinese military was catching up with the U.S. military faster than previously imagined.
The US intelligence community said the Republican senator.the Chinese government is estimated to have spent the equivalent of $700 billion on its defense budget in 2022, more than three times the reported high of $229 billion.
sullivan’s Legislation promotion Further exploration of this issue comes amid renewed interest in China’s true military budget. think tank And observers are doing their own analysis of Beijing’s vaults.
a new report A paper published Monday by the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute seeks to analyze how the United States arrived at its $700 billion estimate for 2022 internally.
Mackenzie Eaglen, the report’s author, wrote that China’s budget is worth about $711 billion compared to the U.S. budget, slightly higher than the budget Sullivan cited in June.
This would make Chinese government spending in 2022 “roughly equal” to the U.S. defense budget of about $740 billion in that year, wrote Eaglen, a senior fellow at AEI.
“This revelation should raise concerns, given that the Pentagon has referred to China as a ‘pacing challenge,'” Eaglen wrote.
She assembled the new numbers primarily by comparing old Chinese budget reports and spending breakdowns and applying them to the $229 billion announced by the Chinese government.
That’s because China’s spending reports are kept strictly secret. Most U.S. observers have been unable to pinpoint the $700 billion amount based on hard evidence.
Understanding $711 billion
Notably, the $711 billion estimate cited by Eaglen does not mean that China is spending exactly that amount on defense. Rather, it explains the purchasing power of the military budget compared to the United States, especially given China’s lower wage and material costs.
Based on 2020 China report united nationsEaglen wrote that China’s military spending in 2022 will likely fall into three main categories: equipment, training and maintenance, and personnel.
Considering purchasing power parity, China likely spent $135 billion on equipment instead of the U.S. equivalent of $85 billion, and $121 billion on training and maintenance instead of $76 billion, the report said. .
But the biggest increase comes from Eaglen’s estimates of Chinese military salaries, which are not typically publicly recorded.
“Labor costs are clearly lower in China, with soldiers earning only one-sixteenth the pay of U.S. Army infantry,” Eaglen wrote in his paper. Opinion article from The Hill.
In his report, he compared the average wages of civil servants in the United States and China and found that the former earn 4.31 times more than civil servants in China.
Taking advantage of this factor, Eaglen writes that China’s personnel expenditures in the same year likely accounted for $293 billion in U.S. military spending.
There is also research and development, which the United States said China did not take into account in its military budget announcements. Eaglen estimated that China spent about $45 billion on research and development, based on what it said it spent that amount on research in “non-public institutions.”
The rest of the total budget comes from large amounts of what China lists as non-military spending, but Eaglen argues should be considered defense spending.
She said one such expenditure is focused on internal security, but also for maintaining the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force tasked with reinforcing the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army in times of crisis. I wrote that it was $45 billion.
Another $45 billion was spent on retirement benefits, military pensions, and demobilization, $2 billion on the Chinese Coast Guard, and $21 billion on the Space Force. Eaglen calculated the growth based on information from officials. China’s space budget in 2013 was $10.8 billion.
“It is in China’s interest that U.S. and Chinese defense spending be parity,” Eaglen wrote, noting that while the U.S. defense budget is spread across different areas around the world, China’s pointed out that it focuses on only one region.
The researchers provided transparency about their findings on China’s military spending power, citing concerns that “the American public is too comfortable believing that the U.S. military remains ahead of all competitors.” asked the US to do so.
It is often said that US military spending is higher than the actual defense budget. Among the predictions for 2023: $1.4 trillion When you factor in costs such as spending on veterans, homeland security, international security, and interest accrued on debt.
Meanwhile, in March, the US passed a bill allocating $825 billion to the US defense budget for 2024, the smallest share of GDP since World War II. In the same month, China announced its next military budget. 231 billion dollars per year.