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China To Share Details Of Defense Spending With U.N.

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By ANITA CHANG, The Associated Press

Published: September 3, 2007

BEIJING - China said Sunday that it will provide the United Nations with information on its military spending and arms deals for the first time in more than a decade, taking a step to address international concerns about the secrecy surrounding its defense spending and operations.

The United States, Japan and other countries have questioned the pace and amount of China's defense spending. China's announcement comes days after its defense minister visited Japan, where officials said they would keep pressing Beijing for transparency.

China will give U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon 'basic data of its military expenditures for the latest fiscal year,' Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a statement on its Web site.

The country already announces basic details of its military budget when its legislators meet each year. It was not known whether the information it plans to give to the U.N. will be more detailed.

'We're very pleased that China has taken this step,' said Patricia Lewis, director of the Geneva-based U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research. 'Some transparency is really useful. If states provide some transparency and others provide full transparency, quite often you can cross-correlate and fill in the gaps.'

China says spending for its People's Liberation Army, the world's largest with 2.3 million members, grew 17.8 percent this year to nearly $45 billion. It was the largest annual increase in more than a decade.

The Pentagon estimates China's defense spending may be much higher because the official budget does not include money for high-priced weapons systems and other items.

Although China does not provide information about its arms deals, several overseas organizations monitor the transactions.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks the volume of arms transfers but not their financial value, said the three largest importers of Chinese arms in 2006 were Bangladesh, Pakistan and Iran, which accounted for nearly 75 percent of China's arms exports.

China is also a major arms exporter to Sudan. It has faced criticism from human rights activists who say Chinese weapons have been used in attacks in Darfur.

Jiang defended China's arms deals, saying the government has 'all along taken a prudent and responsible attitude in its arms export and implemented strict controls on such exports.'

In its announcement Sunday, China said it will resume providing data to the U.N. Register of Conventional Arms, which details imports and exports of seven categories of conventional arms.

It had stopped providing data in 1996 after a 'certain country' gave the register details about its arms sales to Taiwan, Jiang said in an apparent reference to the United States. China decided to provide the data again because that country has stopped giving information on its sales to Taiwan, Jiang said.

Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949, but Beijing regards the self-governing island as Chinese territory. Beijing is vehemently opposed to any actions implying Taiwan is an independent state, such as listing the island as an arms buyer separate from China.

The United States is Taiwan's largest arms supplier. It first reported exporting arms to Taiwan on the 1995 U.N. register and made its last report on the 2004 register.

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