Beijing – China will take steps to increase the transparency of its military operations, reporting expenditures to the United Nations and resuming updates about its arms sales, an official said Sunday.
Countries such as the U.S. and Japan have questioned the pace and amount of China’s defense spending.
Beijing will give the U.N. secretary-general “basic data of its military expenditures for the latest fiscal year,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a statement posted Sunday on the ministry’s website.
“This is a significant step on the part of China in further enhancing its military transparency,” she said.
Messages seeking comment were left on the cellphones of U.N. spokesmen in Geneva.
China had stopped providing data for the U.N. Register of Conventional Arms – which details imports and exports of seven categories of conventional arms – in 1996, after a “certain country” gave the register details about its arms sales to Taiwan, Jiang said in the statement. The country was not named.
The Foreign Ministry statement said China would provide information starting this year.
Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949, but Beijing still regards the self-governing island as Chinese territory. China has threatened war if Taiwan tries to formalize its de facto independence.
Beijing has used its influence to keep Taiwan barred from membership in the U.N. and most other international organizations.
China says spending for its People’s Liberation Army, with 2.3 million members the world’s largest standing army, grew 17.8 percent this year, to about $44.94 billion. It was the largest annual increase in more than a decade.
The Pentagon estimates China’s actual defense spending may be much higher because the official budget does not include money for high-priced weapons systems and some other items.
