China’s Military Budget to Drop 6% Despite Officers’ Protests

BEIJING —  China’s military spending will drop about 6% in real terms this year despite the opposition of some military officers, it was reported Friday.

The New China News Agency said officers met with President Yang Shangkun and called for higher defense spending and advanced equipment for the army.

Yang denied their requests, saying defense spending would rise only when the economy improves. Yang is vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, which sets military policy.

The news agency carried two reports on the subject Friday. Both were unusual for revealing disagreements between the military, or People’s Liberation Army, and the government. A series of cuts in defense spending in recent years is known to have been unpopular with the military.

On Tuesday, China had released its 1989 budget proposal that grants the military $6.5 billion. Last year’s budget was $5.8 billion.

On Friday, the news agency said that if inflation is factored into the budget, China’s defense spending will actually fall 6% next year. China is facing 36% inflation, the highest since the Communist takeover in 1949.

Liu Mingpu, deputy director of the General Logistics Department of the People’s Liberation Army, said that in recent years the growth rate of the military budget has been much lower than inflation.

He said that from 1950 to 1980, defense spending accounted for 17.2% of China’s state expenditures. In 1988, he said, it accounted for only 7.49%.

China is undertaking an ambitious program to professionalize its army.

In the early 1980s, the army abandoned Mao Tse-tung’s “people’s war” strategy for guerrilla warfare, under which China would use the largest number of people in the smallest space and try to overwhelm its enemy. Heavy losses suffered in 1979 during a border war with Vietnam showed the strategy’s weaknesses.

In the last nine years, at least 1 million troops have been cut from the military, which now has fewer than 3 million in uniform.