My Take | UK foreign chief’s claim about China’s military build-up borders on the absurd

In a major speech delivered last week on Britain’s official position on China, foreign secretary James Cleverly warned that China “is carrying out the biggest military build-up in peacetime history”. That claim was headlined in many of the West’s leading news media, virtually with no questions asked. It’s good to see our leading “independent” journalists and editors are working like stenographers.

Biggest-military-build-up-in-peacetime-history: every single word here is misleading, if not false. Ok, maybe not the preposition. Whose peacetime? Whose history? Biggest build-up: relative to what (Chinese GDP) and to whom (the United States)?

The official US military budget this year is US$858 billion, almost four times China’s at US$225 billion. It outspends the next nine biggest military spenders combined: China, India, Russia, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan and South Korea. Moreover, five of these countries are formal military allies of the US, with two of them in Asia. The Saudis and Indians are either neutral or friendly with the US. Russia is the only one that might conceivably join China in a future war.

According to Statista.com, the data service company, China spent less than 1.4 per cent of GDP between 2008 and 2021 on its military. But suppose the Chinese lied as Cleverly has, in the same speech, accused them of not being transparent, and that real spending is a whopping 2 per cent. That’s still the level recommended by Nato for its member states.

It’s hard to see how any Western politicians can complain if China doesn’t spend above the levels of Nato member states, which have turned increasingly hostile.

But the US is something else entirely. In fact, the Pentagon has acknowledged it has more than a trillion dollars a year available for spending from all sorts of funding channels, some outside the official budget.