27 January 2009: AFP
China is likely to begin deploying its military increasingly further from its borders, analysts at a top thinktank said on Tuesday.
The Asian power was also unlikely to constrain its defence budget because of an economic downturn that has left the World Bank forecasting the slowest pace of growth in China since 1990, the analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies said.
Noting that China began using a naval convoy in the Gulf of Aden to protect the country's shipping from Somali pirates, IISS director of transnational threats and political risk Nigel Inkster said he expected "to see further such international contributions".
"We are probably close to the end if not already at the end of what one now calls the Deng Xiaoping doctrine of lying low," he told reporters at a press conference, referring to the man who led China from 1978 to 1997.
The naval task force, deploying two destroyers and a supply ship, marks China's first potential combat mission beyond its territorial waters in centuries.
Tim Huxley, the thinktank's senior fellow for Asia-Pacific security, dismissed suggestions, meanwhile, that China would temper the growth in its military funding as its economic growth slowed.
"China is clearly a country which takes building up its defence capability seriously," Huxley said.
"There's been a long-term trend of substantial increase in China's defence spending over the last 10-15 years.
"All indications are, given China's strategic interests and its sense of entitlement as a nascent major power that it will go on, attempting to increase its defence capability, probably with considerable success."
Last March, China announced its defence spending would rise 17.6 percent in the coming year, reaching 57.2 billion dollars, using end-2007 exchange rates.
Huxley, though, said concerns over the transparency of those figures led him to believe military spending in China may be as much as 50 percent higher than publicly-available data. — AFP
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