Largest in the world in terms of numbers and second in terms of budget, the Chinese army will see its amount increase by 7.2% in 2023, Prime Minister Li Keqiang announced on Sunday February 5, which will allow it to continue its modernization. “The armed forces must intensify their training in all areas,” said the number 2 of the communist apparatus, while unveiling an annual GDP growth target of 5% among the lowest in decades, at the edge of the annual session of the National People’s Assembly. Here are three figures that allow us to understand the power of the Chinese army.
1,553.7 billion yuan
This is what Beijing plans to spend on its defense, the equivalent of 225 billion dollars. The budget, although large, remains about three times lower than that of Washington. Even if a vagueness surrounds this figure, because no details are provided, its increase each year arouses the mistrust of neighboring countries of China having territorial disputes with it. This is notably the case of India – skirmishes sometimes break out along their disputed border in the Himalayas -, of Japan – for the control of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands -, or even of the Philippines where incidents regularly occur around sovereignty of islands in the South China Sea.
2,035,000
This is the number of women and men who make up the Chinese army, according to the British think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). These soldiers are divided in particular between the land (965,000), air (395,000) and maritime (260,000) forces, or even the unit responsible for strategic missiles (120,000).
350
This is the number of nuclear warheads the country has, according to figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), in 2022. This is far fewer than the United States (5,428) and Russia (5,977), but more than the United Kingdom (225) or France (290), according to the same source. The US Department of Defense, however, accused Beijing in November of wanting to increase its nuclear arsenal to 1,500 heads by 2035.
Defend their sovereignty
Since the 1980s, thanks to the strong increase in its GDP over the years, China has gradually financed the upgrading of its army. “Some units are among the best trained and equipped in the world, but others are still decades behind,” Niklas Swanström, director of the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm, told AFP. The objective of the Chinese army would be mainly limited to defending its claims of sovereignty on its borders or to be able to hinder an intervention of the United States in the region, and this while Washington shot down on February 4 off its Atlantic coast a Chinese spy balloon that had flown over sensitive military sites. This diplomatic clash had led the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken to postpone a rare visit to China.