Japan urges China to reveal full defence spending details

Japan is calling on the Chinese government to release full and accurate details of its defence spending to reassure its neighbours about the scale of its military ambitions.

There are reports that Beijing is increasing its defence budget by nearly 11 per cent in the coming year, which would put growth in double digits for the third straight year, but analysts believe spending could be much higher.

According to figures compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China was the second-largest defence spender in 2011, with US$96.8 billion in expenditure announced by Beijing. Others put the figure at US$143 billion.

"China must enhance the transparency of both its defence policy and regarding its military forces," Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet secretary, told a press conference in Tokyo this week.

Japan - which was the world's sixth-largest investor in defence in 2011, with outlays of US$59.3 billion - worries about an increasingly aggressive China and an ongoing row over who owns the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

"China's defence spending is already more than double that of Japan and, if this rate of increase continues, then by 2020, Beijing could be spending between six and nine times the amount that Japan can put into defence," Masayuki Masuda, a China analyst at the National Institute of Defence Studies, told the South China Morning Post.

A decade after that, he said, China's annual defence spending could be 12 times that of Japan. "The Chinese government always explains that its military strategy is peaceful, but without any transparency on the amounts being spent or the kinds of hardware being developed, it's impossible for anyone to verify that," he added.