China says military budget to be US$141.45b this year, up 10.1%

[BEIJING] China will increase military spending by 10.1 per cent this year to 886.9 billion yuan (S$193.42 billion), the government announced on Thursday, building on a nearly unbroken two-decade run of annual double-digit rises in the defence budget.

Last year, defence spending was budgeted to rise 12.2 per cent to US$130 billion, second only to the Pentagon's proposed US$534 billion base budget for the US military.

On Wednesday, the spokeswoman for China's parliament said the rise would be about 10 per cent compared with 2014.

REUTERS