In the Western media, we often hear about America’s leaders and their concerns for the size of China’s military.
Look at these facts and decide why China has a large military. Then you will know why Chinese generals laughed when they heard about the concerns of America’s leaders.
China’s military often has important roles in disasters like the earthquake that struck Southwest China, and the military must deal with violent, internal strife in Tibet and with Islamic extremists in Xinjiang province. It is no secret that there are Cantonese who, after two thousand years, still want to break from Beijing. There has also been unrest in rural China due to the slow pace of lifestyle improvements there.
Soldier carrying injured Chinese girl after major earthquake
America’s total active military equals almost 1% of the population with close to three million men and women in uniform. America has a dozen aircraft carriers, more than fifteen-hundred navy ships, and almost twenty-three thousand military aircraft.
China has less than .25% (that is less than 1% if you missed the decimal) of its population in uniform—a quarter of America’s ratio with about three million troops. China has one aircraft carrier and a navy that is less than half the size of America’s. China’s airforce has about twenty-five hundred aircraft—a ten to one ratio in America’s favor.
Nuclear Weapons—America has 10,000 and China less than 400.
China’s defense budget was about sixty-billion in 2008 compared to more than five-hundred billion spent in the United States. America is spending closer to seven hundred billion this year while China is cutting defense spending due to the world’s economic crises. The Chinese plan to put the money cut from the defense budget into the private sector. Do you think something like that will ever happen in the United States?
Source: www.Globalfirepower.com
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
His latest novel, Running with the Enemy, was awarded an honorable mention in general fiction at the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival.
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