The public line out of Beijing has always been simple: China's military is for the defense of the homeland.The reality, however, may be more complicated. Newly released leaked U.S. diplomatic cables claim China is probably hiding both the size of its military buildup, as well as, on occasion, its intentions.
Australia's national intelligence agency conducted a strategic assessment of China's military spending, and concluded that the communist countries military buildup "threatens regional stability," reports the Australian daily The Age.
A leaked cable states that the agency found that China spent $90 billion on its military in 2006 - double the $45 billion budget publicly announced by Beijing, The Age reports.
While this is just a fraction of the nearly $500 billion the U.S. spends annually on its military, it is still noticeable for the fact that they were probably not publicly forthright about their military spending.
Allow me to respond to the four highlighted passages: 1, 2, and 3: Duh: Ya think? And 4: But America is?
C'mon.. If we've learned anything about how large government/ corporations/ entities work, NONE OF THEM are remotely close to transparent! To think the average citizen in the U.S. (as opposed to any other average citizen in any other country)has more knowledge of our military's black ops or secret spending or the second, third, or fourth set of books involved in how the entire operation(any operation) functions is naive, bordering on stupid/insane. I'm not knocking WikiLeaks for releasing this, nor am I knocking the military for operating in this manner; It's just the way things have always been done. Not that that makes current operations all right, but if we don't have a realistic assessment of systems function, we cannot fix given system without crippling it.
Thank you, WikiLeaks, for the confirmation, however un-necessary, and to CBS News: For God's sake, step it up and give me some real news, please..
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