I saw a news-note in yesterday's paper to the effect that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, now visiting in China, complained that China's massive defense spending indicated some sort of global ambition on the part of that nation. This, of course, is a very awful thing to say about any country, except maybe ...
Last time I heard figures about defense spending, the United States was spending as much, annually, as the next ten nations combined. If we assume (theoretically) that China is in second place, and spending as much as the next nine nations combined, that means that China is spending about half as much as the United States on defense (and, in passing, that each Chinese citizen contributes slightly under 12% as much to defense as each American citizen). I guess I could make some sort of comment here about pots calling kettles black.
Of course, it would hardly surprise me to discover that China does have global ambitions. There may be countries in the world (Liechtenstein springs immediately to mind) that don't, but it would hardly be surprising if the most populous nation in the world, with one of the fastest-growing economies and, like all the rest of us, a resource problem were to look to spread its influence abroad. After all, it has had, over the last half century or so, such a good example of global ambition to imitate.
Posted by Don Harlow at October 20, 2005 09:55 AM