BEIJING: China's state media on Wednesday criticised a Pentagon report on Beijing's expanding military capabilities as unprofessional and aggressive, saying US demands for transparency were unrealistic.
In the report released Monday, the US Defence Department said China's military build-up in the Taiwan Strait had “continued unabated” despite better ties with the China-friendly government in Taipei, in power since 2008.
The Pentagon said Beijing was ramping up investment in a range of areas including nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers and cyber warfare.
China's foreign and defence ministries have so far unusually refrained from reacting to the report, but the state-run media carried a barrage of comments from experts.
“The report is not exactly professional. It uses ambiguous terms without solid proof,” Ni Feng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the China Daily.
Zheng Yongmian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, told the Global Times that the report had an “overly aggressive tone”, though other experts said the rhetoric had “softened”.
Military ties between the United States and China were suspended by Beijing months ago after Washington agreed on a 6.4-billion-dollar arms package with Taiwan that included helicopters, missile defences and mine-sweepers.
China considers Taiwan, where the mainland's defeated nationalists fled in 1949 at the end of a bloody civil war, to be part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
Meng Xiangqing, a professor at the National Defence University, told the Global Times: “The interfering nature of the report remains unchanged. It will surely draw discontent from China over its exaggeration of its military power.”On calls for China to improve its military transparency, with the Pentagon saying billions of dollars are spent but not included in the publicly released budget, experts said Beijing could never meet Washington's standards.
“Anyone who understands basic international politics knows there is no absolute transparency, especially between non-allies,” Shi Yinhong, a scholar on international relations at Renmin University, told the China Daily. – AFP
No comments:
Post a Comment