China announced a sharp slowdown in the growth of its official defence budget yesterday, a move bolstering Beijing's argument that fears about the country being a military threat are overstated.
At Rmb532.1bn ($78bn), this year's draft defence budget is 7.5 per cent higher than last year's, according to the spokesman for the National People's Congress, China's legislature.
That is half the rate of spending growth cited in last year's budget report and the first time in well over a decade that the headline increase in defence spending has dropped below 10 per cent.
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