ABSTRACT
In many countries, official defense budget is only a part of their overall defense spending.1 China is no exception. China watchers in the West know that some categories of military expenditure are missing from the country’s published defense budget, but they are not certain exactly what are excluded and where “hidden resources” of defense financing lie. Consequently, Western estimates of Chinese military expenditures “still largely consist of guesswork…and hence contain a considerable margin of error.”2 The paucity of reliable data has often been attributed to Beijing’s reluctance to be more forthcoming about its defense spending. No doubt, the traditional preoccupation with secrecy on the part of China has made it hard for Western analysts to get hold of a sufficient amount of numbers to crunch in this area. It also needs to be noted, however, that valuable Chinese-language sources have routinely gone unnoticed in the English-language literature, which turns the knowable into the unknown.
