China has laid bare the scale of its rapidly expanding military might for the first time in a paper that argued that the American “pivot to Asia” was destabilising the region.
China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, has some 850,000 service members spread across seven regional commands, according to the defence report issued Tuesday. The navy and air force have 235,000 and 398,000 service members respectively.
The paper also alludes to China’s powerful Second Artillery Force. Described as “the country’s core force for strategic deterrence,” it oversees China’s nuclear arsenal and is tasked with “deterring other countries from using nuclear weapons against China.”
The total number of service members listed was 1.48 million. In 2006, China said the military had a total of 2.3 million members. It was not clear if the new count represented a real reduction in numbers, or if the shortfall was made up by other ground force units that appeared to have been omitted from the count, including the Second Artillery Force.
National Post
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