Evaluation on Chinese Defense Expenditures from 1978–2009—From View of International Comparison - Advanced Research on Computer Education, Simulation and Modeling - page 277

very short, lasting only 6 years. Therefore, the opinion of China's Threat just focused
on the rising of absolute scale defense expenditures, ignoring the declining of DEG and
DEAG.
International Comparison
Limited by the availability of data, we can only calculate DEG of each nation.
From Fig.2, we can see even using the data of SIPRI, China's DEG isn't higher than
other countries. Moreover, China's DEG varied similarly with other countries in the
period of 1988-2008. The variation track is like “U”. With the ending of the cold war,
each nation's DEG declined rapidly. And from the end of 1990s, each nation's DEG
has been rising. Because of the similarity between China and other nations, there isn't
clear evidence to prove the view of China's Threat.
Data: Chinese Statistic Yearbook1980-2010. Data: Database of World Bank and SIPRI
Fig. 1. China's DEG and DEAG Fig. 2. Other Nations' DEG
3.2 Indexes with Regard to Public Finance
Tendency of China
China's DEP has been declining since 1980, from the level of 15% to 6.6%. The de-
crease reveals that more and more public financial revenue has been invested in other
public goods than defense, which proves the argument that defense development must
submit to economy development. China's DECG saw a “W” track. The “W” track re-
sulted from not only the variation of defense expenditure but also the change of Chi-
nese public finance systems in 1994. Before 1994, the revenue capability of the central
government was quite poor, in other words, the ratio of central governmental revenue
to the whole revenue was less than 50%. Thus DECG showed a increasing tendency.
In 1994, a new tax sharing system put into use. As a result, the central government
revenue has improved greatly since 1994, and has become much more than the local
government revenue. Therefore, DECG fell down. But as the defense expenditures
increased to a large extent from the end of 1990s, DECG started to rise again.
International Comparison
Due to the availability of data, we just compare the DECG internationally. We find
there are two kinds of nation. One kind of nation has rather low level of DECG, such
as Germany, France, and the U.K., whose DECG is about 4-7%. The other kind of