By Xie Hui
According to the draft 2026 budget report submitted to the national legislature for review on March 5, China's defense budget for 2026 will reach roughly 1.9 trillion yuan (about 275 billion US dollars), representing a year-on-year increase of 7 percent, slightly lower than last year's 7.2 percent growth. Since 2016, China's defense spending has maintained single-digit growth for several consecutive years, remaining around 7 percent over the past six years without significant fluctuations or the so-called “rapid expansion” speculated externally. This stability reflects the most direct implementation of China's defensive national defense policy.
An examination of the defense budget must take into account the current international security environment. The world is currently undergoing a period of turbulence and transformation, with prolonged local conflicts, a resurgence of bloc confrontations, and growing deficits in global security, governance, and trust. According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military expenditure reached 2.718 trillion US dollars in 2024, up 9.4 percent year-on-year, marking the tenth consecutive year of increase. The global military spending as a share of GDP rose to 2.5 percent. In 2024, more than 100 countries increased their defense budgets, with significant rises observed across Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific regions. Against this backdrop, China's defense budget is experiencing moderate and predictable growth rather than a sharp increase. This demonstrates that China has never treated the development of national defense as a tool for geopolitical competition. Instead, it serves as a necessary support for safeguarding sovereignty and security, ensuring peaceful development, and stabilizing international strategic expectations, injecting stability into a turbulent international environment through rational restraint.
Upholding peaceful development does not mean abandoning the bottom line of national security. China's geopolitical environment is complex, with multiple directions, intertwined contradictions, and concentrated hotspots, creating overlapping security challenges. At present, China faces external pressure from hegemonism, as certain countries strengthen military alliances in the Asia-Pacific and create regional tensions, while risks are also rising in areas such as the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, security competition in emerging domains is advancing, with increasing risks in cyberspace and outer space, and an urgent need to protect overseas interests. In response to this complex environment, China is advancing the modernization of its national defense and armed forces. It aims not to project power abroad or pursue spheres of influence but to shape a secure strategic posture and contain and manage potential crises.
From a practical perspective, the defensive and peaceful nature of China's national defense policy is clearly demonstrated. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, China has consistently pursued a defensive national defense policy. Its military operations have all been acts of legitimate self-defense, and it has never initiated conflicts or occupied the territory of other countries. China is also an important force for safeguarding world peace. As the second-largest contributor to UN peacekeeping assessments and the largest troop contributor to peacekeeping operations among the permanent members of the UN Security Council, China has dispatched nearly 50,000 peacekeepers to participate in 25 peacekeeping missions. It has also completed escort tasks for more than 7,200 Chinese and foreign vessels in over 1,600 batches and actively taken part in humanitarian rescue operations, providing public security goods for world peace through concrete actions.
From a global perspective, the moderate restraint of China's defense budget is even more evident. China keeps its military expenditure at around 1.5% as a share of its GDP for a long time, significantly lower than the global average of 2.5 percent. By contrast, the US military expenditure reached 997 billion US dollars in 2024. Accounting for 37 percent of the global total, it is about 3.2 times that of China. It further raises defense spending to 1.01 trillion US dollars in its budget for fiscal year 2026. In addition, the US has also pushed its allies to increase military spending. After the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, NATO made clear that member states should raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035. The US possesses the world's largest military budget, the most extensive network of overseas military bases, and the strongest power projection capability, yet it continues to expand its military buildup. China, by contrast, has long maintained relatively low defense spending and has consistently focused on homeland defense, but is often subjected to unwarranted hype by Western public opinion. This is a typical case of double standards.
The difference in military spending between China and the US essentially reflects a fundamental divergence in strategic positioning and security concepts. China adheres to a defensive national defense policy, and its defense spending is consistently focused on safeguarding national sovereignty and security. The US pursues a strategy of global intervention, with much of its military expenditure used for overseas deployments, maintaining absolute military superiority, and seeking "absolute dominance" on a global scale, which has become an important factor contributing to global security instability.
The international community should form an objective understanding that what truly warrants vigilance is not China's reasonable, legitimate, and transparent defense spending, but the hegemonic logic of certain countries that continue to drive up global military expenditure, fuel bloc confrontation, and yet criticize the normal defense development of other countries. The development of China's national defense has always represented the growth of a force for world peace. In the future, China will continue to adhere to the principles of moderate, restrained, and transparent defense spending, strengthen its own security safeguards, and provide support for Chinese modernization. At the same time, China will actively participate in global security governance, demonstrating the responsibility of a major country through concrete actions and showing the world that China's development and strength are consistently positive and stabilizing forces for world peace and stability.
(The author is an assistant research fellow at the Department for World Peace and Security, China Institute of International Studies)
Editor's Note: Originally published on china.com.cn, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.