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China to raise defense budget due to US interference: Analyst

Saturday, 04 March 2017 4:22 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 04 March 2017 5:35 PM ]

Military delegates leave a session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing on March 4, 2017. (Photo by AFP)

Beijing says it will increase its defense budget by some seven percent this year in line with its economic development and defense needs amid territorial disputes between China and its neighbors fueled by “outside meddling.”

“Well I am not an advocate of, I am not a promoter of, I am not in favor of military solutions to anything, but I can understand it because the Chinese defense expenditure is about one-third of the US and they feel that the US, on the other side of the globe, is interfering with what they consider their regional rights to do what they do,” Jan Oberg, the founder of transnational.org, told Press TV in an interview on Saturday.

The analyst said it is very likely that the United States would use China’s defense budget increase as a “pretext” for expanding its activities in the South China Sea.

He also noted the problem that the West is facing is “militarism,” which, he explained, is to try to solve any fundamentalist civilian issues that have nothing to do with military solutions through military means.

The analyst also stated that the mindset of the Western governments is for more “military spending,” adding that "the Middle East has been destroyed thanks to this thinking".

Therefore, he expressed hope that China does not go the same way given the fact that it is rising to a very important position in the future by adopting civilian initiatives such as building the Silk Road Economic Belt.

“One of the reasons the Western power, the Western culture, the Western hemisphere, the United States as an empire is on its way down is exactly over militarization. It is the inability to think in intelligent civilian terms,” he said in conclusion.

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