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Pentagon cooks up report on China's military
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-07-06 10:14
A Pentagon report on China's military is being worked on
by several U.S. government agencies, the Defense Department said on Tuesday,
suggesting an expanded drive to make sure it meshes with the Bush
administration's views.
U.S. Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld listens to questions at a joint news conference
with Multi-National Force-Iraq Gen. George Casey at the Pentagon in
Washington, DC June 27, 2005. [Reuters] |
The Defense Department is "trying to
make sure that everybody has the opportunity to weigh in on it," said Lawrence
Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, in an apparent reference to the State
Department and the White House National Security Council, among others.
"And once we release it, we know it will undergo a great deal of scrutiny,"
Di Rita said. "We think we'll be up to that."
The U.S. Defense Department has no target date in mind for release of the
2005 annual report, officially required to be delivered to Congress by March 1
under a law passed in 1999.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said June 4 in Singapore the report
would be published "soon." Di Rita said he doubted it would be this week.
The report is sensitive because China has objected strongly to being
portrayed by the United States as a growing threat to the military balance in
Asia.
Chinese soldiers
crawl forward during military training on a beach in Yuhuan county,
east China's Zhejiang province July 4, 2005.
[newsphoto] | "The wave of 'China military threat theory' whipped up by the U.S. military
is a dangerous practice," People's Daily said in a commentary it carried on June
15. Proponents of this view are "setting up all kinds of obstacles in the way of
the development of Sino-U.S. relationships," it said.
U.S. President Bush also is seeking Chinese support on a wide range of
diplomatic, economic and strategic issues, including luring North Korea back to
the six-party negotiation table.
After the regional security conference in Singapore, Rumsfeld is widely
reported to have ordered the draft be reworked.
"The report has undergone an awful lot of scrubbing by policy officials
across the government," said Daniel Blumenthal, the Defense Department's senior
country director for China region until last November.
One possible explanation for the delay in sending the report to Congress is a
controversy over how much China is spending on its military.
A report released May 19 by RAND Corp. -- a research group that studies many
issues for the Pentagon -- concluded that the Defense Department may have
overestimated China's military spending by more than two-thirds in 2003.
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