China will boost its defence spending by 7.2% this year, fuelling a military budget that has more than doubled under President Xi Jinping’s 11 years in office as Beijing hardens its stance on Taiwan, according to official reports on Tuesday.

China also officially adopted tougher language against Taiwan as it released the budget figures, dropping the mention of “peaceful reunification” in a government report delivered by Premier Li Qiang at the opening of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s rubber-stamp parliament, on Tuesday.

    • cyd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      It’s been omitted from previous statements before. Sure, the Taiwan issue is important, but there’s no need for hysteria over this kind of minutiae.

    • The Snark Urge@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Imagine a world where a second Trump presidency allows Russia to further undermine NATO’s article 5, emboldening other aggressors worldwide, and it becomes all too clear why countries like Iran, North Korea, and China are helping Russia in Ukraine. Their collective ambitions amount to promulgating a third world war, if you ask me

      • OldWoodFrame@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        They don’t have to be in league. Russia wants lebensraum because their borders are not geopolitically secure, and they were all part of the USSR. China wants Taiwan because they’re historically the same country. North Korea is in tension with South Korea because they’re historically the same country. Iran isn’t directly expansionist they just want nukes for power projection.

        They are similar ambitions, that doesn’t mean they would happen on the same time scale they are all discrete circumstances.

        • TooManyFoods@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          How are Russia’s borders not secure? Have they been suffering from incursions from a neighbor? Or did the lebensraum come first and the new border is not secure?

          • OldWoodFrame@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            It’s sort of a famous issue in Russian geopolitics, Moscow is on the North European Plain which leaves it vulnerable to attack. Back to the Russian Empire they were trying to expand to get buffer space. The USSR expanded to the Carpathian mountains which really narrows down the border that has to be defended but, ya know, the USSR included a bunch of sovereign countries that don’t want to be Russia.

            • TooManyFoods@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              9 months ago

              I’ve heard that before, but it doesn’t make sense to me. They had those mountains for napoleon, ww1 and ww2. They lost ww1, and napoleon and hitler blew right past the mountains. They had to be stopped pretty deep into russia. It sounds like an excuse to me. Their borders clearly have been protected by nuclear weapons. Unless they are whipping up fear of illegal immigration from Ukraine, I don’t understand why those concerns exist. No one really talked about going after them in the territory they controlled 3 years ago.

              • The Snark Urge@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                9 months ago

                I get the sense these are old excuses for aggression that haven’t been updated for so long they’ve become a tradition