China increases its defense budget for 2025

Beijing announced in a government report yesterday that the Chinese defense budget – the second largest military budget in the world, but is very late for its American counterpart – will rise in 2025 by 7.2%, the same rate as the same increase last year.

The government said in the 2025 budget report that it will allocate to defensive expenditures 1784.7 trillion yuan (245.7 billion dollars), a three -time amount of the US defense budget. This announcement comes against the backdrop of repeated tensions between Beijing and Washington, and at a time when Europeans are considering increasing their defensive spending significantly to confront the risks of America’s “first” policy, in which Europeans see a threat to their security.