China announces largest military budget ever

BEIJING — China announced its largest ever defense budget Tuesday, a day after the Pentagon warned that China's burgeoning military is fine-tuning its abilities for cyber-warfare and in disabling the satellites of potential enemies.

China's defense budget will rise to $59 billion this year, an increase of 17.6 percent over a year earlier, said Jiang Enzhu, a spokesman for the National People's Congress.

The increase, the latest in a string of double-digit hikes over more than a decade, puts China's military spending on a par with that of Russia, Britain and Japan. Read the piece