Expert interprets China's defense paper

BEIJING, April 18, (ChinaMil) -- The Chinese government published a new version of the national defense white paper - Diversified Employment of China's Armed Forces - on April 16, 2013. Chen Zhou, director of the Defense Policy Research Center of the Academy of Military Sciences (AMS) of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), offered his interpretation of the white paper in an interview by reporters from the PLA Daily.

Innovative publication of the white paper

The new national defense white paper is titled "Diversified Employment of China's Armed Forces". Speaking of this, Chen Zhou said that the past 7 white papers were all comprehensive white papers characterized by panoramic introduction to the new situation and new development in the field of national defense and security. The new white paper is a thematic white paper that focuses on the diversified employment of China's armed forces in recent years.

"Learning from some other countries in the world, the original publication of comprehensive white paper is adjusted to a combined publication with the comprehensive type and the thematic one alternating in an orderly way. This is a change in the way China's national defense white papers are formulated and published".

Lots of new contents announced, military transparency further enhanced

The new national defense white paper consists of 5 chapters with around 15,000 words, which not only covers such traditional contents as judgment of security situations, construction of armed forces, and the like, but also focuses on the employment of the armed forces.

According to Chen Zhou, the white paper elaborates and introduces a lot of new contents for the first time, such as the policies and principles of the diversified employment of the armed forces, maintaining constant combat readiness, safeguarding maritime rights and interests, safeguarding overseas interests, safeguarding the security of international seaways and so forth. For the first time, the white paper officially discloses the designations of all 18 combined corps of the Army of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the personnel numbers of the mobile operational army units, the air force, the navy and others, as the latest step to increase transparency of its armed forces.

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