BACKGROUNDER
No. 3805 | JANUARY 12, 2024
DOUGLAS AND SARAH ALLISON CENTER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY
This paper, in its entirety, can be found at https://report.heritage.org/bg3805
The Heritage Foundation | 214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE | Washington, DC 20002 | (202) 546-4400 | heritage.org
Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.
Cold War Lessons for Estimating
the Chinese Defense Budget
Wilson Beaver
Accurate, data-informed estimates of
the size and composition of the Chinese
defense budget are critical to the assess-
ment of the U.S. defense budget.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The U.S. government should publish its
defense analysis estimates to inform the
public debate around defense spending.
Lessons drawn from the Cold War delib-
erations over the true nature of the
Soviet defense budget can inform today’s
debate over the Chinese defense budget.
O
ngoing attempts to estimate the defense
budget of the People’s Republic of China
and compare it with the defense budget
of the United States closely mirror similar debates
surrounding comparisons of the defense budgets
of the Soviet Union and United States during the
Cold War. Some such estimates relied on Soviet
self-reporting and concluded that the Soviet defense
budget was dwarfed by that of the United States.
These numbers were often cited by advocates of a
reduced U.S. defense budget. Other estimates used
purchasing power parity (PPP) calculations and
attempted to account for the dierences in the Soviet
and American economic systems and governments
to compare the Soviet budget to that of the United
States; these produced far higher estimates of Soviet
expenditures.
1
