A senior Chinese official said on Thursday that China's long-standing policy of not being the first to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances will remain unchanged in the future.

"Since the first day when it came into possession of nuclear weapons, the Chinese government has solemnly declared that it would not be the first to use such weapons at any time and in any circumstance and committed unconditionally not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states or nuclear-weapon-free zones," said Zhang Yan, director of the Department of Arms Control and Disarmament under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He said this in his opening remarks at a news conference held by the Information Office of the State Council Thursday, which coincided with the issuance of a white paper entitled China's Endeavors for Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

He reiterated the policy when an AP reporter asked whether this means nuclear weapons will not be used to threaten Taiwan.

"This commitment has never changed and will remain unchanged in the future. That's an important policy and stance of China on the issue of nuclear weapons," Zhang said.

He said China has persistently exercised the utmost restraint on the scale and development of its nuclear weapons.

"China has conducted the smallest number of nuclear tests among the nuclear-weapon states. China has never taken part and will never take part in a nuclear arms race," he said.

Zhang urged certain countries to adopt a prudential attitude towards the development of missile defense systems, noting it might influence the stability of the international system and international strategies, relations between countries and regional security and trigger the proliferation of missile technology.

He said China opposes the attempt by any country to include Taiwan in a missile defense system, support or provide a missile defense system to Taiwan.

On China's military expenditure, Zhang said China has kept its defense expenditure under strict control in order to concentrate its strength on economic development.

Zhang said China's defense expenditure has always been kept relatively low in the world, reflected not only in the absolute amount of defense expenditure, but also as a percentage of the GDP and financial expenditure.

According to the white paper, China's defense expenditure amounts to only 5.77 percent of that of the United States, 41.03 percent that of the United Kingdom, 75.65 percent that of France and 63.97 percent that of Japan in 2004.

Compared with 1979, the proportion of China's defense expenditure to its financial expenditure dropped by about 10 percentage points in 2004.

Based on economic development and revenue growth, Zhang said, China has moderately increased its defense expenditure in recent years. However, the increase was relatively small. For most years since the 1990s, the growth rate of China's defense expenditure has been lower than that of the state financial expenditure.

He quoted the paper as saying that the defense expenditure increases have primarily been used for the following purposes:

Increasing the salaries and allowances of military personnel to ensure the improvement of living standards in step with socioeconomic development;

Further improvement of the social insurance system for servicemen, including the establishment of systems like casualty insurance, medical insurance for ex-servicemen, housing subsidy, basic life guarantees for accompanying spouses of servicemen and social insurance subsidy;

Supporting the structural and organizational reform of the military and proper resettlement of the 200,000 servicemen recently discharged from active service;

Increasing investment in the development of high-caliber talent in the military, and a refined incentive mechanism for talented people to ensure the achievement of the PLA's Strategic Project for Talented People; and

Moderately increasing equipment expenses to improve the PLA's defensive combat capability under the conditions of modern technology, particularly high technology.

"Like other countries in the world, there are various sorts of comments and guesses on China's military expenditure. But I believe to know the official statistics, you must get them from the official channel," said Zhang.

"The white paper has provided the most authoritative and most comprehensive data on China's military spending. If you want to know the official statistics, the paper is the best channel," he said.

Source: Xinhua