Political Quotes

“I call to the Senators' attention today a disturbing article in the June 29, 2019, issue of The Economist, on pages 36 and 37. It is about the military buildup in China and the way it affects the United States. It says: Xi Jinping wants China's armed forces to be ``world class'' by 2050. He has done more to achieve this than any of his predecessors. I will quote from the lead of this article in The Economist. Over the past decade, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has been lavished with money and arms. China's military spending rose by 83 percent in real terms between 2009 and 2018, by far the largest growth spurt in any big country. The splurge has enabled China to deploy precision missiles and anti-satellite weapons that challenge American supremacy in the western Pacific. China's leader, Xi Jinping, says his ``Chinese dream'' includes a ``dream of a strong armed forces''. That, he says, involves ``modernising'' the PLA by 2035 and making it ``world-class''--in other words, America- beating--by mid-century. He has been making a lot of progress. In the second column of this article, it goes on to say: He has done more in the past three years to reform the PLA than any leader since Deng Xiaoping. This quote is not from some advocate of defense spending but is from one of the leading publications, The Economist.…”