On January 20, a white paper entitled "China's National Defense in 2008" was released.

"The white paper in 2008 disclosed for the first time China's national defense strategy goals. The transparency of strategic intent marks maximum transparency," said Dr. Chen Zhou, a research fellow at the Department of War Theory and Strategic Studies under the Academy of Military Science, and participated in the writing of the white papers as a member of the expert panel for many times.

For the first time the paper, which is the sixth national defense white paper the Chinese government has issued since 1998, makes public basic statistics on the changes in national defense expenditures over the past 30 years, publishes the number of border public security forces and introduces the size of the militia.

In separate chapters, for the first time, it also describes the development of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Second Artillery Force and introduces the specialties of the Navy Reserve, the Air Force Reserve and the Second Artillery Force Reserve.

The white paper also outlines the structure and organization of the reserve forces, as well as the locations of headquarters of the naval fleets for the very first time.

All this new content and new highlights have brought new life to the 2008 national defense white paper.

Meanwhile, Dr. Chen observed that China's national defense white paper has always followed the main themes of taking the road of peaceful development and pursuing defensive policies in national defense. He also noticed that the white papers, tightly focused on national defense and military development, have become increasingly practical and open.

"In the white paper in 1998, there was no specific names given to the seven military area commands when they were mentioned. The white paper in 2000, however, began to introduce the system of headquarters, the system of arms and services and the system of military area commands of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The white paper in 2002 took another important step in improving transparency, specifically mentioning ‘all types of aviation corps are equipped with 20 to 40 aircrafts and that the proportion of aircrafts to pilots (crews) stands at 1:1.2.' This noticeably amazed all large-sized think tanks in the US,"Chen said in an interview.

(People's Daily February 4, 2009)