Agnihotri, Kamlesh Kumar

Abstract
A White Paper on “China’s National Defence in 2008” was released by the Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China on January 20, 2009. This is China’s sixth White Paper on “National Defence” since the first, which was released in 1998. China commenced publication of this paper to convince the world about its “peaceful rise” and to dispel the largely held world view that all its defence modernisation plans were quite opaque and shrouded in secrecy. The paper rebuts most of the issues raised in the United States (US) Department of Defence (DoD) report on “The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China”, released on March 3, 2008. Describing the US report as “overstate”, China systematically seeks to underplay the leapfrogging capabilities of its armed forces, better known as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), by means of this White Paper.
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