Beijing (AsiaNews) - The Ministry of Finance has announced that this year the cost of internal security will be increased by 11.5% to over 700 billion yuan. The figure - higher than the military budget - shows the Communist Party fears over instability, fuelled by corruption and injustice.
In a report, presented to the National People's Congress ongoing in the capital, the Ministry of Finance announced that the budget for police, state security, armed militias, courts, prisons and other items defined as "public security", will total 701.8 billion yuan (about 84.6 billion euros), thus even passing military spending this year which instead will be 670.3 billion yuan (about 80.8 billion euros).
Last year, China spent 629.3 billion yuan, on internal security (about 76 billion euros) and this was already an increase of 13.5 over the previous year.
For years, the leadership is fighting against the so-called "mass incidents": villages with land expropriated; citizens and peasants fighting pollution from factories; injustice in payment of wages by enterprises; unjust taxes, inflation and high prices of food.
According to official figures, up to the early 1990s there were about 9 thousand of these incidents per year, and in 2006 there were 127 thousand. In recent years the government has not released figures, but estimates are around 180 000.