CSMONITOR: China made headlines today with its annual military budget, up 12.2 percent to $132 billion dollars this year. That’s about one quarter of the $495 billion military budget that President Obama presented to Congress yesterday.

Predictably, official commentary here stresses that China is a peace-loving nation with no aggressive intentions. But Beijing has also signaled its ambitions to be the power that holds the ring in the western Pacific, and those ambitions have been spelled out, arguably clearer than ever before, in a direct challenge to US military preeminence.

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