China’s Ministry of Finance offered a slew of numbers on Wednesday describing how the country plans to spend its money this year. The 2014 budget will reach an eye-popping 15.3 trillion yuan, or about $2.45 trillion – maybe not as exciting as President Obama’s $3.9 trillion proposed budget, but not exactly chump change either.
Where is it all going? You can spend the day poring through the numbers, as China Real Time did. Or the crack WSJ Art Department can put them in a format that makes sense to normal eyes. (It pays to have connections.)
A quick glance tells you a few important things about China’s budget priorities:
The military, already a beneficiary of Beijing’s largesse, will get even more love this year.
Social spending isn’t far behind, in a nod to the rising expectations of China’s increasingly wealthy and educated population.
Affordable housing and the environment – two stated priorities of the Chinese government – saw spending fall last year. Beijing appears to want to change that.
One big caveat to these numbers: China has changed the way it presents its spending on public security, one of the country’s biggest priorities amid rising public frustration over everything from pollution to the wealth gap to ethnic tension. In past years the number was even higher than defense spending. It isn’t clear exactly how the figure has changed.
本周三（3月5日），中国财政部提供了一系列的数字描述今年全国的财政预算计划。2014年预算将达到让人瞠目结舌的15.3万亿人民币，约2.45万亿美元——这也许不像奧巴马总统的3.9万亿美元那么令人咋舌，但也不能不容小觑。
这笔预算将会被用在哪里？你可以花一天时间，一项一项地看这些数字，正如《中国时事报》做的一样。你也可以试一试华尔街日报美术部把它们变成的，一般人都能看懂的图表。
稍微浏览就能让你知道几个有关中国的预算的重要事项：
军备，之前就已得到中国政府的大力支持，而今年将会得到更多的预算经费。
社会支出并没有落后于军备支出太多，这是对中国不断上升的生活水平和提高的人口素质的肯定。
对经济适用房房和环境保护的支出——中国政府声明的两个当务之急——去年已经下降。北京似乎想要改变这点。
对这些数字的一个大警告：中国已经改变了它对公共安全的开支的方式。公共安全，与其它中国民众愈加不满的事情，从污染，到贫富差距和民族关系紧张，都是中国政府工作的重点。在过去这些年中，这一数字甚至高于国防支出。至今仍未清楚这项数字是怎么变化的。
