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The steady rise in China's defence budget over recent years naturally stokes the speculation. From just $9.8 billion in 1997 it more than quadrupled within a decade, according to the official figures, to reach $46.8 billion by 2007 (although the proportion of annual GDP rose by just 0.29 percentage points over the same period). Beijing's official defence budget for 2009 is $70.2 billion, but the real level of Chinese military spending is disputed. Because they leave important expenditures on strategic capabilities and military space programmes unaccounted for, the official figures say little about the actual state of China's armed forces.