BEIJING, Sept 2: The Chinese army — the world’s biggest military force in terms of personnel — will be reduced by 200,000 soldiers as part of a modernisation drive.

The People’s Liberation Army will switch its focus to greater use of information technology, the government announced in Beijing on Monday.

The latest cut, which follows the trimming of 500,000 troops in the late 1990s, will bring the size of the army down to 2.3 million by the end of next year.

China’s state media said the personnel cut was aimed at producing a leaner, meaner, better-paid and more sophisticated military.

The defence budget increased by 10 per cent last year with a growing share of expenditure on advanced weapons rather than old-style preparations for a large-scale ground war.

Beijing’s military priority is Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province that must be reunited with the mainland — by force if necessary. But the heads of the armed forces were also heavily influenced by the prowess of US battle systems in Iraq — a force that China is currently ill-equipped to deal with.

Jiang Zemin, the head of the military commission and former president of China, acknowledged that the PLA needed to scale down so that it could catch up with its main rival.

“With the introduction of new technology — especially information technology — international competition in the area of military affairs is getting hotter,” Jiang said at 50th anniversary celebrations for the National Defence Science and Technology University in the southern province of Hunan.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.