China has the second largest military spending in the world, second only to the US. What's more, you really need to look at purchasing power parity (PPP). Basically, it costs less to do things in China, and that really matters for military spending. For example, soldiers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) receive far lower salaries than the equivalent US personnel. It's hard to figure out the true impact of this, but it's important to acknowledge. One article about this is here: https://voxeu.org/article/why-military-purchasing-power-pari... - which argues that US military spending is basically equal to Russia+China once that's considered. Also, there's geography to consider. If China is attacking next-door-neighbors while the US is trying to defend an ally at long distance, it would necessarily cost the US much more. All of this makes comparing military spending much more complicated, as well as depressing. It's my hope that military adventurism will be avoided.

> China has the 2nd largest military budget but only spends 1.7% GDP on it

Not really sure that comparisons of either GDP or state spending on a purpose as a share of it (even if GDP were comparable) are as meaningful as people pretend across regimes with vastly different degrees of state/industry integration both generally (because of effect on GDP measures) or in the field of interest (because of effects on spending measures.)

Unfortunately, there's not good alternative measures, either.

What about the NATO requirement to spend 2% of GDP on defense? Isn't it strategic for the US to spend disproportionately more on the military to support allies' militaries (e.g., South Korea) and prevent the rise of competing superpowers?

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm

Trend rapidly changing, they were focused elsewhere previously.

The part that matters is what they’ll use it for (so far, signs point to authoritarian conquest of sovereign political entities)

That 1.7% that China spends is probably equivalent (or more) to the 3.5% that the US spends. China steals the intellectual property that the US pays for. China takes advantage of lax environmental and green energy laws the the US military and supporting businesses must conform to. China takes advantage of near slave labor to build it’s weapons of war. It’s much economical for China to wage war than the United States.