"As China's leaders open the country's biggest political event of the year, there will be no denying that the era of slower growth has arrived. The economic mood is downshifting on almost every front, which means that as people's demand grows for better schools and pensions and cleaner skies, the government is in less and less of a position to provide. Leaders have tried to drive home that slower expansion of the world's second-largest economy is no cause for alarm: the 'new normal.' Nevertheless, when Premier Li Keqiang 's speech on the economy opens the National People's Congress Thursday, the clue to how Beijing intends to proceed will be mainly in one number: the target for growth," reports The Wall Street Journal.  

According to The New York Times, "The Chinese military budget for 2015 will be about 10 percent bigger than last year's, a senior Chinese official said on Wednesday, meaning that such spending is growing at a pace faster than the overall growth rate of the Chinese economy...A 10 percent increase would put the 2015 military budget around $145 billion, making China the world's second-largest military spender, though still far behind the United States, which spends more on its armed forces than the next eight countries combined...China's military expansion is generally consistent with its economic growth and the size of its economy, which is the second largest in the world and is expected to soon surpass that of the United States. Nevertheless, China's increasingly powerful military and its modernization are alarming other Asian nations, many of which have come into diplomatic conflict with China in recent years over territorial disputes in regional seas." 

"China's proposed anti-terrorism law will not affect the legitimate interests of technology firms, a top Chinese spokeswoman said Wednesday after U.S. President Barack Obama warned of its impact and demanded amendments. China's proposals, which would require tech firms to provide encryption keys and install backdoors granting law enforcement access for counterterrorism investigations, drew criticism from Obama, who told Reuters in an interview this week China would have to change the draft law if it were 'to do business with the United States'. Fu Ying, China's parliamentary spokeswoman, said many Western governments, including Washington, had made similar requests for encryption keys while Chinese companies operating in the United States have long been subject to intense security checks," writes Reuters.