Commentary The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly all aspect of daily life across the globe, but when it comes to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the virus has hardly blunted the pace of modernization. Overall, the PLA is still on track toward meeting its goals of achieving “complete military modernization” by 2035, and becoming a “world-class” military by 2049. In the first place, the pandemic has not really impacted Chinese defense spending. In 2021, Beijing plans to allocate 1.355 trillion yuan ($202 billion) to the PLA. This represents a 6.8 percent increase over 2020 military spending, which grew 6.6 percent over 2019. To be sure, the growth in Chinese military expenditures has tapered off somewhat since the heyday of the 2000s and early 2010s, when annual increases in defense spending averaged around 10 to 15 percent. Nevertheless, in an age of near-zero inflation, annual defense spending increases of 6 to …