Chinese President Xi Jinping said the nation’s military budget would not be able to maintain a “normal growth” rate because of the economic downturn and called on the army to be prudent in its spending, according to the South China Morning Post. In the second of a series of articles elaborating on the president’s vision for the army, the PLA Daily on Tuesday quoted Xi as saying that military resources were not being properly managed, and the army should avoid big projects that required a lot of money but did not yield results. The National People’s Congress announced in March that defense spending would grow 7.6% this year to RMB 954 billion – the first single-digit increase since 2010.