STOCKHOLM, June 9 (Xinhuanet) -- A leading peace research center has devoted a separate chapter to China for the first time in its yearbook to mark the important role the world's biggest developing country has played in world peace.

    Since the late 1980s, China has been increasingly engaged in and even taken initiative in regional and global multilateral security processes, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in its 2003 yearbook issued on Tuesday.

    In the mid-1990s, the country began to hold military exercises with other countries to expand its military exchanges and has since made its contribution to UN peacekeeping missions, SIPRI said.

    This is the first time for SIPRI to give a separate chapter to China in its yearbook, SIPRI Director Alyson Bailes told Xinhua, speaking highly of China's role in international security.

    Last year, the institute even issued its first yearbook in the Chinese language, she said, adding that the Stockholm-based think tank has been attaching more and more importance to China's role in world peace.

    SIPRI, founded in 1966, is one of the world's authoritative institutes on international security and arms control research.

    Bailes noted that global military expending last year is an issue of great concern in the 2003 yearbook.

    Worldwide military spending soared 11 percent last year, mainly because of the US-led war in Iraq. The US military spending, at 417.4 billion US dollars, accounted for some 47 percent of the world's total with its missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and the general war on terror, she said.

    Countries spent 956 billion dollars on defense last year, a 4-percent increase from 2002. Enditem