In November 2015 Chinese President Xi Jinping announced sweeping changes in the Chinese military, foreshadowed in his earlier speech at the September celebration of the victory over Japan 70 years earlier. At present, the Chinese navy and air force are parts of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA); thus the navy is the PLAN, the navy of the PLA. In the future described by President Xi, the navy and the air force are to become independent services, all three services coming under a new joint command.
The 1.4 million–man army is to be cut by about 300,000; many commentators see the cut as a way of paying for naval and air modernization. Some have linked military reform to Xi’s demonstrated willingness to attack senior military officers for alleged corruption. In recent years, the army has undergone another less publicized change: In the past, army units were associated with particular areas of China on a permanent basis. A few years ago, the government began to shift units from region to region.
All of these developments can be read in various ways. The most popular is that Xi is seeking to build a modern, deployable military machine. Every other government has found that sheer numbers of troops no longer equate to effective power. Armies are now highly mechanized, and weapons offer enormous leverage to limited numbers of more highly trained troops. The more mechanized forces also need large numbers of expensive technicians to keep them operational. If Xi wants an army capable of fighting other modern armies, he had better buy it enough equipment and enough maintainers. The latter may be a particular problem if he lacks sufficiently educated people. China is modernizing at an impressive pace, but the gap between the least modern parts in the interior and the showcase of the coastal region is probably still considerable.
Army Units and Party Politics
This is not a new problem elsewhere. After World War II, Western governments found that, despite the draft, their armies were generally smaller than their prewar equivalents: Sheer numbers were no longer affordable because each soldier needed expensive equipment. The more recent shift to relatively small professional armies is driven by economics, not ideology or strategy. It has affected all the NATO countries, even France, which for years treated the mass army as a valuable political statement of national solidarity. Even more strikingly, Russia, the traditional home of the mass army, is moving toward a smaller professional force. Too, the number of formations, such as divisions, that a given number of troops can run has fallen dramatically, because the total number associated with such formations—the divisional or brigade or battalion slice of manpower—has grown so explosively in order to maintain the unit’s equipment. Larger divisional (or other) slices are also associated with the ability to maintain capability in a sustained fight. In this light, Xi is bowing to inevitable forces.
Another interpretation would emphasize the shift, a few years ago, away from associating particular parts of the PLA with particular areas of China. An army unit living in (and probably policing) a particular part of the country could easily become the dominant local force. It would be the muscle backing the local Communist Party, although in some cases army units might be deployed elsewhere (as in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). Army and local party might become so connected that it would become impossible for the central Party authority in Beijing (read Xi here) to impose any sort of control on the local Party. Shifting army units around the country might be a way of breaking such ties. It could also of course be seen as a natural way of developing a more mobile army. At the least the change could be justified in that way. A Chinese president bent on achieving total control certainly might want to reduce whatever backing local Party chiefs enjoyed. He would, moreover, appreciate that soldiers from a distant part of the country would find it easier to attack rebellious people far from home—very much what happened in Tiananmen Square, when tank units from regions far from Beijing were used. In this interpretation, Xi’s prime consideration is to break any political force that might limit his power. The PLA is probably the only force in the country that might effectively oppose him. From this point of view, the most important function of the anti-corruption drive applied to the army has been to destroy an alternative source of political power. It is comparable to, but not nearly as vicious as, Josef Stalin’s Soviet army purges of the late 1930s.
Assuring Officer Allegiance
It is impossible to say whether any of the purged senior officers is a particularly competent commander or strategist or tactician. Most of them probably earned their positions not through merit but through political loyalty and therefore patronage; their sin is that their patrons are or were alternatives to Xi. He now needs a much less politicized military, or at least one in which all senior officers owe their positions to him.
This interpretation may offer a good explanation for the apparently dramatic change in the Chinese military structure, from one service with three branches to three services. It can certainly be argued that the single service with three branches was already an integrated multiservice entity. PLAN officers certainly felt free to publish articles about the virtues of sea power, which suggests that they considered themselves leaders of an independent service. So why change organization?
It seems likely that all senior posts in the new command system (the Chinese Joint Chiefs, if you like) will be filled by officers personally chosen by Xi, and therefore personally loyal to him. In effect the great military reform is a masterstroke of political patronage designed to protect Xi from his own military. That sort of protection seems bizarre from a U.S. point of view; we take the idea of separating our military from politics very seriously. That sort of conscious separation has served us very well, but it gives us something of a blind spot when evaluating foreign military systems in which officers may well be politicians seeking personal power. Incidentally, the foreign sort of blurred military/government relations explains why many governments seem so determined not to promote aggressive commanders. The dashing Colonel X may be more interested in crashing through the gates of the Presidential Palace than wiping out foreign hordes. Better to shoot him (or keep him out of command) than to risk that.
Promoting incompetent officers is perfectly acceptable as long as foreign opponents are in the same position. The system collapses when the acceptable incompetents face aggressive competent foreign leaders. The motivation and the consequences were particularly clear in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Beginning in 1937, Stalin purged competent aggressive officers he thought might threaten his power (those left alive got the message). That left incompetents in too many senior positions when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, and it took precious and expensive time to weed them out.
Stalin undoubtedly did not imagine that he was inviting disaster; he was a materialist who believed that people were interchangeable. He bought advanced military equipment as he shot those who might have understood how to use it. Does Xi share Stalin’s view that competence is irrelevant? Does he think that buying better equipment is the same as buying an effective military?
Enemies Within
Cutting numbers to modernize the PLA has another consequence that may yet prove costly for Xi. The PLA has an important domestic function: to face down homegrown unrest. To us, China is a stable country with few if any such problems. To Xi and other Party officials, it is a seething mass of discontent. The worst problems are in the far west, in Tibet and in largely Muslim Sinkiang. Large numbers of inhabitants in both places demand what for Xi and other Chinese rulers are unacceptable degrees of independence. There is apparently real fear that any significant concessions will reverberate beyond those regions.
Elsewhere in China, there are frequent demonstrations against various injustices, many of them associated with local Party rulers. Typically, the Chinese report about 100,000 strikes and other disturbances each year; a cynic might guess that this is a very low estimate. The Party’s sense of instability seems to be the only explanation for its continuing sensitivity to the threat it sees in Falun Gong—a movement associated with a very popular regimen of exercises performed widely in China. Falun Gong has extended the exercise idea into a violently anti-Party ideology, in part as a reaction to persecution. Party sensitivity shows in the recent decision to keep Miss Canada, a Falun Gong adherent, from competing in the Miss World contest in Beijing.
Is Falun Gong or some other movement likely to topple the Party? Just stating the question this way makes it seem ridiculous. The Party’s thin-skinned behavior suggests a sense that it is sitting uneasily atop a volcano. That makes loyal armed troops invaluable. They do not need the most modern hardware, since anyone rioting in China is most unlikely to be armed with tanks, missiles, and jet fighters. Deep cuts to the army and deeper cuts to its organization (necessary to provide sufficient divisional slices) can significantly reduce the Party’s ability to deal with the numerous more or less simultaneous local problems around China. It is not clear to what extent Xi appreciates the dilemma he has created in the name of military modernization.
As far as the PLAN is concerned, its arguments for modernization and for increased reach have apparently been heard. Most spectacularly, a second carrier, probably similar in design to the ex-Russian Liaoyang, is under construction. If Xi’s call for modernization is taken at face value, this is a natural development, and cuts in the army force structure will help China afford an oceanic fleet. If the army has to be modernized at the same time as the navy, the cost of a smaller (but still massive) army with modern equipment will be considerable, and the manpower cut is really not a cut in cost. Xi will have to find a lot more money to pay for three fully modern services with the requisite logistical muscle behind them. He may want to cut his army a good deal further in the interest of balancing costs, but the cuts he has already announced may have unfortunate internal political consequences.
Dr. Friedman is the author of The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems, Fifth Edition, and Network-centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars, available from the Naval Institute Press at www.usni.org.