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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
China's military has entered a new era. It has acquired modern weapons to rival the world’s finest, undergone a massive restructuring under Xi Jinping, and been on the frontlines of territorial disputes with Japan, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It is readying forces to be able to seize Taiwan sometime in the next decade. It aims to be a "world-class" military on par with the United States.
China's Quest for Military Supremacy provides a broad and accessible exploration of Chinese military power, including relations between the Chinese Communist Party and its army, the strategic worldview of Chinese leaders, military strategy and resourcing, conventional and nuclear modernization, military diplomacy and coercion, preparations for war, and the People's Liberation Army’s emerging global role. It also identifies the challenges facing China’s military and shows how its focus on supremacy in the region means that it is not yet prepared to fight with the same lethality beyond Asia. Different futures are possible, and the book concludes with a preview of what it might take for a truly "world-class" Chinese military to take the global stage.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Notes
Introduction
Purpose of the Book
General Argument
Chapter Outline
Notes
1 The Party’s Army
Political Control and the PLA
Excessive Autonomy
The Party Strikes Back
“Absolute” Party Loyalty?
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
2 Threat Perceptions
The Party’s Vision
A Complex Security Environment
Trouble at Home
Taiwan and the Neighborhood
A Strong Adversary
Global Risks
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
3 Strategy, Organization, and Resources
A Military Strategy for a New Era
Organizational Adaptation
Resources and Innovation
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
4 Conventional Forces
Ground Forces
Air Forces
Maritime Forces
Service Politics
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
5 Nuclear, Space, and Cyber Forces
Information Warfare and the Strategic Support Force
Cyberspace
Space
Other Strategic Capabilities
The PLA Rocket Force
An Evolving Nuclear Deterrent
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
6 Shaping the New Security Environment
Military Diplomacy
Sino–Russian Military Relations
Coercive Tactics
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
7 Preparing for War with Taiwan
Gray Zone Campaigns
Strategic Decisions
Major Combat
Countering Intervention
Lessons from Ukraine
Taiwan’s Defense
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
8 A Global PLA
A Light Footprint
Bases and Places
A Global Expeditionary Force
Conclusion
Further Reading
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Maps
Chapter 2
Map 2.1
The Taiwan Strait
Map 2.2
China’s Regional Environment
Map 2.3
Overlapping South China Sea Claims
Chapter 3
Map 3.1
Theater Commands
List of Figures
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Revised CMC Organization
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
PLA Postreform Organization
Figure 3.2
Force Distribution Across Theaters, Average from 2017 to 2023
Figure 3.3
Defense Budget Growth, 1989–2022
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
PLAA Main Battle Tank Modernization, 2009–2024
Figure 4.2
PLAA Organization Chart
Figure 4.3
PLAAF Fighter Modernization, 2009–2024
Figure 4.4
PLAAF H-6 Bomber Modernization, 2009–2024
Figure 4.5
PLAAF Organization Chart
Figure 4.6
PLAN Principal Surface Combatant Modernization, 2009–2024
Figure 4.7
PLAN Submarine Modernization, 2009–2024
Figure 4.8
PLAN Organization Chart
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Total Military Diplomatic Interactions by Activity, 2002–2023
Figure 6.2
PLA Military Diplomacy by Geographic Region, 2002–2023
Figure 6.3
Total Number of Senior-Level Meetings, 2002–2023
Figure 6.4
PLA Participation in Multilateral Meetings, 2000–2023
Figure 6.5
Total Outbound PLA Naval Port Calls, 2002–2023
Figure 6.6
Total PLA International Military Exercises by Type, 2002–2023
Figure 6.7
PLA Multilateral Military Exercises, 2002–2023
Figure 6.8
PLA Military Diplomacy with Russia, 2002–2023
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
PLARF Conventional Ballistic and Cruise Missiles, 2010–2024
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Chinese Participants in UN Peacekeeping Missions, 1990–2023
Figure 8.2
Expansion of PLA Expeditionary Capabilities, 2005–2023
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Security Challenges Listed in China’s Defense White Papers, 1998–2019
Chapter 3
Table 3.1
China’s Military Strategies, 1956–2019
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
PLA Satellites
Table 5.2
Rocket Force Bases and Brigades
Table 5.3
Estimated PLA Nuclear Forces, 2023 and 2030
Chapter 6
Table 6.1
Chinese Military Diplomatic Activities and Objectives
Table 6.2
Types of PLA and Paramilitary Intimidation Tactics
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
Comparison of 1995–1996 and 2022 Taiwan Strait Crises
Table 7.2
Cross-Strait Military Balance, 2013–2023
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
We dedicate this book to our fathers, Robert J. Wuthnow and David Calvin Saunders, and to our sons, Samuel Wuthnow, Thomas Wuthnow, and Miles Campbell Saunders, with respect, admiration, love, and hope for the future.
China’s Quest for Military Supremacy
JOEL WUTHNOW and PHILLIP C. SAUNDERS
polity
Copyright © Joel Wuthnow and Phillip C. Saunders 2025
The right of Joel Wuthnow and Phillip C. Saunders to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5695-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024939676
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Acknowledgments
Students are often the best teachers. This volume grew out of lectures that we designed for a course on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. The goal of the course was to find a way to explain how the PLA – which the Department of Defense has since designated as its “pacing challenge” – operates as an institution, what motivates its leaders, and how to evaluate its capabilities and operations in Asia and beyond. The material needed to be relatable to our students, who were mostly U.S. military officers at the lieutenant colonel/colonel level and senior civilians, while also avoiding the trap of mirror imaging. The PLA has tried to emulate some aspects of a Western military organization but has also remained different in many ways, especially in its Leninist identity and its commitment to defend a particular political party, the Chinese Communist Party. The PLA had also been changing very quickly during the Xi Jinping era, which meant that new teaching materials were needed. Dr. Wuthnow also offered a similar course for master’s degree students in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. More than a hundred students in these courses since 2020 helped us find ways to make knowledge about the PLA more accessible at a time when greater understanding is of the essence, and we tried to incorporate those lessons into this volume. For that, we are in their debt.
Our work is informed by our own research on the PLA and access to China’s military that resulted from our participation in various U.S.–China military exchanges. But a general work on the PLA far exceeded our own expertise and required that we draw on insights gleaned from the international PLA studies community, a network of scholars in North America, Europe, and Asia who collectively try to understand the critical features of Chinese military power through open sources despite the PLA’s notorious opacity. Presenters and discussants at annual PLA conferences, some of them sponsored by the National Defense University along with our partners at the RAND Corporation, Taiwan’s Council of Advanced Policy Studies, and the U.S. Institute of Peace, were especially useful in bringing us up to speed where we lacked subject matter expertise, challenging our assumptions, and improving our own research projects.1
Several colleagues went a step further and provided detailed feedback on previous drafts of this volume, either on individual chapters or the full manuscript. They include Kenneth W. Allen, Dennis J. Blasko, Tai Ming Cheung, Bernard D. Cole, Fiona Cunningham, J. Michael Dahm, David Finkelstein, Cristina Garafola, Geoffrey Gresh, Kristen Gunness, Melodie Ha, T.X. Hammes, David Logan, Ryan Martinson, Michael McDevitt, James Siebens, Andrew Taffer, and Jonah Victor. We also received constructive feedback from five anonymous reviewers at the prospectus stage and from two reviewers who read the draft manuscript. Their corrections, suggestions, and insights have made this volume immensely better than what we could have produced without their guidance. Undoubtedly, there will still be errors of fact and judgment in this book and for those we are solely responsible.
Completion of a volume such as this one requires a large and supportive team. At the National Defense University, we were fortunate to receive encouragement from the president, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Plehn, and from recent directors of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, Dr. Laura Junor and Dr. Denise Natali. We also benefited from excellent research assistance from several colleagues – Lauren Edson, Xiang “Sean” Chi, and Bernice Xu – who not only collected data and helped to prepare graphics and figures, but also provided useful comments on the manuscript. Parts of Chapter 5 benefited from research on Chinese nuclear modernization co-authored with David Logan and parts of Chapter 6 benefited from research on military diplomacy co-authored with Melodie Ha and research on China–Russia military relations co-authored with Andrew Taffer. At Polity Press, we thank our editor, Louise Knight, for her vision for a general reader on the Chinese military and for her support at every step of the process, as well as to editorial assistants Inès Boxman and Olivia Jackson, who kept us on track and steered us in the right direction on numerous occasions. Katherine Michaelson provided able proofreading assistance.
Notes
1.
The products of many of these conferences can be found online, most of them for free. Recent offerings include Joel Wuthnow et al., eds.,
Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan
(Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2022); Joel Wuthnow et al., eds.,
The PLA Beyond Borders: China’s Military in Regional and Global Context
(Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2021); and Phillip C. Saunders et al., eds.,
Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms
(Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2019).
Introduction
In August 2022, following a brief visit of then U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taipei, Beijing lost its temper. Alongside new economic penalties against Taiwan, China’s leaders tasked the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with conducting a bold series of military demonstrations against the island, which China considers a rogue province. The navy held live-fire exercises in seven zones around Taiwan, mimicking the maritime closure areas the island would face in a blockade; air force jets streamed across the midline of the Taiwan Strait, long considered an informal boundary between the two sides; ballistic missiles flew over the island at high altitudes; drones hovered with apparent impunity over Taiwan’s offshore islands; and military propagandists attacked reality itself by placing fabricated content on social media, suggesting that PLA units were operating far closer to Taiwan than they really were. International observers worried that Taiwan could be the next victim of great power aggression, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine six months earlier. Some feared that China’s leaders would order a full-scale attack by 2027, coinciding with the PLA’s centennial anniversary.
Much as the 2008 Olympics marked China’s emergence as a global heavyweight, the 2022 military demonstrations against Taiwan symbolized a new era for the PLA. No longer the humble force that former leader Deng Xiaoping had in mind in the 1980s when he urged patience – summed up in his often-quoted quip, “hide our capabilities and bide our time”1 – the PLA was now more confident, even brazen. Other signs of growing confidence included China’s increased use of intimidation tactics in regional territorial disputes, such as those with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India; the development of new capabilities, including a blue-water navy, stealth aircraft, innovative conventional missile forces, and a major nuclear buildup; a military reorganization launched at the end of 2015 that established a new joint command structure that will be instrumental in China’s ability to prepare for and conduct modern wars; and the bold leadership of Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, who exerted firmer control of the PLA than either of his immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Xi regularly visited PLA units, urging them to prepare to “fight and win wars,” rather than lining their own pockets.
Yet the PLA’s new era, unlike Putin’s Russia, has not involved large-scale wars against neighboring states. There is a sense of caution that reflects both the party’s preoccupation with economic stability at home and a belief that the military might not yet be fully prepared for the type of war China’s leaders would seek – one with a “quick victory” all but guaranteed. Although tensions with Taiwan and other neighbors have flared, Beijing has not lost sight of its long-term military modernization goals. In 2020, the CCP approved a new modernization plan with an initial milestone in 2027; other targets were fixed for 2035 and the country’s centennial in 2049, by which time the PLA would become “world-class forces,” if all went according to plan. The new era is thus defined not only by boldness, but also by a pragmatism that has set China on a different trajectory from its Russian partners and may lead it to field far more lethal and capable military forces in the coming decades.
Purpose of the Book
This book chronicles the development of Chinese military power in the new era. The general aim is to provide national security practitioners, students, and general readers with enough knowledge about how the PLA functions as an institution – its capabilities, structure, and operations – to place recent developments in context, understand how the military instrument supports the strategic goals of the CCP, and more effectively develop and analyze policies and strategies. It thus follows several previous works that provided broad assessments of the PLA in earlier eras.2 China’s increasing military assertiveness, coupled with important changes in PLA hardware and organization under Xi and the general shift in global geopolitics toward an era defined more by great power competition than by cooperation, requires a new look at where the PLA has been, where it is today, and where it might be heading.
A general assessment of China’s military power requires consideration of a variety of political, strategic, technical, and operational issues. The book’s questions thus include the following: what is the relationship between the PLA and the CCP, and how complete is the party’s control of the army? How do China’s leaders assess their security environment and what roles and missions does this imply for military power inside China, in Asia, and globally? How has China’s military strategy evolved, and what changes has this prompted to the PLA’s organizational structure and resourcing approaches? How has the PLA been modernizing the force across the individual warfighting domains, both conventional (land, air, and sea) and strategic (space, cyber, and nuclear)? In what ways are Chinese leaders employing military power to shape the regional environment to their advantage, and what successes and failures have they experienced? How is the PLA preparing for a war with Taiwan and the United States, what might be Beijing’s strategic calculus for when and how to use force, and what problems might be encountered? What is the Chinese military’s role outside of Asia, and are they poised to challenge the United States as a dominant military power?
The opaque nature of the Chinese system makes these questions difficult to answer. China does periodically publish defense white papers, PLA spokesmen comment on recent events in monthly press conferences, and the Chinese military publishes its own newspapers, though some sources (especially those published in English) are meant more to influence foreign perceptions than to inform. Chinese military pundits, some on active duty, often discuss military matters, but do not represent official views and often cater more to a domestic audience’s desire for patriotically charged rhetoric.3 PLA analysts publish professional articles and books, some of which are accessible, despite growing Chinese restrictions on the availability of sources for foreign researchers. Some of these works have been translated and can be studied by those interested in hearing what the PLA is telling itself.4 Just one example is the 2020 edition of the PLA’s Science of Military Strategy, a core text used to educate senior officers in China’s military educational system. We have also been fortunate in having had many interactions with PLA analysts and operational commanders in our roles at the U.S. National Defense University, which offered unique glimpses into PLA thinking and progress over the years.
The book also builds on a substantial literature that has been produced on the PLA outside China. At the official level, the U.S. Department of Defense publishes an annual report on China’s military power that offers a useful snapshot of PLA capabilities and operations, typically covering events that took place in the previous calendar year; others, including Japan and Taiwan, publish their own assessments. Foreign scholars of the PLA have produced top-notch studies on the individual PLA services and on other topics, such as China’s military strategy and technological innovation base.5 Conferences on the PLA, including those held in the United States, Taiwan, and Singapore, have produced volumes that add to our collective knowledge of how the PLA has been evolving.6 Nevertheless, information about the PLA remains fragmentary, sometimes conflicting and misleading, and difficult to access, meaning that many of the judgments offered in this book must remain tentative.
General Argument
The main contention in this book is that the PLA is stronger and more confident today than at any point in its history, although it also has intrinsic flaws that neither technology nor money will solve, and that create vulnerabilities should the PLA ever be ordered into combat. Any discussion of the PLA’s advantages must begin with a consideration of the direction and leadership provided to the army by the CCP, especially under Xi. The party has launched the country on a path toward the “China dream” of achieving “national rejuvenation” by the middle of the twenty-first century, and has clearly indicated that a strong military is essential if the country is to achieve related goals, including economic security, technological superiority, international influence, and especially “national reunification” with Taiwan. Xi has routinely discussed what he calls the “strong army dream,” which he views as part of the “China dream.” While he is often described as an “assertive” leader willing to use provocative military displays against neighbors,7 his pivotal contribution has been in building a stronger peacetime force, most notably carrying out a downsizing and major restructuring of the PLA, beginning in 2015 and continuing into the 2020s.
China’s confidence also results from qualitative and quantitative improvements in military hardware. PLA ground forces are equipped with a new generation of fighting vehicles, helicopters, and long-range artillery systems. The air force fields fifth-generation fighters that may be nearly as capable as their U.S. counterparts and has developed new long-range bombers and transport aircraft. The navy is often associated with its growing fleet of aircraft carriers, but its firepower is generated more from advanced surface combatants, such as the Renhai-class (Type-055) cruiser, as well as its upgraded diesel-electric attack submarines. China’s land-based missiles are among the world’s finest and include innovative technologies such as anti-ship ballistic missiles designed to target U.S. aircraft carriers, and long-range missiles fitted with hypersonic glide vehicles meant to evade U.S. missile defenses. China’s strategic forces have also been updated. These now include powerful anti-satellite weapons, offensive cyber forces, and most notably a rapidly expanding nuclear deterrent. There is also, to use a cliché, a “quality in quantity.” China’s military remains the world’s largest in terms of manpower. Its growing inventory of fighters, large-tonnage naval and Coast Guard ships (buttressed by the world’s largest shipbuilding industry), and missile forces are often displayed against those unable to muster similar numbers.
A third advantage is money. China’s official defense budget has surpassed $200 billion, though the actual figure is significantly higher, since several categories of defense expenditures, including research and development and paramilitary forces, are not included in the official numbers. Chinese defense spending outpaces that of all other Asian countries. It remains less than the roughly $800 billion the United States spends on its military, but PLA budgets support activities mostly confined to Asia, while U.S. budgets are stretched to fund operations globally. Maintaining steady budget growth over the last two decades has allowed the PLA to recruit and cultivate higher quality personnel, maintain equipment, conduct training, and procure modern capabilities – and the prospects for continued budget growth are bright. Indeed, China is still spending only a tiny fraction of its gross domestic product on the military (roughly 2%). This is far less than the Soviet Union spent in the late Cold War, when Moscow exhausted its treasury to compete with the West, and less than war-weary Russia, and even the United States today. Beijing has ample room to continue to fund the PLA even as China’s economic growth rates slow.
A final source of Chinese strength is what we might call strategic discipline. Chinese diplomats often comment that China has not gone to war since 1979, whereas the United States has been engaged in a near-continuous series of conflicts for much of the same period. Beijing has also avoided signing military alliances that could entangle it in others’ wars. These features of restraint are not a reflection of a benign foreign policy, but rather a result of the party’s commitment to amassing national strength, including capable military forces, in peacetime. Military expenses are manageable because the party does not need to pay the immense costs of mobilizing for and conducting a war. Even Xi Jinping has carefully sought to keep conflicts with territorial rivals and the United States below the level of lethal violence, instead pursuing military modernization as part of the party’s long-term aspirations to achieve “national rejuvenation.” As Oriana Mastro has argued, the origins of China’s successes can be traced to the strategic focus of a “stealth superpower.”8
Nevertheless, the PLA suffers from deep-rooted flaws, most of which cannot be fixed by building new capabilities or spending more money. The most fundamental problem is a lack of trust between the Chinese Communist Party and the army. Civilian autocrats throughout modern history have worried about how to build a military strong enough to protect the nation, but not so powerful that it adopts policies against the regime. Military coups in Romania (1989) and the Soviet Union (1991) are well known to Beijing; in China itself, leaders can remember the abortive coup that Lin Biao staged against Mao in 1971, as well as the 1989 Tiananmen movement, in which some in the PLA refused to obey orders to use force against student protesters. The concern today is not a coup, although this possibility can never be ruled out, but the challenge of managing a force that enjoys a high degree of autonomy. Xi has become the strongest leader of the PLA since Mao but has struggled with accountability among his senior officers. The limits on his control became clear in late 2023 when he fired his defense minister and the leaders of the strategic missile force under clouds of corruption – a turn of events that came a decade after Xi launched a massive anti-corruption campaign in the PLA and across the party-state. Questions about the reliability of his senior officers, and about the quality of the equipment they purchased, could reduce the party’s confidence in the PLA’s warfighting abilities.
Problems of accountability among PLA officers are worsened by doubts about their professional competence. Xi and other Chinese leaders have frequently lamented the poor technical and leadership abilities of those who would lead troops into battle. These officers are said to be afflicted with a “peace disease” – the idea that commanders without combat experience cannot imagine the difficulties they would face in war, and thus cannot effectively prepare for it. Xi has encouraged the PLA to cope with this problem through more realistic training, but this is at best a partial solution. Beyond these critiques, China’s military does not provide its officers with the same experiences that help build the leadership skills of their U.S. counterparts. Few PLA leaders have experience commanding troops outside their own service, weakening their ability to prepare for modern joint warfare. Even fewer have gained experience outside their own professional specialties; it is rare for a commander, for instance, to have served a tour in a logistics billet. Almost none of them have served for any length of time overseas or alongside foreign colleagues. This system promotes a rigidity of thought and institutional myopia that is not well suited to the rigors of command on a dynamic modern battlefield.
The PLA’s organizational culture also creates hindrances to quick and effective decision-making. Based on the party’s need to maintain control over the army, the PLA has retained important vestiges of the Leninist system it borrowed from the Soviets a century ago. This includes political commissars who function as co-equals at every echelon of the PLA down to the company level and party committees that adjudicate major decisions for units down to the battalion level. Compounding the problem is the tendency of the Central Military Commission (CMC) to micromanage decisions, and the dominant role played by Xi as its chairman. The conflux of consensus-based and centralized decision-making weakens the ability of individual commanders to make bold choices and adapt quickly to new or challenging situations without extensive consultations, a system completely at odds with the tendency of the U.S. and other Western militaries to empower lower-level officers through a principle sometimes referred to as “mission command.”9
A fourth limitation is the PLA’s modest global presence. China’s military strategy, organization, and resources are all oriented toward regional missions, especially operations against Taiwan and U.S. forces in Asia. There has been much less attention on projecting combat power far beyond China’s own neighborhood. Overseas operations are small in scale and typically only involve a single service, such as the navy’s deployment of ships to conduct anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden. There is no network of large overseas bases from which to conduct major combat operations, although the navy has begun establishing a more modest string of small bases and has access to civilian ports; and there is no joint command structure that would handle planning, training for, and leading more complex overseas operations. Despite warming relations with partners such as Russia and Pakistan, China cannot count on the military support of foreign nations for any war it might undertake. These limitations reduce China’s ability to coerce opponents far afield and would reduce its ability to prevail in an escalating global conflict with the United States. By contrast, the United States, for the foreseeable future, will leverage its alliances and forward presence to remain the world’s single remaining global military power.
The last disadvantage for the PLA, paradoxically, is strategic discipline. Refraining from wars after the end of the Cold War allowed China to become a “stealth superpower,” but also reflected Beijing’s desire to avoid serious risks to other interests. Protecting the economy from the consequences of war was not only necessary to further PLA modernization, but also to sustain growth, raise living standards, and deliver better governance. The party’s performance in meeting these goals was key to its legitimacy among the people and ultimately to its own survival. The development and use of China’s military tools has thus been carefully weighed against other priorities, some of which could be more vital to the party than even its own aspirations for “national reunification.” Based on these calculations, Beijing has hesitated to fully exploit the new capabilities at its disposal. It has intimidated Taiwan, regional rivals, and the United States, but has steered away from lethal violence and deescalated some crises, as it did after a melee involving Chinese and Indian troops in June 2020 that involved fatalities on both sides. External security goals remain unfulfilled, and, from a military perspective, the PLA has been unable to gain the combat experience it would need to overcome the “peace disease.”
In the years ahead, China could be tempted to go far beyond the August 2022 demonstrations after Speaker Pelosi’s visit and use lethal force against Taiwan. In some cases, such as a formal declaration of independence, Beijing might feel it has no choice. But lingering weaknesses and vulnerabilities limit the PLA’s prospects for a “quick victory” and create opportunities for China’s adversaries. For the United States and its allies, this means developing the agile forces, operational concepts, and skilled leadership necessary to deter and, if necessary, defeat aggression. In other regional disputes, bold Chinese ambitions, increasing budgets, “world-class forces,” and continued technological innovation will give the PLA greater confidence and options to intimidate its opponents. Outside Asia, much of the world faces a PLA with limited capabilities that is often employed more for positive publicity than for coercive purposes. In the foreseeable future, United States will remain the world’s leader in terms of ability to project combat power, but over the long run, new capabilities and changes in the strategic landscape could chart a different course for a PLA that has been, thus far, mainly concerned with problems found much closer to home.
Chapter Outline
The remainder of the volume is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 considers the PLA’s status as a pillar of the CCP, and the limits of the party’s ability to exercise control over the military. It provides an overview of the history and current structure of party control, as exercised through the political commissar and party committee systems. It then argues that the party’s need to grant the PLA sufficient autonomy to professionalize set the stage for corruption, poor coordination between the PLA and other bureaucracies, and continuing questions about the ideological commitment of some PLA officers to the party’s values. Xi Jinping has sought to strengthen the party’s role in the military, and consolidate his own power in the process, by being more involved in the PLA than either Jiang or Hu, controlling key appointments, increasing power to internal watchdogs such as financial auditors, carrying out a widespread anti-corruption campaign, and trumpeting the need for ideological orthodoxy. But the limits of these reforms became clear when, a decade into his tenure, Xi was forced to fire numerous senior officers due to suspected corruption. Strains between the party and its army are likely to continue and could grow into more serious threats to the regime.
Chapter 2 describes the strategic worldview of Chinese leaders. It argues that the PLA is not simply reacting to perceived slights by others but is an important tool for the party to advance its vision of “national rejuvenation” by addressing problems at the domestic, regional, and global levels. Internally, the PLA and its paramilitary cousin, the People’s Armed Police, are the ultimate backstop to regime survival and ensure control over parts of the country prone to unrest, especially Tibet and Xinjiang. Regionally, concerns that Taiwan is slipping toward independence dictate that the PLA deter independence and increase its ability to compel unification talks or seize the island. China’s periphery contains varied other problems, ranging from hotly contested territorial claims in the South and East China seas, and across the Sino–Indian border, to potential conflict on the Korean Peninsula. The military thus needs to enforce Chinese sovereignty claims and prepare for other contingencies. Moreover, in the PLA’s mindset, the United States remains the pivotal strategic challenger, whose military forces may intervene to support Taiwan or a regional ally. Countering U.S. influence in the region and preparing to oppose U.S. intervention are therefore important PLA missions. Globally, the party worries about threats to critical imports, the safety of Chinese citizens, and maintaining a positive image for China. This creates an expectation that the PLA must be able to operate overseas, even if its main attention is focused domestically and on China’s periphery.
Chapter 3 explains the evolution of China’s military strategy from the Cold War to the present and the resulting implications for the PLA’s organization and approaches to resourcing and innovation. The current strategy requires the PLA to focus on Taiwan while also preparing to respond to domestic emergencies, conduct other regional operations, and go abroad when needed. The main form of operations for the PLA has shifted from large-scale ground combat to “integrated joint operations” involving close collaboration among the services and across the warfighting domains. One of Xi’s main contributions was overseeing a restructuring of the PLA to become more joint – a new command structure was fashioned whose main duties include planning, training for, and conducting joint operations. These reforms ultimately improved the PLA’s effectiveness by allowing forces to operate with greater cohesiveness and to transition more quickly from peacetime to wartime. At the same time, increasing budgets have allowed the PLA to purchase the advanced hardware and recruit the technically literate personnel it will need to conduct its most important missions. The procurement system has also been adjusted to reduce reliance on foreign arms imports, strengthen China’s defense industrial base, and foster closer cooperation between the military and civilian firms, which have been on the leading edge in developing artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other technologies the PLA will need in the “intelligentized” wars of the future.
China’s military strategy has guided the modernization of conventional and strategic forces. Chapter 4 considers modernization across the land, air, and sea domains. The ground forces have lost manpower but remain politically influential and conduct important missions in border security, as the land force in a Taiwan invasion, and in preparing for conflicts on the Korean Peninsula or with India. In addition, the People’s Armed Police has undergone reforms to handle internal security and augment the PLA in wartime. The air force has styled itself as a “strategic” service whose missions have grown beyond territorial air defense to encompass long-range strike and power projection. The navy is no less “strategic,” blossoming in a few decades from a coastal defense force to a “blue water” force that has sailed past the first island chain, and into the Indian Ocean and beyond, while coordinating with the Coast Guard and maritime militias in managing regional disputes closer to home. All three services have produced “world-class” equipment and increased the quality of their personnel. Yet, as with most modern militaries, the PLA also suffers from interservice competition for prestige, influence, and resources that limits progress toward a capable, and cooperative, joint force.
Chapter 5 turns to the modernization of China’s strategic forces in the nuclear, space, and cyber domains. Chinese strategists view dominance in the information domain, which includes space, cyberspace, and electronic warfare, as critical for modern warfare. The PLA has invested heavily in offensive cyber and counterspace capabilities to exploit U.S. military vulnerabilities, but its efforts to harness space and cyberspace to support joint operations have also created new vulnerabilities. A future conflict will almost certainly involve warfare in space and cyberspace; the question is whether it will also affect critical civilian infrastructure and nuclear-related command and control systems. The Rocket Force operates China’s ground-based conventional and nuclear missiles, which give the PLA long-range precision-strike capabilities and are the linchpin of China’s nuclear deterrent. China has embarked on an unprecedented buildup of its nuclear forces, including the creation of a nuclear triad, and appears to be rethinking the political and military utility of nuclear weapons. One important goal may be to provide a “nuclear shield” that would give China the freedom of action to initiate a conventional conflict against Taiwan while reducing the risk of U.S. intervention or nuclear escalation. A larger Chinese nuclear arsenal will have important implications for regional security, strategic stability, and the global arms control regime.
Chapter 6 considers how a modernized PLA has sought to shape the regional environment in China’s favor. This has followed a dual-track approach, combining military diplomacy to win “hearts and minds” with coercive diplomacy. On one track, the PLA engages with foreign militaries through senior-level visits, bilateral and multilateral security dialogues, military exercises, ports calls, and functional exchanges. It also conducts non-traditional security cooperation to demonstrate that a stronger PLA can make contributions to regional security. PLA exercises with foreign militaries mostly focus on non-traditional security, but its exercises with Russia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Pakistan have been more combat-focused, including Sino–Russian bomber and maritime patrols in Northeast Asia. On another track, the PLA has used intimidation tactics to shape adversary decision-making, including military construction in disputed areas, aggressive enforcement of territorial claims, dangerous intercepts of U.S. and allied military operations near China, and disinformation campaigns. PLA coercion has undercut efforts to portray China as a peaceful power and led regional countries to improve their diplomatic and security ties with the United States, the European Union, and major powers such as Japan, India, and Australia. The PLA has thus succeeded in shaping the regional security environment, but not in the manner party leaders desired.
Chapter 7 covers China’s preparations for war with Taiwan. It argues that Beijing has several options short of war to exert greater pressure on Taipei, including a quarantine of the island using its numerically superior maritime forces. However, Beijing faces complex economic, military, and political tradeoffs in any strategic decision to implement any of its major military campaigns against Taiwan, including missile bombardments, blockades, or a full-scale invasion. Among the most important factors is Beijing’s perception of the likelihood and effectiveness of U.S. intervention on Taiwan’s behalf. This would create a much larger and less predictable conflict than the narrower fight the PLA prefers, and so Chinese planners have devoted much attention to the ways in which they can counter U.S. intervention. One of those is leveraging China’s growing strategic arsenal to intimidate Washington, mirroring the apparent success that Putin had in brandishing his powerful nuclear capabilities to minimize NATO’s role on the Ukraine battlefield. Rising confidence that the PLA can fight the war it wants, however, must be balanced against recent adaptations that Taiwan is making to improve its own defenses, and adjustments in U.S. strategy to operate in a contested environment.
The final chapter widens the aperture to consider the PLA’s role outside Asia. Based on the imperatives of China’s military strategy to focus on deterrence and warfighting in the immediate periphery, there has been far less attention on global roles and missions. Over the last few decades, the PLA’s overseas presence has mostly been confined to UN peacekeeping missions, anti-piracy patrols near the Horn of Africa, and a few non-combatant evacuations. The opening of a naval base in Djibouti in 2017 and Chinese ownership and management of civilian ports across the Indian Ocean region and beyond marked a new effort to develop the logistics infrastructure needed to support PLA operations abroad. However, several constraints remain, including the absence of an overseas joint command structure and lack of military allies. Future changes to the PLA’s overseas role will be shaped by changes in the security environment. Resolution of the Taiwan issue on China’s terms, for instance, could free up resources for China to undertake a far more ambitious military presence abroad. Absent such changes, it remains doubtful that the PLA will be able to compete with the United States as a global military power.
Notes
1.
Shin Kawashima, “The Development of the Debate Over ‘Hiding One’s Talents and Biding One’s Time’ (
taoguang yanghui
),”
Asia
–
Pacific Review
18: 2 (2011): 17–19.
2.
These include Harlan Jencks’s
From Muskets to Missiles: Politics and Professionalization in the Chinese Army, 1945–1981
(London: Routledge, 1982), which explained how the PLA developed under Mao; Ellis Joffe’s
The Chinese Army After Mao
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), which took stock of the PLA’s initial reforms under Deng; David Shambaugh’s
Modernizing China’s Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), which surveyed the PLA’s advances in the 1990s; and Roger Cliff’s
China’s Military Power: Assessing Current and Future Capabilities
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), which documented PLA modernization into the early 2010s.
3.
Andrew Chubb, “Propaganda, Not Policy: Explaining the PLA’s ‘Hawkish Faction,’”
China Brief
, July 25, 2013.
https://jamestown.org/program/propaganda-not-policy-explaining-the-plas-hawkish-faction-part-one/
.
4.
The China Aerospace Studies Institute’s “In Their Own Words” series is an excellent starting point.
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/CASI/In-Their-Own-Words/
.
5.
See Ian Burns McCaslin and Andrew S. Erickson, “The People’s Liberation Army (PLA),”
Oxford Bibliography
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021).
6.
These conferences include a series sponsored by the U.S. National Defense University, the RAND Corporation, the Council on Advanced Policy Studies (Taipei), and most recently the U.S. Institute of Peace. Recent conference volumes, all from NDU Press, include
Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan
(2022)
, The PLA Beyond Borders: China’s Military in Regional and Global Context
(2021), and
Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms
(2019). See also James Char, ed.,
Modernising the People’s Liberation Army: Aspiring to be a Global Military Power
(London: Routledge, 2024).
7.
The label “assertive” has often been applied to Xi. See, e.g., Robert D. Blackwill and Kurt M. Campbell,
Xi Jinping on the Global Stage
(New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2016). Yet there is also a strong academic debate about whether China under his leadership has actually become more assertive. See Alastair Iain Johnston, “How New and Assertive Is China’s New Assertiveness?”
International Security
37:4 (2013), 7–48.
8.
Oriana Skylar Mastro,
Upstart: How China Became a Great Power
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
9.
Mission Command White Paper
, Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 3, 2012.
1The Party’s Army
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is on its way toward fielding “world-class forces” by mid-century, but the price of that transformation is incomplete control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its civilian leadership. Founding leader Mao Zedong sought a symbiotic relationship between the party and the army but understood that to modernize it needed some autonomy to manage its own affairs. In the later 1970s, Deng Xiaoping expanded the PLA’s latitude to pursue modernization and allowed it to go into business to compensate for tight budgets. This helped build the PLA into a more competent professional force but had negative repercussions such as excessive military secrecy, widespread corruption, and a perceived drift away from strict obedience to party values and priorities. His successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, made attempts to rein in the army, but with limited success.
Sensing a military slipping from the party’s grasp, Xi Jinping made serious efforts to restore party control. Some of the tools he used include strengthening his own status as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), appointing trusted allies into senior roles, reinforcing Marxist political indoctrination (as well as promoting “Xi Jinping Thought”) within the PLA, breaking up patronage networks and rotating senior officers, and increasing the authority of the PLA’s internal watchdogs: auditors, anti-corruption inspectors, and military courts. Xi’s goal is for the PLA to become both more “red” (politically reliable) and more “expert” at fighting wars.
However, Xi’s push for total control of the military has yielded mixed results. Xi has become the strongest leader of the PLA since Mao and used his strong influence to push through historic reforms and pursue a cleaner and more professional officer corps. Yet even after Xi’s attempts to enforce tighter party supervision, the PLA is still a largely self-governed force with limited opportunities for civilian oversight and intervention. Moreover, powerful fiefdoms continue to exist in the PLA, and its degree of acceptance of Marxist virtues of selfless sacrifice, especially among a senior leadership awash with growing defense budgets, is dubious at best. The limits of party control became strikingly clear in late 2023 when Xi fired his defense minister and the leadership of his strategic missile force under a cloud of corruption. Given incomplete political control, CCP civilian leaders will continue to be wary that the army is pursuing its own agenda; “absolute” loyalty to the party will never be taken for granted.
This chapter explores the relationship between the CCP and the PLA in five sections. The first discusses how Chinese leaders since Mao sought to maintain political control over the PLA while pursuing modernization. It also provides an overview of the political work system instrumental to the party’s control over the army. The second argues that excessive autonomy granted to the PLA under Deng led to management and supervision problems that his successors had to grapple with even as they promoted military professionalization. The third section explains how Xi pursued a multipronged political strategy to strengthen the party’s (and his own) control. The fourth analyzes the results of Xi’s strategy and suggests that internal governance remains a key challenge for China’s military. The conclusion argues that the party will have to navigate a balance between an army that is both “red” and “expert.”
Political Control and the PLA
The central dilemma of civil–military relations is how to build an army strong enough to defend the nation, but not so independent that it threatens the political status quo.1 In mature democracies, the problem is alleviated by a military code of values that includes acceptance of the principle of civilian control, aided by external monitoring mechanisms such as legislative oversight, the rule of law, and a free press. Under these circumstances, militaries can serve as an effective warfighting force but have little interest in interfering in domestic politics.
In China, by contrast, the army serves as the armed wing of the CCP. This is captured in Mao’s famous dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the party.”2 Mao’s general view was that the military should be closely aligned with the party’s Marxist–Leninist values and revolutionary agenda. This accorded with the PLA’s origins as a body of “revolutionary soldiers” – founded on August 1, 1927, at the outset of the Civil War between the CCP and the ruling Nationalist party – who saw themselves as instrumental in carrying out the party’s utopian vision. The wartime relationship between civilian political cadres responsible for recruiting, motivating, and directing soldiers to achieve CCP political objectives and soldiers fighting under the party’s direction to achieve a revolutionary victory produced close ties between CCP civilians and PLA personnel. These ties endured even when CCP civilians turned their attention to building the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into a powerful socialist state.
During much of the Mao era (1949–1976), the boundaries between civilian and military spheres were blurred because China’s senior CCP leaders had extensive military experience and connections gained through service in the war against Japan and the Chinese Civil War. CCP civilians made key strategic decisions, including to intervene against United Nations forces in the Korean War and to pursue nuclear weapons. After launching the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to secure his position against perceived rivals inside the CCP civilian leadership, Mao ultimately called the PLA out from the barracks to restore order and govern society at the grassroots level.
Party control over the PLA was reinforced by a system of political control based on the organizational practices of the Soviet Red Army, which had been established during the Bolshevik Revolution a decade earlier. Soviet leaders, especially Leon Trotsky, understood that party control could not be taken for granted based on common values, but must be actively enforced through close supervision at all levels.3 Mao and his colleagues embraced this opinion, as did his successors, who ensured that most of this system of control survived through the present. At the pinnacle, the CMC serves as the nexus between the party’s most senior civilian official and the military brass. Technically an organ of the CCP Central Committee, the commission is responsible for high-level decision-making, weighing in on subjects such as organizational structure, military strategy, acquisition, and leadership issues. The commission is typically chaired by the top civilian leader who serves concurrently as party general-secretary. This system channels contacts between PLA leaders and the CCP civilian leadership through the civilian CMC chairman and prevents senior PLA officers from lobbying individual members of the Politburo Standing Committee.
At lower tiers of the PLA, party control is the remit of political commissars and party committees. Under the “dual-leadership” system, the PLA officers who serve as political commissars occupy equal authority with military commanders in units down to the company level. The two officers routinely consult with each other, though in practice there is a division of labor whereby commanders focus on professional military issues such as training and planning, while commissars are responsible for morale, personnel management, and political indoctrination. Political commissars are in a specialized career track, although many began their careers as commanders and they receive similar training (thus enabling them to scrutinize commanders’ judgments and provide input on military decisions). In the view of Mao and his successors, “dual leadership” was so critical to party control that the PLA retained the system permanently. The Soviets, by contrast, found that it damaged battlefield efficiency and downgraded commissars to become members of the commander’s staff during World War II.
Party control is also exercised through party committees at all units of the PLA down to the battalion level. Companies have similar arrangements called party branches. Under the Leninist principle of collective decision-making, party committees – composed of political commissars (who serve as the secretary), commanders (who serve as deputy secretary), their deputies, and a few others – are supposed to have the final say in major decisions in peacetime. One of their most important functions is selecting candidates for promotion. They also transmit high-level party guidance down to the units. Only during emergencies can the normal functioning of party committees be suspended, though even in these cases commanders and political commissars are supposed to consult with each other and promptly report their decisions to their committee. Party committees are in turn responsible to committees at the next higher level, all the way up to the highest-level party committee: the CMC. The commissar and party committee apparatus is administratively guided by the Political Work Department, whose director sits on the CMC. This department is the successor to the General Political Department (GPD), whose roots can be traced back to 1930.4
Even PLA personnel outside the political work system are intimately involved in party affairs. All PLA personnel take an oath of loyalty to the party, rather than to a constitutional order as in the Western system:
I am a member of the People’s Liberation Army. I promise that I will follow the leadership of the Communist Party of China, serve the people wholeheartedly, obey orders, strictly observe discipline, fight heroically, fear no sacrifice, loyally discharge my duties, work hard, practice hard to master combat skills, and resolutely fulfill my missions. Under no circumstances will I betray the Motherland or desert the army.5
The overwhelming majority of PLA officers are party members in good standing; they need to attend periodic party meetings, have a grounding in party dogma and history, study the party leadership’s positions on contemporary issues, and follow party rules related to personal conduct, such as those prohibiting accepting bribes, engaging in for-profit business activities, practicing religion, traveling without permission, or criticizing the party. Many non-commissioned officers and some conscripts are also party members. Officers and enlisted personnel, including those who choose not to become party members, are also subject to regular party indoctrination through study sessions (and in the modern day, study programs that can be completed online). Some accounts suggest that political indoctrination accounts for about 40 percent of basic training and about 20 percent to 30 percent of a soldier’s time once they have joined a unit.6
At various times, however, the pursuit of party control has conflicted with the military’s need to carve out a separate sphere in which to become a professional warfighting force. In the mid-1950s, Marshal Peng Dehuai, who led Chinese forces in the Korean War, sought to build the PLA into a more modern force by means such as differentiated uniforms and ranks, professional military education, and modern military doctrine stressing combined-arms operations.7 Peng also advocated following the Soviets in abandoning the “dual leadership” system, but failed to convince Mao and was eventually purged for questioning Mao’s decision to launch the Great Leap Forward. During the 1960s, Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi advocated the PLA becoming both “red” and “expert.” This call for increased focus on building military expertise faced opposition as Mao sought to keep the army’s focus on social revolution. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) constitutes a lost decade for PLA modernization as the army became deeply involved in politics, maintaining domestic order, and local governance.
Following Mao’s death in 1976, Deng encouraged PLA leaders to focus on building military skills rather than politics and granted the PLA more autonomy to pursue this goal.8 Getting the PLA “back into the barracks” was not difficult because most officers, especially among the younger generations, had little interest in governing society. Military representation in key CCP decision-making organs decreased over time, so that the military now holds only about 20 percent of the seats on the party Central Committee, and the PLA lost its final representative on the Politburo Standing Committee in 1997. Senior PLA officers, including the CMC vice chairmen who remained on the lower-level Politburo, increasingly confined their contributions to the military sphere.9 The CMC insulated the PLA from civilian intervention while limiting the PLA’s ability to pursue its own institutional interests by exploiting potential splits in the CCP leadership. The result was a PLA leadership focused on improving military capability that made significant progress on modernization and reform during the Deng era and into the 1990s.
Unlike Peng Dehuai, however, Deng did not seek reduced party influence within the army. As in civilian governance, top CCP leaders relied on both the political values of loyal party members (including the duty to obey decisions made by senior party leaders) and monitoring mechanisms to ensure compliance and exercise control over the military. Deng advocated a professional military ethos that blended technical competence with political subordination. PLA officers cultivated martial virtues such as leadership, courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice but did not develop a code of professional ethics independent of the CCP.10 The PLA remained a party–army, party membership was still required of officers, and political work continued and even increased after the 1989 Tiananmen crisis, when some PLA units did not obey orders.
Excessive Autonomy
While the expansion of a distinct military sphere in the 1980s succeeded in keeping the PLA in its “bureaucratic lane in the road,” the ways in which Deng promoted military autonomy produced negative consequences for party control that Xi Jinping ultimately needed to address thirty years later. Unlike militaries in mature democracies, there were no credible external constraints, such as legislative or judicial oversight. The fact that a large share of PLA revenue came from off-budget commercial activities, which Deng tolerated to compensate the military for low official budgets in the 1980s, reduced the effectiveness of budgets as a tool of civilian oversight (although the PLA did gradually become more dependent on state funding approved by the National People’s Congress as extra-budgetary revenue declined in the 1990s). This new party–army bargain, which James Mulvenon has referred to as “conditional compliance,” was like that in other communist countries in which coercive forces and other “strategic groups” were compensated for their political acquiescence.11
There was also no attempt to create additional civilian control such as a secretary of defense-equivalent within the military. The party general-secretary, in his role as CMC chairman, provided the sole link between the civilian party elite and the PLA.12 As a result, civilian control rested on the authority and effectiveness of the CMC chairman. While Deng wielded strong influence due to his decades of military experience and extensive network of military contacts, his successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, came into office with no military experience or close ties to the PLA. Both had to curry favor among senior officers to consolidate their authority, including by tolerating corruption. Senior PLA officers often took advantage of this situation through illicit business empires or corrupt promotion schemes. Jiang’s continuing efforts to exert power and influence from retirement also enhanced the military’s leverage at Hu’s expense. Jiang stayed on as CMC chairman for two years after Hu’s accession as CCP general-secretary and the former’s hand-picked choices of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou as CMC vice chairmen undercut Hu’s authority even after Jiang stepped down in 2004.13
