CHINESE ARMY NATIONAL MILITARY STRATEGY

In the immediate wake of Tiananmen in 1989 and for at least 2 years thereafter, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was deeply engaged, for obvious reasons, in an intense period of political work. The seemingly singular focus of the Chinese armed forces on strengthening Party-Army ties and on ideology was cause for foreign students of Chinese military affairs to wonder whether the first decade of the 1990s, like the 10 years during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, would turn out to be another “lost decade” from the standpoint of military modernization and enhanced professionalism. Clearly, this turned out not to be the case. If anything, the decade of the 1990s should be viewed as a period during which the PLA made tremendous strides as a professional military force.

At mid 2007, the PLA is over 3½ years beyond a seminal decade of focused and sustained efforts to modernize. For more than a decade, the armed forces of China have been undergoing transformative adjustments of such a profound nature relative to their past that one group of Chinese military authors considers this ongoing period of reform to constitute the PLA’s “Third Modernization.” Since the end of Beijing’s ninth Five Year Plan in 2000, many of the outputs and “deliverables” of this remarkable period of change have become evident to foreign observers of Chinese military affairs. Ardent analysts, scholars, and other observers of the PLA are familiar with the long list of changes that have unfolded, and it is not the purpose of this chapter to provide a comprehensive accounting of them. At the same time, for those less familiar with what has transpired, a brief overview may usefully provide some appreciation of the scope and scale of the changes undergone or underway.

For the sake of brevity, almost all the reforms or modernization efforts the PLA has engaged in over the past 13 years can be treated under at least one of what I refer to as “The Three Pillars” of PLA reform and modernization. They are:

Pillar 1: The development, procurement, acquisition, and fielding of new weapons systems, technologies,
and combat capabilities. Under this pillar, one would cite:

• End item purchases from Russia such as SU-27 and SU-30 aircraft, Kilo Class submarines, Sovremenny destroyers, and precision-guided munitions (PGMs);
• Indigenously produced conventional weapons systems such as Chinese-made submarines and surface vessels, armor, and communications equipment;
• Production of conventional missiles and upgrading the quality and survivability of China’s nuclear arsenal; and
• Basic research and development in which the PLA is engaged domestically to produce information age military technologies, to include the creation of a fourth general department (the General Equipment Department, 1998) in yet another rectification of the military research and development (R&D) establishment.

Pillar 2: The vast array of institutional and systemic reforms. These include critical changes to the PLA’s
corporate culture that are focused on raising the levels of professionalism of the officer corps and enlisted
force (especially NCOs) and making them more adept at employing and maintaining new battlefield technologies. This pillar also encompasses the myriad organizational changes aimed at optimizing the force,
many of which came into effect in the mid-to-late 1990s. Under this pillar, one could list:

• Major changes to the officer professional military education system;
• The creation for the first time of a corps of professional NCOs;
• More stringent requirements for officer commissioning, the diversification of the sources of commissioning, and the standardization of criteria for promotion; and
• Force structure adjustments that include a significant new emphasis on the Navy, Air Force, and strategic rocket forces, the downsizing of staffs, the consolidation of ground force units at the division and brigade levels, and new battlefield logistics paradigms.



Pillar 3: The development of new warfighting doctrines for the employment of these new capabilities. In 1999 the PLA revised its operational-level doctrine from its previous emphasis on ground force-centric combined arms operations to one emphasizing joint operations in the aerospace, maritime, and electromagnetic battle space dimensions. This new operational doctrine is aimed at shifting the PLA:


• From a focus on operational planning to prosecute protracted wars on the mainland to short-duration high intensity joint campaigns off China’s littoral;
• From focusing on an enemy’s weakest forces to attacking and destroying the enemy’s most vital
assets;
• From the concept of mass to the concept of concentration of firepower; and
• From static defenses to mobile offenses.

In short, the attention of the PLA is now doctrinally fixed on being able to prosecute short campaigns inflicting
shock and paralysis (vice long wars of attrition) to level the technological playing field at the inception of hostilities by concentrating PLA’s best capabilities against the enemy’s most important assets. Taken in their totality, the programs instituted by the PLA to date constitute a set of significant strides in modernization and reform efforts that will enable the PLA to become over time a more capable force in an operational sense and a more professional one in an institutional sense.

None of this happened overnight. It is the result of a series of carefully made decisions, sustained focus, increased levels of funding, prioritization, and incrementally implemented changes and adjustments over time.