The new red army

The new red army
Chinese soldiers at Tiananmen Square
Eyes right: Chinese soldiers at Tiananmen Square on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Photo: Reuters
Since Xi Jinping took over as the general secretary of the Communist Party of China and became president of the republic in November 2012 and March 2013 respectively, perhaps the most marked difference from his predecessor Hu Jintao has been his dealings with the military. Under the terms of his succession as head of the party and as president, Xi was also given his third post-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC)-putting him in the unique position of commanding the party, government and military all at once.

On February 1, Xi announced what the PLA Daily described as "the largest scale military reform since the 1950s". The reforms will cement his direct control over every sphere of the vast military, which has, for decades, functioned as a state within a state, with untrammelled power and nil supervision. Besides its four main forces-the army, navy, air force and Second Artillery Corps that commands missiles and nuclear weapons-the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was run by a vast bureaucracy spread over four general departments-the general staff, political, logistics and armament. Largely autonomous fiefdoms, favoured generals here promoted their own, lined their pockets and ruled over vast bureaucracies and commercial interests worth billions.

In January, Xi, in one swift stroke, disbanded the four departments and brought them under the direct control of the CMC. Cut to size, they have been placed on a par with 15 smaller, specialised functional 'services' departments, including one devoted to anti-corruption and "discipline inspection". Xi described the move as "a dramatic breakthrough made in the reform of the military leadership and command system". So, for the first time in the PLA's history, the CMC will take control of its entire administration.

A second major reform was announced on February 1, consolidating what were earlier seven sprawling military area commands covering China's entire territory into five "theatre commands" (see graphic) that will be responsible for combat readiness and will report directly to the CMC. For the first time, the five theatres will also have a joint command of integrated land, air and navy services, in addition to two new services that have been set up: a PLA Rocket Force that will be a scaled-up Second Artillery Corps and control China's missiles; and a PLA Strategic Support Force which will, according to observers, include an expanded cyber warfare division.

A depleted force
For all the impressions of the PLA-both in China and overseas-as a fearsome fighting unit, its recent history has been anything but glorious. Its last real experience of combat, against the Vietnamese in 1979, was a wake-up call, leaving the Chinese with a bloody nose. The PLA hasn't been in major combat since. But two recent episodes that tested its capabilities caused its top brass and military observers in Beijing consternation, cementing the perception that a once hardy revolutionary army-that fought the Americans in Korea, bested India and challenged the Russians-had become a bloated outfit whose generals concentrated more on the army's vast commercial interests than in training troops.

The first came in May 2008, when a devastating earthquake struck western Sichuan province, claiming over 70,000 lives. The PLA was called in to lead the rescue effort. The quake struck remote areas, but it was not entirely out of reach of the PLA's sprawling headquarters in provincial capital Chengdu. The response, however, was slow and lumbering, so inept, in fact, that it prompted an internal inquest into overhauling training at all levels.

Graphic by Saurabh Singh
Barely a year later came the second test, when mobs of armed Uighurs went on the rampage in Urumqi, capital of the Muslim-majority Xinjiang province, setting buildings afire and slaughtering Chinese residents over two days. The official death toll was 197, but Uighur or Chinese, all agreed that the real number of casualties, on both sides, was far higher. Again, the army response was found wanting. One former official of the paramilitary unit, the People's Armed Police, recalled the confusion in the chain of command. Initially, young officers, with barely any training and not armed with guns, were sent to confront armed mobs of a several thousand. According to protocol, permission was required to deploy more advanced units. It never came. So confused was the response that then president Hu Jintao, who by then had taken over the PLA as the head of the CMC, had to leave the ongoing G20 meeting in Italy and rush back.
The enemy within
Xi, his successor, is taking no chances on such incidents recurring. Both Hu and, before him, Jiang Zemin, had to cede control of the army to their predecessors in their first few years in power. In Hu's time, so influential was Jiang that even after retirement, he continued to hold an office in the PLA's Ba Yi headquarters and to receive files. The kind of power Xi now has, no Chinese leader has had in a generation. And he, clearly, hasn't been afraid of using it. Hence his reform of the military.

The PLA is unlike any other military: it doesn't work for the state, but for one political party. The relationship between the Communist Party of China and the PLA is complex. So concerned is the civilian party leadership about control over the PLA that not a month goes by in Beijing without a high-profile announcement reiterating that the PLA's loyalty must be only to the party. Troops, even today, are made to undergo political training, sitting through hours of study of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought.

In practice, however, the PLA has largely been left to its own devices. In a sense, its loyalty has been bought: the army was given vast commercial interests, from real estate to valuable industries, and supported by a ballooning defence budget that has recorded annual double-digit growth this past decade, set to cross $150 billion this year. That will now end.

Building a new army
The basic objectives of Xi's reform, PLA officials and experts say, are twofold: to centralise PLA decision-making in the hands of the CMC-and Xi-and transform what has historically been a land-dominated military into a nimble, integrated force. Xi began the process in September when he announced a demobilisation of 3,00,000 troops of the 2.3 million-strong PLA. The services departments under the CMC will handle the former task, while the new theatre commands are tasked with the latter. The idea, explains Zhao Xiaozhuo, a military expert in Beijing, is to strengthen the CMC's hand and to "reinforce the party's absolute leadership to the army".

By no means are these reforms an overnight transformation: the groundwork was, in fact, laid more than two decades ago. The reforms are finally implementing what was a strategy adopted in 1993 after the Gulf War, when the PLA, alarmed by the demonstration of US firepower, changed its abiding mission from that of "a people's war" to winning "local wars under informatised [or high-tech] conditions". Given the PLA's history as a "revolutionary army", where it has had a special historical role and cast a long shadow over other services, it has been difficult for the Communist Party to turn it into an integrated force.

Xi's reform hopes to change that. "From an organisational or institutional perspective, these reforms are unprecedented," says Taylor Fravel, an expert on the PLA and political science professor at MIT. "They represent the abolition of the general staff system and military region structure the PLA had adopted in the 1950s. If successful-and it's a big if-they should improve its combat effectiveness."

High fly: Xi presents flag to Northern theatre commander Song Puxuan in Beijing. Photo: AP
The earlier system "hampered joint command", says Fravel. "The main reason to create a ground forces headquarters and elevate the second artillery to a service as the PLA rocket force is to improve the joint command of troops. But the difficulty of successfully implementing these reforms should be stressed. Such wide-ranging organisational changes are not easy, so the reforms are very much a work in progress and the real work of organisational change has only just started."
Xi, no doubt, faces a challenge. But the view in Beijing is that he is the best-placed leader in decades to achieve this. "On almost all fronts, through publicly available information, the past three years have seen rapid progress in the PLA's modernisation," says Shen Dingli, a leading Chinese security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai. Unlike his predecessors Jiang and Hu, Xi's "Red roots" give him indisputable credentials. His father, Xi Zhongxun, is among the Communist Party's revolutionary heroes. The 'Second Red Generation'-the sons and daughters of the party's founding revolutionaries-have "rallied around Xi", says Beijing historian Zhang Lifan who follows Red family histories. They place faith in him to revive the party and the PLA-both of which the Red families see as their "inheritances", according to Zhang.

A case in point is fellow "princeling" Liu Yuan, son of former president Liu Shaoqi, a PLA general whom Xi has relied on in his battle to clean up the army. Liu played a key role in dismantling the vast fiefdom of the General Logistics Department-long seen as the most corrupt. Liu brought down its deputy director, Lieutenant General Gu Junshan, who controlled this fiefdom. Gu became the highest-ranked PLA officer to be arrested, tried and convicted in 2015, for illegal sale of military real estate-out of which he made millions-and "abuse of power", believed to have involved selling ranks. Liu didn't stop there. A year after Gu's purge, he brought down Xu Caihou, who was for a decade China's highest-ranked general, as vice-chairman of the CMC under Hu. Xu would become the first member of the CMC to be expelled from the party, in 2014, for massive corruption. He died in prison in March 2015. As one Beijing observer put it, the hope is Xu's dramatic purge would be a case of "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys". Whether that will work still remains to be seen.

Flexing muscle
As much as the reorganisation-and the disbanding of earlier fiefdoms-is aimed at cleaning up the military, the reforms will also dramatically alter the PLA's projection of power beyond China's borders. As Fravel points out, the orientation of the five new theatres is "created to align China's strategic directions with the command of troops". "So the northern theatre will focus on North Korea, the central theatre on the defence of Beijing, the eastern theatre on Taiwan and to a lesser extent the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands [contested with Japan], the southern theatre on the South China Sea, and the western theatre on India and border control," he says.

For India, this could mean further widening of the asymmetry along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LoAC). In the past decade, China has already built a huge infrastructure network of highways, railway lines and airports across the Tibetan plateau. The idea is to be able to mobilise, at short notice, a vast number of assets to win a "high-tech local war". The integration of commands, if successful, will further enable this mission.

"What the PLA is saying is we aren't going to, any more, find Napoleonic kind of warfare. We have to be focused, reorganise with rapid response forces, and have an objective not to occupy territory, but to paralyse the adversary," says Srikanth Kondapalli, an expert on the Chinese military who teaches at JNU in Delhi. "For this, you need concentration of firepower-air force, artillery in one area-and mobilisation. And you can't have divisions in land, navy, air force. They're raising 40 rapid response units, of which 30 are already done, and an airborne corps for transporting troops."

Drawing the line
Meanwhile, the cat-and-mouse game between India and China along the LoAC continues, with both sides patrolling up to their overlapping claim lines. Despite efforts to enhance CBMs through a Border Defence Cooperation Agreement and erecting additional border personnel meeting points, the LoAC is "still simmering", says Kondapalli, with incursions in September and November.

What the PLA reorganisation may answer is the long-running question of whether it has been an impediment to improving conditions on the border. "For years, India's wrestled with the question of whether these incursions, which seem to occur at inopportune times, are the product of local commanders acting autonomously or whether they are directed and managed by the senior leadership in Beijing," says Jeff Smith, director, Asian Security Programs at the American Foreign Policy Council and author of Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the 21st Century.

"For instance, after the three-week border incursion that overshadowed President Xi's inaugural visit to India, he gave what appeared to be a relatively stern and public lecture to the PLA top brass within days of returning from his trip stressing the pre-eminence of party loyalty. On the other hand, the commander of the military region responsible for that section of the China-India border was later promoted."

Neither country has the desire for conflict, and neither expects one. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Xi both see eye-to-eye on not holding the relationship hostage to the boundary question when economic ties are growing, particularly in terms of Chinese investment in India. But the PLA's strategy of testing India across the LoAC hasn't eased. Modi's proposal to clarify the LoAC hasn't been received favourably either, with Beijing viewing the process as an unnecessary and parallel diversion to the stalled boundary negotiations. Incursion incidents, Indian officials say, have been "managed", but continue to hobble ties. And as Xi builds a new army, the worry for India is that the sensitive balance of power will continue to tilt in China's favour.