China’s Never-Ending Military Reforms

On November 26, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would undergo a fundamental restructuring that goes well beyond the well-publicized cuts of 300,000 personnel announced at the World War II victory parade in September. The restructuring has been long a time coming as the contradictions between the PLA’s previous organizational structure established in the 1950s and the requirements of “winning informatized local wars” (the goal of China’s latest military strategy) sharpened. Despite known organizational hindrances to the operations the PLA would like to execute, the timing of the reform was not predictable. The PLA’s primary vested interest group, the ground forces, probably stood in the way of these kind of reforms for much of the past two decades. Meanwhile, contingent developments beyond the PLA helped reduce the importance of the ground forces. The significance of the reform cannot be understated as nearly every significant department was affected in some way, but the direct implications for key issues in warfighting like intelligence and jointness will be difficult to gauge for the foreseeable future. 

Wide-Ranging, Comprehensive Reform

Virtually no part of the PLA is going untouched, and the scope of the reorganization befits the challenges the Chinese military identified under the rubric of the “Two Incompatibles” (liang ge buxiang shiying). The “Two Incompatibles” date to a Central Military Commission (CMC) judgment about shortcomings in PLA capabilities: that the PLA could not meet the needs of “New Historic Missions” and that the PLA was incapable of “fighting and winning wars under informatized conditions.” The judgment subsequently became a touchstone for how the PLA talked about its shortcomings and where it needed to change.

While many discussions about the “Two Incompatibles” revolved around capabilities, PLA organizational structure also was one of the shortcomings identified in military writings dating back years. The PLA Daily, for example, published this statement in 2008: “The existing structure and staffing of China’s armed forces is far from being able to fulfill the requirements of the development pattern of informatized war. The adjustment and reform are a practical demand for performing the armed forces’ historical mission.” One of the PLA’s foremost thinkers, Chen Zhou of the Academy of Military Science, also observed in a 2007 article for China Military Science that “It is necessary to deepen the adjustments and reforms of the organizational structure and the policies and systems, lay stress on resolving the deep-level contradictions and problems that have become structural hindrances to the development of the armed forces.”

The basic meaning of the reforms can be summed up by the Chinese phrase used in the authoritative “CMC Opinion Regarding the Deepening of National Defense and Military Reform”: “The CMC has supreme command; theater commands lead on warfighting; the services lead on force development.”  This moves the PLA from its Soviet-era organization to something more like the U.S. military after the Goldwater-Nichols Act, with combatant commands organizing, planning, and executing joint operations and the services (Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps) focused on building the forces that the combatant command would employ.

Under the previous system, the CMC and the four general departments (si zong bu) – the directors of which were CMC members – oversaw most PLA functions and included what counted as the ground forces headquarters. The current initiative breaks up the four general departments and parts of the existing CMC bureaucracy into seven departments, three commissions, and five offices. Though there appears to be a clear, direct evolution from the general department system to the present configuration, the similarities mask significant changes.

• General Armament Department (GAD) became the Equipment Development Department
• General Logistics Department (GLD) became the Logistic Support Department
• General Political Department (GPD) became the Political Work Department
• General Staff Department (GSD) became the Joint Staff Department

The most obvious and significant changes are the shifts from the GSD to the Joint Staff Department. The creation of a ground forces headquarters separate from the GSD significantly reduces the scope of the Joint Staff Department’s remit. Moreover, the GSD Strategic Planning Department, created near the end of Hu Jintao’s tenure to oversee reform and audit PLA compliance with CMC directives, has become one of the five offices reporting to the CMC.

The newly created Strategic Support Force with centralized responsibilities for PLA space, electronic warfare, and computer network operations probably further diminishes the Joint Staff Department from its predecessor’s standing. The GSD’s intelligence (Second and Third Departments) and electronic warfare (Fourth Department) capabilities are being stripped at least in part for this new force dedicated to information dominance. 

The other departments survived more intact with more minor modifications, although they probably will serve joint functions more directly now that the ground forces have their own headquarters. For example, the Equipment Development Department lost the GAD Science and Technology Commission to the CMC – a development that formalizes the commission’s advisory role with CMC members.

At the next level down, the PLA elevated the Second Artillery Force to a service, now called the PLA Rocket Force, on par with the navy and air force as well as the ground forces. Previously the service heads served concurrently as CMC members, but one group of senior analysts seem to suggest that the CMC will shrink.

The services will focus filling out the table of organization and equipment (TO&E), like their American counterparts. Without a direct operational role at headquarters, the services’ technical reconnaissance bureaus – responsible for tactical intelligence collection via technical means – will be reassigned to the theater commands even if they retain their intelligence departments to provide strategic assessments.

The other significant change is the creation of the theater commands (zhanqu) to replace the military regions. The theater commands reportedly will function similarly to the U.S. combatant commands, overseeing the operations of all units, regardless of service, under their jurisdiction and taking responsibility for campaign planning. Instead of seven military regions, there will now be five theater commands: Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, and Central. The process of changing these organizations over began in December and appears to have been essentially completed in January.

Two Kinds of Time

The timing of the PLA’s restructuring really is a two-part question related to Xi’s reform effort and the longer-term modernization effort that began in 1993 with the revision of the military strategic guidelines. The former is a simpler question with a simpler answer: Organizational reforms of this magnitude require time to formulate, consider, and then execute. The latter suggests looking at the political dynamics of the PLA and the military’s place in the political system.

In November and December, official Chinese media sources identified a new alphabet soup of PLA organizations. Although many new organizations have clear antecedents (like the Joint Staff Department created from the General Staff Department), these departments may also have changed substantially. For example, the General Staff Department had two departments, the Third and Fourth, with computer network operations capabilities and responsibilities, because of the departments’ respective roles in signals intelligence and electronic warfare. The Joint Staff Department would seem to inherit these departments, as it has retained PLA intelligence chief Sun Jianguo as a deputy, but the creation of the Strategic Support Force suggests there was not a complete transfer. Semi-official sources indicate that the new force will have capabilities in space, cyber, and electronic warfare (which includes computer network attack).

The scale of reorganization goes well beyond what can be designed and pushed overnight or even over the course of a conference. At the November launch, Chinese press highlighted the more than 2,000 interviews and surveys, consultations, working groups, and conferences put together to prepare for the reorganization. The loud emphasis on reform since Xi assumed the CMC chairmanship in November 2012 obscured how little actually happened within the military to improve its ability to fight and win wars, apart from the anti-corruption campaign. The work report of the 18th Party Congress’ Third Plenum announced that China would “optimize the size and structure of the army,” including the institutions connected to the CMC, with the aim of building new combat proficiencies and improving joint operations. There was a new leading group created in 2014 to help guide the process, but no transparency accompanied their work. And the PLA continued its slow, relentless process toward the planned completion of its modernization process in 2049.

Reading the official press, no one could have predicted when this work would be completed, but 2015 offered a number of clues that the planning was drawing to an end. Last year’s biannual defense white paper, China’s Military Strategy hinted at the possible integration of the PLA’s information warfare. Given the lengthy coordination process for the white paper, such clues could not be seen as anything other than deliberate signals. Separate rumors indicating that the PLA’s capabilities in cyberspace would be centralized under a single organization appeared later in the summer and fall.

Then, at the September 2 parade to celebrate the end of World War II, Beijing announced that 300,000 personnel would be trimmed from the PLA. In early November, reports made it out of China about a PLA analysis of the threats to internal stability if the soon-to-be-demobbed personnel were not looked after satisfactorily. A debate ensued over what to do with the personnel, followed by an announcement that at least some would be taken into the state-owned enterprise system.

In the larger sense, much of the reform effort involves diluting the authority and importance of the ground forces, which Chinese and foreign observers say formed the core of the military’s vested interests. The question is, why could the ground forces stand in the way for so long? It is a question that is perhaps best answered by looking at the two contextual changes that probably helped Xi break up the vested interests of the ground forces and move the restructuring forward. The first and most well-known is Xi’s signature anti-corruption campaign, which extended well into the PLA and jailed two of the most senior Chinese officials caught in the dragnet. The second, which is more speculative, is the declining importance of the ground forces in preserving the regime for anything other than the last resort – meaning a crisis on a scale far beyond the unrest that China experienced in the late spring of 1989.

The anti-corruption campaign within the PLA, combined with Xi’s rhetoric of the “China Dream,” signaled that military modernization and reform was a national project that would not be held back. Xi showed he was not beholden to anyone, including Jiang Zemin, who was widely credited with aiding Xi’s ascent to the general secretary’s chair – a point he pressed home with Xi’s attendance of the funeral of the controversial Yang Baibing in January 2013. The two military “tigers” brought down by the campaign – Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong – owed their positions to their relationship with Jiang. Without loyalties to the status quo and tackling two visible symbols of corruption in the upper ranks, Xi sent a signal that he could push change and quite literally arrest the opposition.

Xi’s anti-corruption campaign also invigorated and empowered those officers and intellectuals within the PLA who had identified corruption as one of the key barriers to military modernization. Some of these officers, like former GLD political commissar Liu Yuan, may not have survived the restructuring, but they established a different tone in the spirit of Xi’s advocacy for the development of a good and disciplined work style. The message also filtered down from CMC Vice Chairman Fan Changlong, who, as chief of the Jinan Military Region, oversaw a critical series of exercises in joint operations and experimental command structures.

One consideration that has thus far attracted little attention from the punditry is Beijing’s concern with internal security and stability. The tragic ending to the demonstrations in 1989 proved that the PLA was the guarantor of the Party’s power, and that the police might not be reliable at containing domestic unrest. Thus in 2004, Hu Jintao included “provide an important guarantee for the Party to consolidate its ruling position” as one of his New Historic Missions (“Three Provides and One Role”) that defined the PLA’s contemporary role.

The steady increases in the military’s budget garner attention every year, but the real money story in Chinese security of the last decade is the expenditure on public security modernization. The internal security budget surpassed the military budget for the first time in 2011, and has seen double-digit percentage increases in recent years. Since 2011, the total government expenditure has remained higher than the official defense budget, and some reports suggest additional funds (sometimes tens of millions of dollars) get pumped into the system at local or provincial levels to support the purchase of surveillance systems.

One of the key features of internal security modernization has been the modernization of domestic intelligence. The purpose of the expanding network of cameras, real-name registration of online and telecommunications services, and documentation for transportation tickets alongside a network of human informants is to isolate potential problems before they begin. A series of leaked documents to the China Digital Times stated the intelligence mission would “persist in putting detection and warning first; defend and control early.”

In addition to the growing ability of the Ministry of Public Security to identify, isolate, and neutralize threats to the state before they become national contagions, the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP) has become a much more significant force. The PAP handled the major unrest in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009, and works closely with public security elements in the continuing operations in Xinjiang. Jointly led by the CMC and State Council, the force has since its formation in 1982 gradually assumed the internal security duties once performed by the PLA and public security troops.

In sum, PLA ground forces and their senior leadership are less significant and more vulnerable than at any time since the modernization program began in 1993. They could no longer claim to be quite as vital, and the anti-corruption campaign demonstrated a changing atmosphere and the extent of Xi’s power.

Lingering Unknowns

The PLA reforms and restructuring mark an important step forward in aligning the Chinese military with the thinking about warfare it has done since U.S. forces overwhelmed the Iraqi military in 1991. The full implications and outcomes, however, remain unknown. Some of these unknowns are specifics about the institutional restructuring or the direction of the Chinese military policy, particularly with regard to intelligence and jointness.

The organizational requirements of creating the ground forces headquarters, the Strategic Support Force, and the theater commands will definitely change how intelligence is conducted within the PLA. Some basic GSD intelligence functions appear to have followed the department’s evolution into the Joint Staff Department, as the senior-most Chinese intelligence officer, Sun Jianguo, has moved from being a GSD deputy to a deputy of the new department. The GPD also possessed an intelligence and covert action department, named the Liaison Department, but that mission was not explicitly acknowledged as part of the Political Work Department’s responsibility.

On the future of jointness, the question is how the remaining dominance of the ground forces will be accounted for. Despite the new ground forces headquarters and the restructuring of general departments, the ground forces still make up two thirds of the PLA (or slightly less, if all 300,000 demobbed personnel come from the ground forces). By virtue of numbers alone, they will still fill many of the ostensibly joint billets in the CMC departments without significant intervention from Xi and the CMC.

Some unknowns are intangible. The PLA still lacks experience – its last war was in 1979 – and new organizational arrangements will require additional time to shake out. Ongoing operations, such as Gulf of Aden anti-piracy patrols, give small portions of the Chinese military experience, but nothing on the scale of combined arms operations that even a minor conflict might demand. No matter how slowly change occurs, new procedures and authorities will require time to become normal and instinctual under the stress of a crisis or actual combat.

Conclusion

PLA reform, like so many other planned Chinese policies, should not (and probably cannot) be judged in the moment. Finalizing the PLA’s new structure will take years, something that military leaders acknowledged, despite the sudden nature of the announced policies and their implementation, such as the disbanding of the military regions. Some elements are changing rapidly, like the centralization of information warfare in the Strategic Support Force, while others, like personnel management within the Joint Political Department, appear to have changed only in name rather than in substance.

Overall, the PLA almost certainly will become a more useful and usable instrument for the Chinese leadership in international politics. The ground forces’ stranglehold on functions like intelligence, electronic warfare, and overall defense acquisition has been broken. The Central Military Commission will be better served and informed on shaping the overall strategic development of the PLA, and it will have direct control over the PLA’s deterrent forces, including space, cyberspace, and nuclear. The services and the theater commands, as reported in the Chinese press, establish clearer lines of authority and responsibility for operations than the old military region structure.

There will be much to watch in the coming months and years as the PLA grapples with this change. The Chinese military will also be studying how the new arrangements work in reality, and observers can expect lessons from exercises testing new ideas to be integrated into the reforms as they are validated or rejected. This will be a time for upholding the standards of sober judgment for PLA watching rather than leaping at the latest reports. The impact of the organizational changes will only be felt as the new arrangements are stressed by practice over time.