From Muskets To Missiles

Politics And Professionalism In The Chinese Army, 1945-1981

Harlan W. Jencks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367019068
• eBook ISBN: 9780429724749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the extent, nature, and political implications of professionalization in the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). It provides a description and evaluation of the military, political, economic, and social context within which PLA officers have functioned since the civil war.

1
Military Professionalism

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent, nature, and political implications of professionalization in the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). Heretofore, this subject has been addressed by a number of scholars,¹ but typically the reader has been left to provide his own intuitive definition of "military professionalism." This lack of definition has led to the identification of certain figures as "military professionals" simply because they wore PLA uniforms and opposed certain policies of Mao Tse-tung.

This study seeks to provide a more rigorous definition of military professionalism and to apply it to the Chinese case. We will find that an armed force's technological complexity bears directly upon the professionalism of its officers. We will therefore devote considerable attention to the pattern and timing of technical modernization in the PLA, in an effort to ascertain where and to what extent there are likely to be professional Chinese officers.

As Thomas Etzold has written, and as current events continue to show, there is no doubt that the PLA must and will modernize.² Rather, the questions include the following: When and with what urgency and priorities will modernization proceed? With what combination of domestic and imported technology? With what force structures and capabilities as ultimate goals? We must also ask what the impact will be, both within the PLA and within the political system and society in general. With respect to the military's role in China, three major issues have long been identified:³ (1) PLA behavior as a political elite and its relationship with other sectors; (2) The resource and technological demands of the military sector and their impact on the rest of the economy; (3) The economic and administrative responsibilities assumed by the PLA in society.

We will also consider the "generation gap" with respect to professionalization--a gap accentuated by the continuing domination of the military by aging veterans of the Long March and Yenan eras. There is an important differentiation within the PLA at about the level of regimental commander. At that level and above, the officer corps consists of men who joined a struggling revolutionary movement and led it to victory. Below that level are officers who (like their American, British, or Soviet counterparts) joined the officer corps of an existing national army. The older group will die off or retire fairly rapidly over the next decade, to be replaced by these younger men, about whom little is known. We will attempt to piece together, in general terms, the career experiences of these younger officers in order to make some projections about how the Chinese high command will behave a decade hence.

The "generation gap" factor should not be overstated. As we shall see, there have been advocates of technical modernization and relatively professional military officership since the 1920s. Several have held influential posts for decades. In fact, PLA behavior during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) of 1966-69 indicated that, even then, many top leaders tended to act in remarkably "professional" ways. The influence of such leaders, which has waxed and waned over the decades, must be evaluated.

This first chapter will be devoted to an examination of the concept of military professionalism, and to a review of the emergence of professional characteristics in the Soviet Army. Soviet influence has been a significant factor in PLA history, and the Soviet experience provides useful insights into the interplay of advanced military modernization with authoritarian politics.

Military Professionalism Defined

From earliest times, certain persons have been accorded special status because they benefited society with specialized knowledge or skills. Priests and medical healers already enjoyed such status in primitive societies. In classical antiquity, sea captains were accorded special status and authority. Over the centuries, groups of these and other specialists evolved into what we today identify as "professions."

Until very recently, however, the leadership of armed forces was an undifferentiated aspect of political leadership--on whatever scale. Kings, freebooters, adventurers, landholders--all who exercised power and authority over others--had to be brave, strong, and cunning in battle, or they stood to lose their followings and their lives. The industrial revolution and the advent of the modern bureaucratic nation-state, however, created the need for specialists in the military art and military science.⁴

The modern state made it possible to raise and finance mass armies of conscripted citizens, which replaced the small mercenary armies of the past. As Western armies assumed this mass character, it became increasingly difficult for aristocratic part-time officers to handle them.

In the eighteenth-century army, the rank and file formed an outcast group, isolated and distrusted, with no roots in, or connection with, the rest of society. The officers, on the other hand, had definite status in society by virtue of their aristocratic position. In the reversal of roles which took place in the nineteenth century, the enlisted men became a cross-section of the national population--citizens at heart--and the officers became a separate professional group living in a world of their own with few ties to outside society.⁵

Thus, the officer corps became the continuing hard core of the new national mass armies.

Not only could aristocratic amateurs not handle the troops, they found it impossible to cope with the march of military technology. Artillery gunnery, railway movement, and a host of complex new organizational and technical problems made it imperative that armies be led by full-time specialists rather than part-time generalists. Solid scientific staff work replaced intuitive "genius." By mid-twentieth century, professional officers in industrialized states were spending about one-third of their total careers in formal schools—probably the highest ratio of any profession.

A professional soldier, however, is necessarily more than a mere technician, for his functions border on economics, sociology, religion, and politics as much as they do on physics and mathematics. This is most apparently true of those high-ranking officers who must make representation to, and advise, the state's political leaders. It is true to a certain degree of any officer, however, for the organization of violence is intimately related to the cultural patterns of a society. Professional officers in the West have therefore been expected to have a broad background of general culture, usually symbolized by a university-level education.⁶

The degree of professionalism in a military organization is closely related to the characteristics of the polity it serves. For a variety of historical reasons, military professionalism first appeared, and became highly developed, in the nineteenth-century Prussian general staff system, which first applied to the waging of war the now-familiar bureaucratic principles of hierarchy, specialization, education, and promotion based on merit.⁷

The truly revolutionary aspect of the Prussian system "was its assumption that genius was superfluous, and even dangerous, and that reliance must be placed upon average men succeeding by superior education, organization, and experience. This approach . . . subordinated the individual to the collective will and intelligence of the whole, and yet guaranteed to the individual wide freedom of action so long as he remained upon his proper level and within his sphere of responsibility. It was the antithesis of the eighteenth-century theory of the military genius." It represented, in a word, the triumph of well-trained mediocrity.⁸

This first truly professional officer corps emerged within the context of the struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and the declining aristocracy. Ambitious commoners and impoverished nobility alike found in military officership an honorable calling with a future. More important, because neither class was strong enough, after the disaster at Jena in 1806, to gain control of the army, a grudging compromise was adopted; The army would remain outside of politics altogether. Noble and burger alike came to accept the doctrine of military apoliticism, rather than risk having the army fall into the "wrong" hands. In practice, however, since the state remained in aristocratic hands, the meritocratic ideal was not fully implemented. Even in the heyday of Prussian professionalism, the landed Junker class dominated the upper levels of the officer corps. Thus, even this "purest" example of military professionalism was "contaminated."⁹

It should perhaps be emphasized that our use of the Prussian model does not imply that it was long-lasting, for it was not; nor that it was (or is) good or desirable. It is used herein as a "benchmark." We will be asking the question, "How, and to what extent, if at all, is the Chinese officer corps approaching the Clausewitzian military-professional ideal?"

The first comprehensive rationale for the modern profession of arms was set down by Karl von Clausewitz in his Vom Krieg, published in 1831. It contained the seminal conceptions of the role of the professional soldier in society and of the dual nature of war. Like medicine or law, wrote Clausewitz, war is, on the one hand, a unique and autonomous science with its own methods and goals. On the other hand, war is a subordinate science whose ultimate purposes come from outside itself.

The profession of officers hip, characterized by Lasswell as "the management of violence," is characterized, like other professions, by expertise, responsibility and corporativeness.

The expertise of a profession is based upon universal standards "which inhere in the knowledge and skill and are capable of general application irrespective of time or place." This expertise is largely reducible to writing, has a history which is studied, and a future which is researched, Formal institutions usually exist to teach, preserve, and develop this body of professional knowledge. Contact between the practical and the academic sides of the profession is maintained by journals, conferences, and the circulation of personnel between academic and practical pursuits.¹⁰

The conception of war as an "autonomous and yet instrumental science implies a similar theory with respect to the specialist in war." Because the management of violence has a grammar of its own, the military professional must be permitted to develop expertise at this grammar without extraneous interference. The ends for which military forces are employed, however, are outside his competence to judge. Clausewitz's assertion that "war is a continuation of politics by other means" clearly established the subordination of the soldier to the statesman. Huntington observes that, "Virtually all the other aspects of professionalism must necessarily follow" for "in formulating the first theoretical rationale for the military profession, Clausewitz also contributed the first theoretical justification for civilian control."¹¹ Clausewitz was quite explicit on this point when he asserted, "The political object of war really lies outside of war's province." War has no logic or purpose of its own, but these are found rather in the realm of the statesman's expertise, not the soldier's. Policy, he wrote, may well "take a wrong direction, and prefer to promote ambitious ends, private interests, or the vanity of rulers," but the military man must always simply assume that policy is "the representative of all interests of the whole community."¹²

Clausewitz therefore held that the professional soldier's behavior in relation to society is "guided by an awareness that his skill can only be utilized for purposes approved by society through its political agent, the state . . . . The principal responsibility of a military officer is the security of the state." Professional behavior is guided by an explicit code, expressed in law, and also is guided by custom and tradition. Unlike a doctor or a lawyer, however, the officer serves only one client --the state, which monopolizes the military profession on behalf of society.¹³

Because his profession is thus "monopolized," the professional officer's compensation is only partially determined by the market. He is neither a citizen-soldier nor a mercenary; and he tends to be poorly paid compared with other professionals. He is also mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 MILITARY PROFESSIONALISM
• 2 PLA MODERNIZATION AND PROFESSIONALISM
• 3 "MAOISM"
• 4 PROFESSIONALISM ON TRIAL
• 5 THE FORCE STRUCTURE
• 6 THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM
• 7 PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT IN THE PLA
• 8 CONCLUSION
• Selected Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index