Chinese Warfighting: The PLA Experience since 1949

The PLA Experience since 1949

Mark A. Ryan, David M. Finkelstein, Michael A. McDevitt, CNA Corporation

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134942572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes pédagogiques

This is the first systematic study of modern China's military campaigns and the actual fighting conducted by the People's Liberation Army since the founding of the People's Republic. It provides a general overview of the evolution of PLA military doctrine, and then focuses on major combat episodes from the civil war with the Nationalists to the last significant combat in Vietnam in 1979, in addition to navy and air operations through 1999. In contrast to the many works on the specifics and hardware of China's military modernization, this book discusses such topics as military planning, command, and control; fighting and politics; combat tactics and performance; technological catch-up and doctrinal flexibility; the role of Mao Zedong; scale and typologies of fighting; and deterrence. The contributors include scholars from Mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States, who draw from a wealth of fresh archival sources.

1

Introduction

Patterns of PLA Warfighting

Mark A. Ryan, David M. Finkelstein, and Michael A. McDevitt

Toward an Operational History of the PLA Since 1949

During the 1990s the modernization of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as a growing field of research interest in the West seemed to take off—especially in the United States.

The increasing interest in current Chinese military issues was likely fueled by a confluence of factors: a general interest in the observable and clear progress the PLA is making in transforming itself into a more capable and professional institution; the rise and coming of age of a new generation of U.S. scholars with skill sets that included Chinese language proficiency coupled with an intense interest in security issues; the arrival onto the research scene of a generation of retiring U.S. military officers who had spent a good deal of their professional lives as China specialists; and, of course, a more general interest in the phenomenon of “rising China” as a modernizing nation-state.¹ As a result, there is an ever-growing body of literature on Chinese military modernization and defense policy that runs from the strategic to the tactical levels of analysis.²

Whereas the literature on contemporary Chinese military issues has seemed to flourish, solid operational histories of the PLA’s warfighting experiences, especially since 1949, have not quite kept up. There are many reasons for this. First and foremost has been a paucity of primary source data—the basic requirement for serious historical research. Without access to the archives of the PLA, serious historical research is difficult, if not impossible. Second, the language barrier, as ever, would be an obstacle for many professional military historians even if access to sources were possible. Finally, it is generally difficult to draw professionally trained historians into work on operational-level military histories. Consequently, while there are now more and more histories of Chinese strategic behavior since 1949 available, there is still a relative dearth of operational-level military histories—histories that examine the PLA’s application of the operational art at the campaign and tactical levels of warfare as distinct from strategic-level histories that examine why China has in the past decided to wage war or enter into conflicts.

But even this situation has started to change. Since the mid to late 1990s we have witnessed the slow but steady emergence of new military histories of the PLA. This may be viewed as a function of four key factors. First, a new generation of historians is taking an interest in China’s foreign and security policies during the Cold War, which has led in some cases to an examination of the use of the PLA as an instrument of national policy. In many cases these individuals are professionally trained historians originally from mainland China who have studied at, and now teach at, universities and colleges in the United States. Second, some of these scholars, who obviously have no language barrier to overcome, have been able to secure limited access to some primary source data, some from mainland China and some from Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union. Third, in China itself, the passage of time has resulted in the publication of numerous memoirs of key veteran Chinese military commanders, especially those who fought in Korea.³ Finally, over the past fifteen years the PLA itself has begun to publish some official campaign histories and may have recently begun to pay greater attention to modern archival methods for preserving the basic grist of future historical studies.⁴

In spite of these strides there is still a dearth of solid historical narratives or analyses in English of the operational experiences of the PLA since 1949. This is strange indeed, for since the founding of the People’s Republic of China the PLA has engaged in three major wars—in Korea (1950–53), against India (1962), and in Vietnam (1979)—as well as multiple operations against the Soviets, in the Taiwan Strait, in the South China Sea, and on its border with Vietnam after the 1979 war. As a consequence of the paucity of historical treatments, contemporary studies of Chinese military modernization have lacked the benefit of context in which to place ongoing reforms, non-China specialists have had few places to turn to for a basic overview of the operational history of the PLA since 1949, and students of Chinese military affairs have been hard pressed to identify both operational continuities and operational changes in the PLA for lack of a panoramic overview that focuses on warfighting.

In view of the new possibilities for research, the new talent in the field of Chinese history and military and diplomatic affairs, as well as the niche that needed to be filled, The CNA Corporation’s Asian security studies center, Project Asia, convened a two-day academic conference in June 1999 to explore the operational history of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army since 1949. For two days, a group of very talented scholars from universities and research institutes in the United States and beyond met at The CNA Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia, to present their findings on the post-1949 warfighting legacies of the PLA.

The chapters in this volume are derived from that conference. They focus on the major combat episodes of the PLA since the Second Civil War against the Nationalists. They span the years across the 1950–53 Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s, the 1962 Sino-Indian War, the 1969 Sino-Soviet border clashes, and the 1979 border war with Vietnam. They are bracketed by Paul Godwin’s overview of the fifty-year evolution of PLA military doctrine and overviews of the PLA Navy and PLA Air Force “at war” by Alexander Huang and Xiaoming Zhang.

While this volume cannot provide a comprehensive history of PLA warfighting over the last half-century, as a body of scholarship its chapters do offer a rich trove of information and insights by an unusual mix of astute and capable scholars. Many of the chapters are solidly grounded in fresh Chinese archival sources and provide extremely useful data and bibliographic leads for those who hunger for historical detail and deeper understanding of the legacies of the operational art in China post-1949.

Readers will properly draw their own conclusions from this collection. In some cases more questions will be raised than answered. But at the end of the day we hope that this volume will at least serve as a vehicle for continued dialogue and debate, and especially inspire future scholarship.

The remainder of this introductory chapter will present the editors’ own comments on a number of overarching patterns suggested by the chapters. It will touch on points of convergence and common understanding among the authors but will not ignore areas of disagreement or historical anomalies. As we surveyed the expanse of issues addressed by the chapter authors, eight thematic areas readily emerged:

1. operational planning;

2. command and control;

3. the linkage between fighting and politics;

4. operational design, combat tactics, and performance;

5. technological issues and doctrinal flexibility;

6. the role of Mao Zedong;

7. operational scale and typology of fighting;

8. deterrence.

The final section of this chapter will address the general issue of the importance and applicability of studying the history of the PLA.

Intricate Planning and Preparation

It is difficult to exaggerate the degree of intensity involved in PLA planning and preparation for military operations. This comes across in most of the chapters but is most pronounced in He Di’s superb treatment of the planning in 1949 and 1950 for the unrealized invasion of Taiwan and in the account of the 1962 Sino-Indian War co-written by Cheng Feng and Larry M. Wortzel.

He Di shows that Mao Zedong and Su Yu, his lead planner for the Taiwan invasion, were cautious after the shocking failures of the attempted landings against the islands of Jinmen (Quemoy) and Dengbu in October 1949. Su Yu carefully evaluated the potential for American involvement but also the military and political limits of any U.S. intervention. The sudden need for joint air, sea, and land operations presented novel challenges, but Su Yu and his staff immersed themselves in the finances and logistics of building up shipping tonnage and air support for the crossing and produced a series of increasingly refined invasion plans. This problem of joint operations, which is also traced in the Godwin chapter, remained troublesome over the decades and persists into the present era. The single successful PLA joint operation, the seizure of Yijiangshan Island in 1955 described in Xiaobing Li’s chapter on the 1950s Taiwan Strait crises, remains an important inspirational example for the PLA, but it was small in scale and of uncertain relevance.⁵

The PLA occupation of Hainan Island in May 1950 triggered a reconsolidation of the defense of Taiwan by the Kuomintang (KMT), as 70,000 Nationalist troops retreated from Hainan and another 120,000 were withdrawn from the Zhoushan Islands. Su Yu and his staff went back to the drawing board now looking at a Taiwan defended by 400,000. The need to assemble even more resources and troops meant new and more complex planning reiterations, and the invasion was reset for the summer of 1951. With the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 the situation changed once more as the interposition of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait forced another postponement, to 1952. But this change proved more enduring and marked, in He Di’s phrase, the “emergence of the Taiwan problem” that would so bedevil Sino-American relations. The intense, detailed, and expensive planning for the invasion reflected the fixation of the Chinese leadership with Taiwan. The requirements for an invasion of Taiwan in the present era appear fundamentally the same as those faced by Mao and Su Yu, even given modern advances in intelligence, information and electronic warfare, missile technology, and so forth. In this sense He Di’s study is startlingly relevant.

Planning preceding the 1962 war with India was likewise remarkable for its duration and comprehensive nature. Cheng and Wortzel document the Chinese assumption of a war with India years beforehand and the formulation of a longterm program of preparations, including road building along adjacent borders in harsh and remote regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, stockpiling of weapons and supplies, mapping, and acclimatization of troops for the extreme Himalayan altitudes. India did none of this and suffered a quick, sharp defeat despite lesser logistical obstacles. The careful, almost obsessive, planning by the Chinese carried over to the fighting, as PLA troop deployments and maneuvers were precisely scheduled and mapped out down to the smallest units.

Command and Control: Tension Between Centralization and Field Autonomy

Mao Zedong emerged in the 1930s as the leading military theoretician, organizer, and commander of the PLA, but given the scale and geographic expanse of operations against the Nationalists and Japanese, and the relative isolation of the separate PLA armies, field commanders and officers enjoyed considerable autonomy in devising local operational plans and conducting campaigns to achieve centrally directed strategic objectives. By the late 1940s, therefore, the PLA had a large corps of able, experienced, and self-reliant officers. However, with victory in 1948 and 1949, conditions changed such that Mao and the core leadership were now able to exercise operational control more tightly from the center.

The resulting tensions between central and field command fully surfaced during the Korean War. Shu Guang Zhang argues in his essay that Mao’s heavy-handed micromanagement from Beijing at the expense of his commander on the ground in Korea, Peng Dehuai, was disruptive and risky, and cost the Chinese heavily in lives. Prior to the mid-1951 stalemate along the 38^th Parallel, during the PLA’s “Five Campaigns,” Mao continually and abruptly modified Peng’s plans using a stream of telegraph message traffic, or overrode them entirely and substituted his own. Peng’s approach to the war was markedly cautious and conservative, and arguably more realistic compared to Mao’s. Mao constantly pressed Peng to push the offensives and inflict more casualties on U.S./UN forces at the cost of very sizable casualties among the “Chinese People’s Volunteers,” the exhaustion of his troops, and creation of dangerously stretched lines. At some points Peng was able to dissuade Mao or tone down his ambitions for the campaigns, but overall Mao dominated and was, as Zhang puts it, “obsessed with his self-image as the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party] ultimate commander-in-chief of military affairs.”⁶

Zhang concludes that the Chinese were severely handicapped by a carryover of a pre–Korean War style of “personalization” of informal command relationships. This style may have worked reasonably well for the PLA during the long and often chaotic Civil War, but was less useful in Korea, where the technology of warfare was more modern and mechanized, the “ops tempo” much quicker, where the terrain was suddenly unfamiliar, and where long supply and communications lines were subject to constant stress, interdiction, and interruption.

This problem of personalized and overly centralized command and control complicated Chinese military and political affairs well beyond the Korean War. Zhang Aiping, for example, the local commander during the 1954–55 operations to recover the Dachen Islands (and later defense minister), suffered the same type of interference but managed to buck Beijing over the timing of his assault. The 1962 Sino-Indian War, on the other hand, appears as the best example of balance between centralized strategic direction and operational autonomy in the field. Cheng and Wortzel find that “strategic direction and policy-making in the border war were highly centralized within China’s core leadership, but in the field the PLA depended on the initiative of commanders at all levels. Thus, despite the tight control from the top, combat leaders were granted a great deal of flexibility in operational and tactical command.” But during the 1969 border clashes with the Soviet Union, according to Thomas Robinson, an overly rigid hierarchy and chain of command again hurt the PLA. It remains unclear to what extent the varying evidence derives from differences in the command styles from war to war or from differences in historiographical interpretation.

Intimate Connection Between Fighting and Politics

There is near total agreement among the contributors regarding the consistent integration of PLA combat with the larger political purposes at stake, and the consistent primacy of the political over the purely military consideration. This fundamental principle is clearly reflected, for example, in the campaigns late in the Second Civil War. Wortzel finds much to admire in the military execution and operational art of the 1948–49 Beiping-Tianjin Campaign, but he also stresses the Communist awareness of the importance of the economic, political, and psychological elements of national power. The propaganda machine was running at full power concurrent with combat, and great pride was taken in the fact that Beiping (soon renamed Beijing) was induced to surrender short of a destructive battle.

The command tensions between Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai during the Korean War cited above likewise may be explained at least in part by Mao’s concern with the larger strategic and international repercussions of Korean battlefield developments. Mao appeared willing to gamble militarily for purposes of political and psychological advantage. His decisions in this sphere often seem intuitive and pitched to the long-term, and are therefore difficult to pin down and judge with any exactitude or finality. To this day, in Chinese eyes, the Korean War is considered a great Chinese military victory because the mighty United States had been checked and pushed back down below the 38^th Parallel. It is uncertain, however, whether this outcome could have been reached without the horrendous sacrifices incurred, especially in the later, militarily dubious, campaigns forced by Mao.⁷

Another more specific example from Korea, involving Zhou Enlai, is also telling, but from the angle of controlling the escalation of the war. As related in Xiaoming Zhang’s chapter, in February 1952 Zhou personally called off a PLA Air Force bombing mission aimed at Kimpo airfield near Seoul only minutes before takeoff. Zhou’s concern was not to upset an implicit mutual understanding that U.S. bombing would not extend beyond the Yalu River onto Chinese territory by introducing Chinese bombing south of the 38^th Parallel.

During the 1954–55 Taiwan Strait crisis, Chinese forces took great pains to confine their operations and engagements to Nationalist forces and avoid any clashes with U.S. forces patrolling very nearby. This was militarily prudent but also political in design, since a main Chinese goal during this period was “to continue the civil war without disturbing the Cold War.”⁸ A similar intimate connection between fighting and politics can be traced for the 1958 Strait crisis, and for the major fighting of 1962, 1969, and 1979.

For the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, however, Thomas Robinson, the unabashed contrarian among the contributors, finds an entirely negative political-military nexus. In his view Mao was led into this reckless misadventure by a combination of domestic political concerns flowing from the Cultural Revolution and gross geopolitical miscalculations, resulting in decades-long damage to his nation in the process. Ten years later, in 1979, the primary and openly stated strategic objective of China’s incursion into Vietnam was to “teach Hanoi a lesson.” The PLA’s poor operational...