This is a study of Chinese civil-military relations in the post-Deng Xiaoping era. It addresses three analytical issues. First, what has changed in Chinese civil-military relations in the post-Deng era? Second, what accounts well for the change? Finally, what are the major implications of the change? Addressing these issues is important for two major reasons.
First, because the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is a Leninist party-army, it is commonly assumed that the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PLA is symbiotic. Clear institutional boundaries based on a functional division of labor, for instance, are absent between the two institutions. This symbiosis suggests that the primary role of the PLA is in China’s domestic politics. It is to participate in the intra-CCP leadership power struggle and in defending the CCP regime against the popular rebellions from within the Chinese society.
For more than three decades after the massive intervention of the PLA to quell the popular rebellion in Beijing in 1989, however, the PLA has not been mobilized by the top party leaders such as Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping against major political oppositions from within the CCP senior leadership, or against popular rebellions from within the Chinese society. Instead, the PLA has largely been confined to perfecting its functional and technical expertise and fulfilling its external missions. Also, the PLA Army (PLAA ), which is more appropriate for domestic politics, has been substantially downsized. Capital-intensive and technology-intensive services that are more appropriate for power projection and external missions, such as the PLA Navy (PLAN), the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF), and the PLA Strategic Support Force (PLASSF), have become more privileged in China’s military modernization drive.1 This study undertakes to resolve this analytical puzzle by examining the major change in Chinese civil-military relations in the post-Deng era.
Second, China’s civil-military, inter-agency coordination in making decisions and managing crises regarding China’s external security has remained an area of speculation for lack of careful analysis. By analyzing the major change in Chinese civil-military relations, this study aims to shed light on this analytical puzzle as well.
A Review of Literature
In a comparative study of civil-military relations in Leninist regimes, Amos Perlmutter and William LeoGrande argue that when the relationship between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Soviet military is “coalitional,” such a relationship between the CCP and the PLA is “symbiotic.” In the Soviet case, they explain that “the complexity of governing requires a division of labor among various political institutions. … With this division of labor comes, of necessity, some degree of institutional autonomy.” This institutional autonomy of the Soviet military increases also “as the technologies of war have become more complex.” The complexity of military technologies enables the Soviet military to monopolize technical expertise and specialized knowledge “inaccessible to non-military elites.” Because of these leverages, the Soviet military has become a “coalitional partner,” or a bureaucratic actor in bargaining with the top party leaders over issues that may affect its institutional interests and priorities, such as the defense budget and foreign and security policies, even though the Soviet military never challenges the sovereign role of the party “as the chief arbiter of values, authorities relations, institutional arrangements, political practices, and policy.”2
Unlike the Soviet coalitional party-army relations where regular interactions are rare between the military and party elites except at the top level, according to Perlmutter and LeoGrande, “symbiotic interaction is on all institutional levels” in the Chinese case. These Chinese party-army “symbiotic relationships are characterized by low levels of differentiation between military and nonmilitary elites, and (high levels of) circulation of elites between military and nonmilitary posts. The functional and even institutional boundaries between military and nonmilitary structures may well be obscure.” This symbiosis also means that in comparison with the Soviet military which is largely focused on external threats, the PLA is much more involved and entrenched in domestic politics and “plays an important role in the politics of leadership transition.”3
Perlmutter and LeoGrande consider the legacy of guerrilla war as a major explanation of the symbiotic party-army relations in Leninist regimes, because it is “a form of political-military combat in which the fusion of political and military elites is virtually inevitable, and in which the governing of liberated territories is a function performed largely by the guerrilla army itself.” They further propose that “once guerrillas established themselves in power and begin the process of dividing the labor of governing, a symbiotic party-army relationship is difficult to sustain. Institutional boundaries begin to solidify, and circulation between military and nonmilitary elites becomes more difficult. The more professional the military becomes and the more sophisticated its technology, the more likely it is that the party-army relationship will evolve away from symbiosis toward coalition.”4
Perlmutter and LeoGrande’s comparative work offers two major insights for the study of Chinese civil-military relations. One is the assumption implied in the above paragraph, that rather than staying static and fixated, civil-military relations in Leninist regimes do evolve and change over time. This assumption gives credence to the analytical effort of this study, which intends to demonstrate the dynamic evolution of the Chinese civil-military relations over time, from symbiosis to quasi-institutionalization. Second, Perlmutter and LeoGrande’s study identifies the legacy of guerrilla war as a major explanation of party-army symbiosis in China. They also suggest that this symbiosis means that the primary role of the PLA is in domestic politics. These observations reflect the mainstream analytical literature on Chinese civil-military relations, which is summarized in the following section.
Party-Army Symbiosis and Factionalism Politics
Perlmutter and LeoGrande are insightful to argue that the 22-year guerrilla war waged by the CCP and the PLA from their rural bases before they seized state power in 1949 had contributed to the party-army symbiosis. This protracted rural strategy is in sharp contrast to the urban strategy of the Russian Bolsheviks. The latter, for instance, involved an urban uprising that led to the seizure of state power. To establish control over the country, the newly established Bolshevik regime waged a brief, three-year civil war against the counter-revolutionary forces in the provinces.
After 1949, however, there was a brief period in the 1950s when a military policy of Soviet-style functional and technical specialization was introduced in China. Under this policy, the PLA reduced its role in domestic politics and concentrated on perfecting its functional and technical expertise, which had enhanced the institutional autonomy of the PLA.5 This policy was adopted because China’s civilian and military leaders learned from the Korean War that advanced military technology can be critical in winning battles and lowering human cost. The Soviet-style military modernization of the 1950s is a moment when Chinese party-army relations may indeed “evolve away from symbiosis” as suggested by Perlmutter and LeoGrande.
Beginning in the late 1950s, however, CCP Leader Mao Zedong began to mobilize the PLA into domestic politics, particularly after Defense Minister Peng Dehuai was accused of “anti-party” crimes in 1959. This trend gained momentum during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, while millions of PLA personnel were mobilized directly into domestic politics at both the elite and societal levels,6 thus reviving the pre-1949 party-army symbiosis. Besides restoring order to a society on the verge of anarchy, a major reason for this mobilization was Mao’s concern about class privileges stemming from the Soviet-style functional and technical specialization and bureaucratic differentiation of the 1950s. To eliminate these privileges in order to realize his vision of a non-specialized, non-differentiated, and egalitarian communist society, Mao resorted to a populist strategy of mass mobilization associated with the legacy of the guerrilla war.
The party-army symbiosis revived by Mao, however, does not imply a high degree of congruence or consensus among China’s civilian and military leaders. On the contrary, political rivalries were rampant among the Chinese leaders during the Cultural Revolution. But rather than bureaucratic politics defined by civil-military institutional boundaries, these rivalries were among the highly personalized leadership factions that cut across the party-army boundaries. A few political-military factions, each composed of a symbiotic cohort of both senior party and PLA leaders and their followers, for instance, engaged in a zero-sum struggle for political power against one another. Such power struggle usually involved mutual accusations of “anti-party” crimes and factional purges. As a result, factionalism became the dominant model in explaining Chinese elite politics during this period.7
One prominent factionalism explanation of Chinese elite politics is the “field army” thesis.8 The party’s pre-1949 struggle for power, for instance, was through long years of guerrilla war from several rural, remote, and isolated base areas, which had evolved into five major field armies during the Civil War from 1946 to 1949. In 1955, however, these field armies were abolished and Soviet-style functional and technical specialization was promoted. This specialization was intended to clarify the institutional boundaries between the civilian and military authorities at the expense of the old, cross-cutting field army ties, particularly after the introduction of the military rank system in 1955.
But according to this thesis, these informal ties prove to be resilient and stay robust, and five field army factions, each a symbiotic cohort of major party and PLA personalities, informally mobilize support and enlist members from both the civilian and the military bureaucracies, at both the central and regional levels, to engage in a protracted struggle for power against one another. Why are the field armies defining the factional solidarities and rivalries? One explanation is the high level of strength of the field army ties, which was developed and reinforced during the war years by the long and shared experience of life and death and victory and defeat, particularly in one condensed geographical region such as a guerilla base.
The rise of Deng Xiaoping after the death of Mao in the late 1970s led to the replacement of Mao’s revolutionary agenda with a nation-building project of “four modernizations,” that is, modernizing China’s industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defense. It was recognized that expertise based on a functional and technical division of labor was indispensable to accomplish such tasks. As a result, the PLA was brought back to the barracks and downsized by a million billets, and functional and technical specialization was promoted. This trend clearly helped to reestablish the institutional boundaries between the civilian and military authorities, so that the latter could enjoy more institutional autonomy to pursue its functional and technical expertise.9 This trend also suggests that the newly clarified civil-military institutional boundaries should make it mo...