CIVIL MILITARY RELATIONS IN XI´S CHINA / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Civil-Military Relations in Xi’s China

It will be difficult for the Communist Party to subordinate the Chinese military and turn it into a world-class military. 

By: Kamran Bokhari

As China struggles with its most serious financial crisis as a major power, it also faces the vital political challenge of maintaining civilian supremacy over its military. 

President Xi Jinping is trying to ensure that the People’s Liberation Army remains subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party as he transforms an institutionalized autocracy into a personal dictatorship. 

He is also trying to turn the PLA into a military force that can allow China to project power internationally. 

It is unlikely that he will be able to do both.

Speaking at a conference in Yanan designed to ensure that the PLA remains faithful to the CCP, Xi called for “deep reflection” from his country’s armed forces. 

“The barrel of a gun should always be in the hands of those who are loyal to the party,” Xi said at the first “military-political work conference” that Beijing has convened in a decade. 

He warned that corruption, breakdown in discipline and ideological wavering among the PLA’s general staff could undermine its efforts to evolve into a military able to challenge the United States and its allies. 

The president ordered PLA commanders to eradicate the “soil that breeds corruption.”

The location of the conference was telling. 

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Yanan was where the CCP rebuilt the military after its defeat at the hands of the nationalists in the first civil war (1927-1936). 

Mao Zedong spent nearly 10 years preparing the PLA for the second civil war, which began in 1945 and ended with the founding of the People’s Republic four years later. 

A similar conference Xi held in 2014 – just two years after becoming president – took place in the highly symbolic southeastern town of Gutian, where Mao and CCP leaders met in 1929 to discuss how to strengthen the PLA (then known as the Red Army). 

Here, the notion of “the party commands the army” was established as a core principle.

Civilian supremacy over the military had its roots in Mao’s view that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” a popular phrase that he first used in a 1927 CCP meeting. 

Some argue that Mao was uniquely capable of combining militancy, the peasantry and Marxism into a successful political strategy. 

However, history shows that to gain power as a revolutionary movement is a double-edged sword. 

To come to power, a movement must have mastered insurgent tradecraft, but it’s difficult to evolve from an insurrection into a ruling order that can deliver all the things a government needs to deliver. 

It was especially difficult for the CCP because it had to transform its military wing into an institution of national defense, and thus regime preservation, without giving it too much power to overthrow the state. 

Once the regime was established, there was a need to ensure that the PLA became a professional military for two reasons. 

The first was for regime preservation as well as for national defense. 

Second, the party does not want to lose control of the state to the armed forces as has happened in so many countries with powerful military establishments.

Military forces in any state dominated by ideological parties present difficulties to civilian rulers. 

As long as they are properly wielded, the armed forces are effective tools to establish robust autocracies at home and vital to the projection of power beyond their borders. 

However, if the military establishment becomes a powerbroker, it can destabilize the political system and threaten the interests of the civilian elite. 

In many ways, the institutional intelligence needed to run a well-oiled military alone is a threat to civilian autocrats.

Under democracies, armed forces are normatively and legally subordinate to elected civilian leaders. 

Under autocratic regimes, however, there is a far less clear-cut chain of command. 

And this is the problem in China, where ideology blurs the line between the officer and the politician. 

Both are affiliated with the party and share the ideology, so there isn’t as fine a division of labor, especially when the state is facing public backlash.

Such was the case during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. 

The student protests became too big for the civilian law enforcement agencies to handle, so the military had to be called and martial law imposed. 

The crisis underscored how the CCP had become dependent on the PLA to maintain power. 

Situations like these create openings for the military to become involved in political decision-making, especially when the officer corps realizes that the ruling party on its own is unable to maintain control. 

So, while the CCP normally doesn’t want the PLA involved in politics, it needs the PLA to defend the regime, which entails constant ideological conditioning, resulting in a highly politicized army.

That China’s economy grew so big, so quickly in its rise to global prominence is why the CCP was able to quell unrest and maintain control over the PLA. 

But a byproduct of growth was widespread corruption in both the CCP and the PLA. 

The situation remained manageable until the 2008 global financial crisis, which brought an end to a long era of high growth rates. 

It was under these circumstances that Xi came to power. 

To manage the crisis, he brought the CCP and the PLA under his personal control. 

But in the post-Mao era, the CCP was successful largely because it institutionalized itself into a state bureaucracy and depersonalized the country's autocratic system. 

Since bringing the CCP under his personal control, Xi has been purging and restructuring the PLA, knowing that if there is one institution that can challenge his rule, it’s the PLA. 

Put simply, this has undermined the party.

The question now is whether China can avoid becoming a stratocracy – a government of military chiefs. 

Military establishments in autocratic regimes tend to be risk averse, content to support a powerful leader. 

But if they see that a leader fails to perform the functions of the state, then they might feel compelled to insert themselves into the decision-making process. 

After all, the men and women of the PLA tend to come from the masses and are well aware of their country’s economic hardships. 

Xi understands as much and is thus trying to mold the PLA to his liking.

But Xi will have to be careful because too many changes to the established rules of the game can produce the very outcome that he is trying to avoid. 

The more he tries to impose himself on the political system, the more he is likely to face pushback. 

These circumstances bode ill for Beijing’s goal of emerging as a major military force capable of projecting geopolitical power and becoming a formidable challenge to the U.S.-led alliance structure in the Western Pacific.