China’s Military Self-Critique
Beijing’s drive for a world-class military is colliding with its own political insecurity.
By: Victoria Herczegh
Last week, the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of China’s armed forces, published a lengthy and unusually candid article assessing the People’s Liberation Army’s shortcomings.
State military commentary typically celebrates progress under President Xi Jinping’s military modernization drive, and this essay was no different.
But it also criticized “profound deficiencies” in the PLA’s integrated joint operations and called for a systemic overhaul to close the gap with “formidable adversaries.”
The rare self-critique highlighted the PLA’s failure to achieve “deep integration” among its core components – equipment, personnel, training and battlefield systems.
It was followed in the PLA Daily by the first installment of a series on “political rectification.”
Noting a lack of alignment between the Chinese Communist Party and the military, this later article announced CCP-led “reflection exercises” to ensure ideological purity within the PLA’s ranks.
Taken together, the articles reveal a military plagued by both operational inefficiency and political distrust – two flaws that Xi’s decade-long modernization drive has yet to reconcile.
The Fourth Plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee reinforced that message.
Nine senior officers were stripped of their party and military titles, while 16 others – all members of the Central Committee – were conspicuously absent.
No explanation followed, though at least half are reportedly under investigation.
The absences suggest a purge larger than any in recent years, one that underscores how Xi’s control over the military remains incomplete.
Deficiencies in Structure and Talent
The long-standing problems within the Chinese military establishment are well-known.
Despite Xi’s sweeping restructuring in 2015-16, when he replaced seven military regions with five joint theater commands, political and bureaucratic constraints continue to inhibit operational integration.
One persistent issue is personnel.
The PLA struggles to attract and retain the technically skilled recruits needed to operate advanced systems.
Despite efforts to appeal to university graduates through defense fairs, promotional campaigns and university programs, service in the PLA remains unattractive compared with private-sector opportunities.
Lower pay, rigid lifestyles and postings to remote areas have kept recruitment targets unmet.
The goal of increasing university-educated recruits by 70 percent since 2010 has fallen short; the actual figure hovers around half that.
Many of those who do enlist leave at the first opportunity.
Discipline and morale have also suffered.
Desertions have become frequent enough to prompt a government campaign publicly shaming offenders.
These visible attempts at control underscore a deeper problem: The PLA’s political environment discourages initiative, weakens cohesion and erodes professional pride.
The PLA’s command system compounds these difficulties.
Promotion and leadership selection prioritize political loyalty over competence, creating a fragmented hierarchy where political commissars often wield power equal to commanding officers.
Training emphasizes ideological indoctrination as much as military skills, leaving recruits ill-prepared for complex operations.
What’s more, commanders need party committee approval for even the most basic actions, delaying decision-making.
Frequent purges of senior officers further degrade morale and weaken readiness.
Ostensibly launched to root out corruption, these campaigns are meant to consolidate Xi’s control over the armed forces and combat the spread of factionalism or anti-government sentiment.
Corruption is in fact rampant within the PLA.
Purges also generate an atmosphere of fear, discouraging cooperation and inter-service trust.
Commanders hesitate to act decisively, uncertain whether their superiors – or they themselves – might be targeted next.
Joint operations, which rely on trust and initiative across units, cannot function smoothly in a climate of suspicion.
These organizational flaws cut directly against Beijing’s ambitions to field a world-class military.
The lack of skilled personnel, combined with a rigid and politicized command structure, limits the PLA’s ability to conduct sophisticated exercises or coordinate across domains.
The PLA Daily’s open admission of such failings underscores how far the force remains from genuine integration.
Missing Elements
China’s current challenge mirrors a dilemma the United States faced four decades ago.
The U.S. military’s joint transformation began not with foresight but with failure.
The Vietnam War and the 1983 invasion of Grenada exposed the costs of fragmented command and poor inter-service coordination.
The result was the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which dismantled entrenched divisions between the services, empowered unified commands and embedded jointness as both culture and structure.
The U.S. did not achieve integration overnight.
It evolved through experience – from Desert Storm’s tightly coordinated air-land campaign to two decades of counterinsurgency and now to the Joint All-Domain Command and Control framework, fusing sensors, shooters and decision networks across every domain.
Xi’s military reforms, by contrast, attempted to impose integration by decree.
The 2015-16 overhaul replaced the PLA’s regional commands with joint theater commands intended to promote cross-domain coordination.
Yet authority remains centralized under the Central Military Commission, with decision-making concentrated in Beijing.
Publicly observed exercises show progress in structure, but data sharing and autonomy appear limited.
In some ways, this is also a technological issue.
True real-time command and cross-domain fusion depend on advanced computing power – and thus on reliable semiconductor supply chains.
But despite major investments in domestic chip production, Chinese firms still lag behind U.S. and allied capabilities in high-end semiconductor manufacturing.
Beijing’s civil-military fusion strategy seeks to bridge this divide by combining civilian innovation with military needs, but sanctions and export controls have restricted its access to critical technologies.
Where the U.S. institutionalized reform through decades of conflict and constant adaptation, China is attempting to compress the process into a single generation – one constrained by political control and a lack of combat experience.
The result is a military that is modernizing rapidly in form but unevenly in function.
Xi’s Dilemma
China is capable of achieving the deep integration it seeks.
Its centralized command structure and civil-military fusion model – a national strategy aimed at building a world-class military by linking the country’s economic, academic and technological resources with its defense sector – enable it to move faster than the United States did during its own transition.
Although the PLA’s level of integration remains below U.S. standards, the pace of reform is clearly accelerating.
But the United States built integration gradually, over decades of operational experience and technological evolution.
China is attempting to compress that process into a single generation – one in which the CCP must also manage an economic slowdown, trade tensions with Washington and domestic stability.
While Beijing’s structural reforms are progressing faster on paper than America’s once did, true proficiency still depends on time, experience and technological depth.
To ensure progress, the PLA’s long-standing institutional problems must be resolved.
Recent state media publications have not only issued unusually sharp criticisms of the PLA’s current capabilities but also framed the challenge as a “contest between systems,” emphasizing China’s need to “catch up.”
This rhetoric implicitly acknowledges the United States’ clear lead in military integration and capability.
A central obstacle to reform is the widening gap between the CCP and the PLA – an issue openly recognized in state media.
The sweeping purges within the military, the disappearance of senior officers (including commanders of the ground force, the navy and the northern and western theater commands, all central to improving joint operations) and the PLA Daily’s calls for “rectification” suggest that Xi either feels threatened by the military or no longer trusts its senior leadership.
This dynamic endangers more than Xi’s personal authority.
With half the seats on the Central Military Commission vacant and senior posts in constant flux, the deep structural issues undermining the PLA’s modernization have become only harder to fix.
Until alignment between the party and the military is restored – until Xi and the CCP reassert full control – the PLA will remain unable to reach its full potential, even if its reforms continue.
As long as the internal struggle persists, catching up with its “formidable adversaries” will remain beyond reach.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario