Indian Defence Review

An impressionable Henry Kissinger, the then U.S. national security adviser, was clearly awed by the presence of his Chinese interlocutor, Zhou Enlai, steeped in revolutionary history and the myths that go with it. In 1971, when Kissinger famously had his runny bowel in Rawalpindi, and instead of a toilet, landed in Beijing, was purportedly told by Zhou at a state banquet that it was “too early to say.”

This was a reply to a question – small talk – by Kissinger about what Zhou thought about the French Revolution of 1789. The first-generation American immigrant, clearly missing the European sense of history in the United States, was reportedly left speechless by Zhou’s remark. Only later could he describe his feelings about that comment that it was so sage, so oriental and so deeply spiritual that he felt consumed by the comment.

Only recently, in June 2011, has Kissinger’s interpreter, now a retired U.S. foreign service officer, busted the myth. According to him, Zhou had mixed up the meaning of Kissinger’s words and mistook them to mean the 1968 youth revolt in Paris and thus replied such.

Notwithstanding that little contretemps, if one looks at the “Middle Kingdom’s” dalliance with modernism, which began with the re-emergence of Deng Xiaoping towards the end of the 1970s, it included modernising the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). That was the last of Deng’s “Four Modernisations” agenda.

The modernisation of the PLA really caught momentum after the difficult war the Chinese PLA fought with the Vietnamese in 1979, on account of the Vietnamese army (Vietnamese People’s Armed Forces) attacking Cambodia to dislodge the Khmer Rouge regime, which Beijing was supporting.

An enunciation of the costs the PLA was bearing and the prices it had to pay tells a tale. According to an analysis, first, the Chinese military was using equipment and tactics from the era of the Long March, World War II and the Korean War, which meant, for example, that only Chinese officers carried assault rifles while the Vietnamese had more modern Soviet (and U.S.) equipment, combined with assault rifles for every soldier.

Second, under Deng’s order, China did not use its naval power and air force to suppress enemy fire, neutralise strong points and support its ground forces. Thus, the Chinese ground forces were forced into absorbing the full impact of the Vietnamese forces’ firepower.

Third, the PLA lacked adequate communications, transport and logistics. Further, it was burdened with an elaborate and archaic command structure, which proved inefficient in the Forward Edge of Battle Area (FEBA). Its maps were 75 years old. Runners were employed to relay orders because there were few radios – those that they did have were not secure.

Fourth, China was one of the only two countries in the world at the time that lacked the military rank system (the other being Albania), and thus commands were not effective. Fifth, the Cultural Revolution had significantly weakened Chinese industry and military hardware produced suffered from poor quality and thus did not perform well (sinovietnamesewar.com, accessed 2 April 2013).

This gave a jolt to the leadership of Deng as the chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) – the controlling authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the PLA – and elders like Marshall Ye Jianying and General Yang Shangkun. Through the 1980s, the bloated manpower of the PLA began to be shed, the command and control structures were established, and the force was first restructured for a “people’s war under modern conditions” and then for the objective of “limited war.” (David Shambaugh, Modernising China’s Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

While this first phase of “modernisation” was still ongoing came the First Iraq War, which broke out in February 1991. The technology-rich environment of the allied attack on the elite forces of President Saddam Hussein left a deep imprint in the minds of the Chinese leadership. As Shambaugh has written in his aforementioned book, this once again shook up the Chinese leadership, thus ushering in a period of deep study of the war strategy, operations and tactics.

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As Shambaugh has written in another volume, the CCP at its apex Central Committee sponsored a series of studies on the causes of the demise of the Soviet Union. One could draw a linkage between the two studies in terms of the threat-board that the Chinese leadership faced at the final decade leading up to the twenty-first century.

This is also the time when China had begun the journey of a sustained 10-plus per cent growth, which continued for the next decade. Thus, as the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP) exploded, there was more money to be spent on defence. Most Western watchers of China believe that the Chinese elite leadership began spending money for the cause of modern warfare only between 1997 and 1999.

In 1997, the Chinese had spent $15.5 billion; in 1998, $17.8 billion; and in 1999, $20.7 billion. So a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the Chinese increased the spending from “pump priming” expenditure of $15.5 billion to a 34 per cent growth in the penultimate decade of the twenty-first century – all over three years.

Since then, China has consistently posted a growth in defence expenditure at an average rate that has been in double digits from the late 1990s till today. Even in the 2013 budget, the defence expenditure of the nation rose by over 10 per cent. In the previous year, 2012, it was 11-plus per cent.

How have this military expenditure and the accompanying philosophy impacted the PLA? The PLA today is not only ground-based. In its portfolio of functions are what Richard Bitzinger, a Singapore-based scholar, calls the five missions. They are as follows:

For one thing, as China strives to become a global power, it is increasingly seeking “hard” power, i.e., military strength commensurate with its growing economic, diplomatic and cultural “soft” power. Second, Beijing appears to be more prone to using military force (or the threat of military force) to defend and promote its regional interests, such as stressing its territorial claims in the South China Sea and protecting local sea lanes of communication (SLOCs) vital to its energy supplies and trade. Consequently, building up that military wherewithal is instrumental to this strategy. Third, it aspires to increase its military capacities to keep the pressure on Taiwan not to declare independence and to eventually accept some kind of reunification with the mainland; at the same time, China wants to reduce the willingness of the United States to intervene on behalf of Taiwan in case of a cross strait military clash by raising the costs of involvement for the United States.

Fourth, China wants to increase its capacities for military operations other than war (MOOTW) so as to defend its growing interests around the world, to which end it is participating more in activities such as peacekeeping operations, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, and anti-piracy operations. Finally, China overall seeks military power to mitigate the rising American military presence in the Asia Pacific, and to establish itself as a credible rival to the United States in this region (Richard Bitzinger, “Modernising China’s Military, 1997-2012,” China Perspectives, No. 2011/4).

Each of these missions is a stepping stone for the PLA to emerge as the arrowhead of comprehensive national power of the potential superpower that the world is keenly watching.

Innards of the PLA

The epilogue of the 18th CCP Congress, which witnessed the generational change in Chinese leadership, also recast the PLA’s apex decision-making body, the CMC. A crucial decision on that count was taken by the outgoing general secretary of the CCP and president of the country, Hu Jintao, who decided not to follow the footsteps of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who stuck to power of the chairman of the CMC even after he laid down office as the general secretary and the president.

Hu retired from the CMC chairmanship, creating the possibility for his successor, Xi Jinping, to chart his own course as the new chairman of the CMC, of which he was a vice chairman for about two years. Xi reportedly possesses quite a constituency amongst the upper echelons of the PLA because in one of his earlier assignments, he had served, first, as the personal secretary to the then defence minister Geng Biao in 1979, soon after he graduated from Tsinghua University.

He has also been a first secretary to the PLA’s Nanjing Military Region and Fujian Military District (1990–1996); first political commissioner, PLA Services and Arms, Reserve Artillery Division, Fujian (1996–2000); director, PLA National Defence Mobilisational Committee for Fujian province (1999–2002) and concurrently Jiangsu province, Nanjing city (1999–2003); and finally, first secretary, Nanjing Military Region and Zhejiang Military District (2002–2007).

His wife, Peng Liyuan, is a major general with the PLA Song and Dance troupe. Peng is a soprano who is very well known in China. Her public appearances and performances though have more or less stopped after Xi Jinping was elevated to the Polit Bureau Standing Committee at the 17th Party Congress in 2007.

The positions at the CMC, starting with the two vice chairmanships, were distributed on the basis of group loyalties and balancing interests. Specifically, this was a negotiation between the second-generation generals Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou (PLA elders, as they are known) and senior officers with no known group identities. Of course, Hu and Xi had their favourites/protégés.

On the other hand, at the professional level, the PLA is undergoing a transformation that began almost coinciding with the Tiananmen Square episode, where Deng and his group of “wise old men” asked the PLA to prove its loyalty to the party government. The PLA has made major enhancements in its budgetary provisions since Jiang took over in 1989 in the midst of the crisis.

From 1989 to 2002, till Jiang laid down office, the expenditure growth witnessed an annual average growth of 16 per cent, while during Hu Jintao’s tenure, the corresponding figure was a shade lower, at 15 per cent.

Meanwhile, the roles of the PLA ground forces and both the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) and the PLA Navy (PLAN) have expanded enormously. The PLAAF and the PLAN have had their footprints rise not just in the Taiwan Straits but also in South China Sea and even the two oceans, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

The PLA’s immediate concern is to maintain the status quo in cross straits relations. This, in effect, means that the mainland Chinese wants to dissuade any fissiparous tendencies amongst the leadership of the original Taiwanese and motivate the Guomintang to get closer to Beijing on the path of eventual assimilation.

In the process, the PLAN, the PLAAF and the Second Artillery (Missile Forces) have to follow an anti-access/area denial exercise, when the United States seeks to establish a new status quo. Anthony Cordesman and Nicholas S Yarosh, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an important paper, “Chinese Military Modernisation: Force Development,” “Attempts to discern a systematic hierarchy among Chinese war-­fighting principles usually identify two concepts – ‘Active Defence’ and ‘Local Wars Under Conditions of Informatisation’ – at the top level of China’s military doctrine. In addition, the old conception of ‘People’s War has been modified and updated to remain relevant in the 21st century” (Centre for Strategic and International Studies, p. 32).

“The Science of Military Strategy, a PLA textbook on strategy, presents four pillars to ‘active defense.’ First, China will not fire the first shot and will attempt to settle any disputes by peaceful means for as long as possible. Second, China will attempt to deter war militarily or politically before it breaks out. Third, China will respond to an attack with offensive action and will seek to destroy the enemy’s forces. A fourth pillar, but presented as a part of pillar three, is that China will not be the first State to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons,” Cordesman and Yarosh noted.

They further hold that the PLA textbook acknowledges China will have to fight in the future in an environment saturated with information and intelligence technology and will be limited in scope in terms of geography, duration and political objectives.

This, in effect, dictates the terms of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that the PLA is undergoing and will continue till it rides its CISR setup to strike quickly, in the deep and in a resource-intensive manner.

Conclusion

But despite the PLA’s feverish pace of modernisation, the PLA leadership accepts that at least in the near term, it would lag behind the massive military-industrial complex of the United States. In war-making terms, this would entail the PLA’s taking strategic and operational measures that would allow it to take on the superpower in asymmetric ways and means.

Keeping that in mind, the emphasis of the PLA’s modernisation plan is on acquiring capabilities that limit the United States in a theatre and not let its cornucopia of military superiority be brought to bear upon China.

In that light, it is important to note how China is harnessing its civilian population to multiply its forces in the cyber realm. This essentially independent bunch of Chinese info-hackers is being organised to join forces with the PLA’s own cyber soldiers to attack the command and control centres of the opposing forces right at the outset of a military campaign.

For the PLAAF and the PLAN, network centricity has arrived as an atmosphere where they play war games in a CISR-rich environment. This growing culture of knowledge soldiering is creating impacts on recruitment, training and practices of the enlisted men to the officer corps.

China, until a while ago, had the ideological concept of Mao Zhedong’s Long March and Revolutionary practices of having enlisted men progress to the officer corps. But now the military leadership is putting the onus on basic educational standards for the enlisted men or even direct recruits to officer ranks. Bitzinger (“Modernising China’s Military, 1997-2012,” China Perspectives, No. 2011/4) wrote that first, there is an attempt to improve the educational backgrounds of new officers and enlisted personnel. Today, to be inducted into the PLA as an enlisted person, recruits from rural areas must have at least graduated from middle school and those from urban areas must have graduated from a vocational high school or a three-year technical college or be enrolled in a four-year college.

Officers in the PLA used to be drawn from the ranks of enlisted personnel. Some were promoted directly to become officers while others were sent to one of the PLA’s 30 or so military academies. Direct promotions have ended, however, and those remaining officers who were directly promoted have been required to attend military academies. More importantly, approximately half of the PLA’s officers are now recruited from civilian universities, which are regarded as providing higher-quality education than the PLA’s academies.

Bitzinger also observed that in addition to improving the quality of its soldiers and officers, the PLA is attempting to improve the quality of its training by increasing the realism, complexity and “jointness” of its exercises. Traditionally, training was conducted in small units belonging to a single branch (e.g., infantry, frigates or fighter aircraft) and was performed in benign conditions that included a familiar terrain, daylight and good weather. Moreover, training exercises were done either without an opposing force or with opposing forces whose actions were predetermined and briefed to the force being trained ahead of time. Now, however, training is routinely conducted on unfamiliar terrain, at night or in bad weather, and against opposing forces whose actions are not predetermined. The frequency of combined-arms (different branches within a single service) and joint (different services training together) training has also increased, as has the scale of the exercises. Some training areas now have dedicated opposition forces that simulate the tactics of potential adversaries and are even allowed to defeat the visiting unit. Finally, rigorous evaluation and post-exercise critiques have become an integral part of PLA training, with units required to meet standardised performance benchmarks or undergo remedial training.

Technologically, China has turned a corner in terms of the indigenously developed weapons systems. Veteran China watchers believe that this became possible because the state threw money to the R&D facilities and even the public sector manufacturers. The sheer volume of demand, based on these stupendous funds thrown at them, created an environment where defence-manufacturing complex had to come up to par and deliver better-quality armaments and other supporting equipment.

The result of that was seen in the production of the J-20, the completely rebuilt aircraft carrier, Varyag, the anti-ship ballistic missile, etc., which signify the qualitative leap the Chinese have made in growing an indigenous supply chain.