The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (19 page)

The fact that privileged pockets of the military still operate outside the law is on display on the streets of major Chinese cities every day. Porsches, SUVs and BMWs bearing military licence plates, often with expensively dressed women behind the wheels, are a common sight. Whether speeding blithely through the traffic or parked illegally outside nightclubs and gyms, the military-plated cars seem to exist in a legal dimension beyond that of ordinary citizens. As blatant as they are, though, these displays of privilege are largely a lagging indicator of the PLA’s halcyon days of corruption and power. Party insiders striving to create a more rules-based state in China boast that the military’s powers and duties have been codified much like the rest of the bureaucracy. ‘They used to be a very privileged organization,’ said an adviser to Hu Jintao. ‘Any demobilized soldier would automatically get a job in government. This is no longer the case. These privileges have been withdrawn. This is a great achievement of the Party.’

Forced out of formal politics and business, the generals have a single brief for the twenty-first century, to build the Party a world-class army, navy and airforce. The trade-off for the military of confinement to barracks is that their quarters are more plush and modern than they have ever been. The pay of soldiers has been substantially increased. Operational budgets have been lifted and military scientific research institutes lavished with funds to develop technology for the high-tech wars of the future. But this new task has brought with it a different set of slow-boiling tensions, between the growth of a professional military ethos, rooted in western traditions, and the overriding preoccupation of the Party to keep control of its most vital asset. As in much of twenty-first-century China, the often flashy modern overlay is still anchored, and weighed down, by old-fashioned political oversight.

At the top, Hu Jintao sits above the army as commander-in-chief, as the chairman of the Central Military Commission. In a still evolving institutional setting, the commander-in-chief role comes to Hu by virtue of his leadership of the Communist Party, but not immediately on taking office. Jiang Zemin did not hand over leadership of the military until nearly two years after stepping down as party secretary, infuriating many in the political and academic establishment. In doing so, he set a precedent that many expect Hu to follow when he finishes as party secretary in late 2012.

When you drill down into the ranks, into the day-to-day practice of political supervision, however, the Party’s ubiquitous web of controls and its 90,000 party cells seem increasingly archaic, quaint to insiders and confusing to longtime students of the system abroad. ‘What kills the military is the political system,’ a retired officer told me. ‘We don’t have a sergeant system, and the sergeants and the like are the ones who do most of the real military work.’ What the Chinese officer called the sergeant system is the tradition in western militaries of vesting substantial authority in non-commissioned officers. Commanders in western armies have a well-established practice of listening to NCOs, sergeants, corporals, warrant officers and the like, who have the delegated authority to make many on-the-ground decisions. ‘In our culture, delegating actually enhances authority. It shows that a commander listens,’ said a senior US military officer who has studied the PLA. ‘It is difficult to have an NCO system in a culture which does not like to delegate authority. In China, where so much is vested in face, you maintain your authority not just by being in charge but by appearing to be in charge.’

With the paramount emphasis on politics, the hierarchies are upended in China. From its very beginnings, the PLA has had a dual leadership system in its officer ranks. Much like a single person with two heads, one watching the other, each senior position is filled by two officers of equal rank, one a commander and the other a political commissar. Discerning the division of responsibilities between them, and who defers to whom and when, is not easy. ‘They can’t get their heads around our NCO system, in which a commander can defer to a subordinate,’ said a foreign military officer. ‘And we can’t get our heads around their system, with these two equally ranked commanders.’ (The PLA now has an NCO corps, but its soldiers have none of the authority or
esprit de corps
of the western variety.)

The political commissar system was inherited from the Soviet Red Army, but comes with a strong whiff of Imperial China as well. Chinese emperors would send supervisors to the battle front to check on the loyalty of their military commanders. In a similar fashion, the Party uses Soviet-style commissars to monitor the military from the inside, oversee appointments through the PLA’s own organization department and root out graft. Whereas the NCOs embody all the hallmarks of a high-trust system, in which superiors trust their subordinates to make decisions on their own, the political commissars model, like Chinese society, banks on little trust at all.

The modern PLA political officers spread throughout the ranks are part cheerleaders, part indoctrinators and part administrators. ‘They go to great lengths in conversation to emphasize they are not political hacks running around with little red books, but fulfilling a professional administrative role,’ said the foreign military officer. On the rare occasions that information does leak out involving their work, however, the controversies involving the commissars are overtly personal and political.

The most famous recent public act of rebellion against a commissar involved a troubled lieutenant stationed at one of the Beijing garrisons in 1994. After going through his subordinate’s private correspondence, the commissar discovered the lieutenant’s wife was pregnant with their second child, and first son. He informed the lieutenant’s hometown authorities, who ordered the baby aborted. The enraged lieutenant went on a shooting rampage, starting at the barracks, where he killed the commissar and other officers, before heading into a diplomatic district in the heart of the capital, 2 kilometres from Tiananmen Square. All in all, he shot about seventeen people before being killed himself. The army’s own stained reputation post-1989 contributed to the carnage. The soldiers delayed their pursuit of their rogue colleague from the barracks in order to change from their uniforms into civilian clothes–in the words of one report, so as ‘not to disturb the public’ with their appearance.

The indifference of younger officers to mandatory political education and their bewilderment at its relevance to modern military duties seeps through persistently in official documents. Yung Chunchang, an officer of the Military Science Academy, complained in 2008 about how rising officers had become influenced by ‘purely military viewpoints’ and no longer thought political work was important. ‘Once, when we were gathering opinions, one [young] comrade suggested–“Now that we have a market economy, and the profit incentive is being used, and the impact of rules and institutions is being emphasized, why do we still [say] political work is the ‘lifeline’?”’

‘Is there any doubt on this?’ Yung had snapped back at the young comrade. After consulting with his superiors, the answer that came back from on high was that the pre-eminence of politics was ‘the scientific conclusion left by the last several decades’ and could not be changed. ‘In 1954, someone deleted the sentence on “lifeline” [from political work regulations in the military], but Chairman Mao reinstated and approved it. Leading comrades such as Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have time and again emphasized the importance of the lifeline issue.’ The political commissar system, pioneered by the Soviet Union, had in fact been abolished by Stalin because it was considered no longer useful in motivating the troops. In China, with the Party still in power, it was there to stay.

For the vocal neo-nationalists, there is no question the military could be anything but under the direct control of the Party. ‘I have never thought about this. Is it important?’ replied Song Xiaojun, when I asked him about the issue. I met Song when he was at the end of a tour in 2009 to promote
Unhappy China
, co-authored with Wang Xiaodong and other patriotic stirrers, sometimes collectively known as the ‘New Left’. Song was a former navy officer who had lectured at the national submarine college before leaving the services in the mid-eighties. He now edited a military magazine catering to enthusiasts tracking the latest in modern weapons.

For the likes of Song, there is no need to justify or explain the right of the Communist Party to rule the military, or the country for that matter. It is, in a phrase you hear again and again, simply ‘the verdict of history’, a fact of life after a revolution in which the military played a pivotal role. ‘If you must talk about such a topic, we have to consider that after China was bullied, the Communist Party emerged with its military arm,’ he said. ‘The period of 1927 [when the PLA came into being] to 1949 [when the Party took power] is so particular. Unlike the UK or anywhere else, the people at the very bottom rung of the society rose up and regained the pride and dignity of the country, through military means.’

Over time, and away from the ritual hubbub about the military’s loyalty to the Party, the PLA has evolved in recent years in line with the job it has been given, becoming a more professional force, with its own ethos and values. Even if they pay lip service to party control, younger officers are more focused on developing their military skills than their elders ever were. ‘You hear junior officers complaining a lot about the quality of the military leadership,’ said Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese scholar and regular visitor to Chinese military academies. ‘They are extremely concerned that the world is changing fast. They want to be integrated into the global system. This second tier of the officer corps is more global.’

The officer class was once dominated by military families who grew up together in the same compounds and exchanged reciprocal favours as they rose through the ranks. For young officers these days, it pays as much to be expert as it does to be red. Promotions have been tied to technical and professional skills; career paths are highly specialized; educational requirements more strict, through custom-designed military academies; and an old-fashioned ranking system has been restored, replacing a revolutionary-era distinction between ‘commanders’ and ‘fighters’ reintroduced by Mao in 1965. The striking thing missing is actual combat experience. ‘It is the most over-educated army I have ever come across in my life,’ said a part-time lecturer at a PLA school. Many military princelings, the offspring of veteran Chinese leaders, still rise through the ranks but they rarely get to the very top. Far from their pedigree ensuring promotion, the PLA’s princelings are increasingly falling short in competitions for top positions. ‘Instead of moving up to become chief military leaders, the majority of the princeling generals ended their career in deputy positions,’ said Bo Zhiyue, a Chinese academic, who combed through decades of military records for his study. ‘The fact that they hit a glass ceiling in the military and the Central Committee means their family background could be a liability.’

The PLA has also quietly developed a system where commanders take primary responsibility for their units, even though they are in theory ranked on a par with the political commissars. ‘Effective command of the troops requires the concentration of power in one centre,’ says You Ji, a Chinese military specialist. ‘The PLA is no exception to this iron rule.’ The only way that commanders and commissars can get on, he says, is through subordinating ‘political affairs to the combat command system’. Foreigners who deal with the PLA have noticed the gradual sidelining of the political commissars. ‘I have been on Chinese ships when the captain will not answer questions without first deferring to the political officer,’ said Bud Cole, of the US National War College, a visitor over many years to Chinese naval vessels, ‘and on others, when the captain doesn’t really seem to care what the political officer thinks at all.’

If the symbiotic relationship between the Party and the PLA has faded, the new order, to quote David Shambaugh, an authority on Chinese politics, favours a ‘more corporate, professional, autonomous and accountable military’. Ultimate control rests firmly in the Party’s hands. But much as the Party has stepped back from micro-managing large state enterprises, the PLA enjoys greater freedom in managing its day-to-day duties. Far from subverting political control over the PLA, the redefinition of the relationship arguably displays the Party at its sinuous best. ‘There is still more of a political direction than a strict military philosophy,’ said the foreign military officer. ‘But party work is adapting to societal change.’

The propaganda system is adjusting as well. On the PLA navy’s sixtieth anniversary in May 2009, China invited naval officers from around the world to view its new nuclear submarine fleet off the port of Qingdao. For the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the republic in October that year, Zhang Yimou, the once cleverly subversive film-maker who joined the establishment when he oversaw the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, was hired to direct the military parade through Tiananmen Square. The first major foray far offshore for the PLA navy earlier in the year, to conduct anti-piracy patrols off Somalia, was another important moment, as it displayed a tangible connection between the surging military budget of the previous two decades and China’s growing international economic clout.

The Central Propaganda Department makes sure it keeps distinctive military voices out of public debates, to minimize the chances of damaging public splits between the PLA and the Party. ‘The military is not allowed to have a position. They are forbidden [by the Party] from expressing their view,’ said Yan Xuetong, of Tsinghua University, who has close ties with the military. Instead, the Party promotes a narrative of its own construction, of shiny new hardware, selfless patriotism and an expanding global role. All three of the made-for-TV military events in 2009–the Somalia mission, the navy anniversary and the Tiananmen parade–were carefully managed to engender pride and confidence in the forces at home in a way that reinforces the prevailing system of the Party’s control over the PLA. Abroad, the Party’s expansive message is a much harder sell. Nowhere is this more evident than with the battle it has long planned for, closest to home, over Taiwan.