Asia Centre

On July 15th and 16th, the Central Military Commission (CMC) held an enlarged meeting, attended by the directors of the four general departments[1], the army leaders and political commissars from the seven military regions, the directors of the leading establishments directly responsible to the CMC, and their political commissars. In total more than eighty leading figures attended the meeting, including nineteen generals who were former members of the two previous Central Military Commissions.

On this occasion, Hu Jintao, as chairman of the CMC, gave a speech entitled "On strengthening and improving political instruction, organisation, discipline, and modern technology in the army". The vice-chairman of the Commission, Guo Boxiong followed up this address with a contribution entitled "Let us maintain the absolute control of the Communist Party over the army; let us strengthen the armed forces' esprit de corps; and let us speed up the modernisation programmes". These two speeches reflect Hu Jintao's determination to reinforce his power within the army. At the same time they show a real anxiety over the "liberalising" trends in the thinking of the military. These are felt to be a negative phenomenon since in the medium term they could discredit the idea that the army belongs to the Communist Party in favour of seeing it as belonging to the nation. The theme of the need to reinforce army discipline was particularly emphasised. This had already been the theme of Hu Jintao's address to the military delegates attending the session of the National People Congress in March 2007. At that time, his insistence had been interpreted as a wish to clarify his categorical opposition to the views of certain younger officers who wanted the PLA to become a professional army with its allegiance to the State, and not to the Party[2].

In his speech, Hu Jintao stated that in this period of peace the army faced eight challenges, going even so far as to say that the PLA was experiencing a crisis. 1) The troops' consciousness of their mission is weaker and less clear. 2) The political consciousness of the army and its organisation of the troops is in disarray. 3) The principle of absolute Party control over the army being more and more frequently questioned. 4) The PLA's ability to resist Western influence, corruption, and division is being undermined. 5) Internal discipline leaves much to be desired. 6) Relations between officers and other ranks are deteriorating[3]. 7) There is no guarantee that the army would be victorious in a hi-tech war. 8) The relations between the army and local administrations and populations are getting worse.

In view of all this, Guo Boxing insisted on the need to strengthen the work of political education in the PLA, with the following four priorities: 1) Reinforce the awareness of the need to fight against tendencies towards westernisation and splitting the army 2) Firmly reject anything which weakens the control of the Party over the army … in favour of national control, and at undermining its political education 3) Prevent the army from being "contaminated" by all the sorts of negative thinking which are already pervasive in Chinese society 4) Work to improve the army's sense of its mission and responsibilities.

Two weeks later, on August 1st, the People's Liberation Army celebrated its 80th anniversary. But, according to Luo Bing, 2007 is already a time of transition in which Hu Jintao is struggling to strengthen his power within the armed forces. His principal weapons are the fight against corruption, the strengthening of political education, and the tactics of appointing and promoting personnel, and restructuring units[4]. This wish to increase control over the forces is the main factor behind the unusual number of letters carrying instructions sent to different sections of the government and the PLA shortly before the 80th anniversary celebrations. Hu Jintao also ordered 80 teams of inspectors to be sent to oversee the operations of the military regions, army groups, and various units.

The first letter was addressed to the State Council and the Central Military Commission. It deals with strengthening the Party's control over the army, which must be absolute. It calls for the links between the Party and the PLA to be made more visible, to retain at all costs the Party's role in initiating all political activities and in selecting the composition of army units, and to actively oppose any trend capable of damaging the leadership of the Party.

The second letter is addressed to the disciplinary inspectorate of the PLA and to the general political department. It is aimed at speeding up the implementation of the disciplinary committee's directive entitled "Some rules concerning the formal prohibition of the abuse of position in order to gain illegal advantages". It gives corrupt officers one month to denounce themselves and write a precise account of their illegal gains in exchange for lighter penalties. It calls upon the political commissars and party cells in the army to inform the army and the armed police about these measures, and to warn them that heavy sentence will be handed down by the inspection teams when the grace period is over, after August 20th.

The third letter is addressed to the four general departments, enjoining them to see to strengthening discipline among the troops. The fourth, addressed to the State Council and CMC, calls for better control over the PLA to prevent it from engaging secretly in lucrative economic and financial activities. Despite the prohibition issued to the army in 1998 against investing in the economic life of the country, following a survey conducted in 2000, the government believes that its assets amount to over 160 billion yuan (15.5 billion euros) managed indirectly through various civil organisations, often local governments, which funnel back its returns.

In order to restore army discipline, from the moment he became head of the Central Military Committee, from September 2004 until August 2007, Hu Jintao reorganised the composition of numerous military units. Seventeen of these were from those directly dependent on the military regions, nine from the army groups, fifty-five from those under the direct authority of the four general departments and the headquarters of the navy, air force, and second artillery group. In addition, under Hu Jintao troop numbers were reduced by 30,000, out of which 28,000 were forced into early retirement, and 1830 into a change in specialisation. According to statistics from Chengming, 80% of these measures were taken for economic infractions and 16% for exploiting their position to obtain various advantages. They form part of Hu Jintao's consistent efforts to display the central government's struggle against corruption and to gain greater legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

But the problems of discipline cannot be reduced to the question of material corruption. The Chinese leadership openly expresses its anxiety over changes in the army's mental attitudes and is seeking ways of forestalling the kind of spiritual corruption which would strike at the link between the Party and the army. In the past, most Chinese soldiers were recruited in the countryside, and the officers themselves were of peasant origin. They had risen up through the different ranks from the bottom. This sociological makeup worked in favour of disciple and unfailing loyalty to the Party and the hierarchy. Nowadays, when the army is introducing a modernisation process "in order to win conflicts in the context of high technology", it is recruiting from different social strata, urbanised and better educated. It is forced to put in place various projects aimed at improving the levels of technical training given to these recruits in the army's specialised institutions[5]. These recruits, and the new generation of officers, have mastered information technology, and it is difficult to conceal from them that having the armed forces in the service of the nation is the guarantee of their professionalism, and agency of their progress in the most modern societies. As Hu Jintao himself put it, the army would appear to be "destroying its great wall of iron and steel", referring to Deng Xiaoping's observation that the PLA was the wall of iron and steel which protected the Party. Accordingly, urgent action is needed to snuff out a tendency which step by step could favour "peaceful change", the time-honoured Party term for the slow democratisation of the political system through pervasive Western influences.

This theme of the struggle against "peaceful change" is at the heart of the fifth letter from Hu Jintao to the PLA disciplinary inspectorate and the general political department. It emphasises the need to fight against trends favouring the Westernisation, liberalisation, and nationalisation (subordination of the army to the state) of the PLA, by reaffirming constantly the leadership of the Party. It spells out twelve prohibitions for the military, including use of the internet, membership of religious organisations or associations, reading foreign publications with subversive contents which might demoralise the troops etc. According to Luo Bing, this is the most significant of these communications. In his view it reveals less a will to exercise political control over the military than a genuine anxiety over the changing attitudes in the PLA… but this will no doubt be utilised in order to reassert the control of Hu Jintao and of the Party at large over the army at the time of the 17th Congress.