Despite the hype, however, high-ranking insiders have come forward to say the Chinese military is rotten to the core. Formal hierarchies are trumped by personal patronage, coordination between branches is minimal, and corruption is so pervasive that senior positions are sold to the highest bidders while weapons funding is siphoned into private pockets. "Corruption has become extremely institutionalized and significant," says Tai Ming Cheung, director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California/San Diego. "It makes it much more difficult to develop, produce, and field the weapons systems required to achieve world-class power projection."
It's not just corruption. More than three decades of peace, a booming economy, and an opaque administrative system have taken their toll as well, not to mention that the PLA is one of the world's largest bureaucracies -- and behaves accordingly. "Each unit has a committee with a commander, political commissar, and deputies, to the point they have a meeting now for everything," says Nan Li, associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute. Li told me that PLA military universities have even been reduced to printing textbooks that instruct commanders how to transcend the tyranny of committee-style decision-making. "That shows how much the PLA has been defeated by -- corroded by -- peace," he says.
Nor is the military necessarily 100 percent loyal to its political masters in the Communist Party -- a terrifying prospect for a new leader trying to consolidate his power. In theory, the PLA has always been subordinate to the civilian side of the party, but the actual command linkages are largely limited to its top leader and sometimes his deputy. In 2012 -- in the wake of the political destruction of Xi's potential rival, Bo Xilai, who boasted extensive informal ties within the military -- the drumbeat of official demands that the PLA demonstrate the proper obeisance to the party and the party's outgoing general secretary, Hu, suggested the chain of military command might be more fragile than commonly understood.
Xi's associates believe he harbors similar
concerns. They note that Liu Yuan, the senior general who sent shock waves
through the party and military establishment after warning in an internal
speech that mafia-like knots of patronage and corruption were crippling the PLA, did so only after getting a nod
from Xi. "Only our own corruption can destroy us and cause our armed forces to
be defeated without fighting," Liu warned in his December 2011 speech. The two
ambitious princelings, as the privileged sons of China's revolutionary leaders
are known, have been close friends since the late 1970s. Another close friend
of the Xi family, whose father fought alongside Xi's father when the Chinese
Red Army was a hungry, disciplined machine, told me that Xi has focused his
political capital on whipping the PLA
into better shape and probing to see which generals he can personally rely on.
The family friend says Xi's relentless inspection program and calls for combat
readiness have a clear purpose: "To sort the horses from the mules you need to
walk them around the yard."
Xi's associates point out that his first real job, as personal assistant to the secretary-general of the Central Military Commission, gave him a ringside seat for studying the art of accumulating power as demonstrated by one of the world's great strongmen, Deng Xiaoping. Although most recall Deng today as the architect of China's economic reforms, the initial foundation of Deng's political platform was the military, where he enjoyed prestige unparalleled by any other post-Mao leader. He tightened his "grip on the gun," as Communist Party insiders put it, by mobilizing the military for an invasion of Vietnam in February 1979. Deng, still technically vice chairman of the commission but already its most powerful leader, initiated, planned, and managed an invasion that was militarily disastrous, costing tens of thousands of Chinese lives and blowing out the budget deficit, but nevertheless left him with a more professional fighting force and firmly in command.
He ensured this grip on power by closely managing the military's upper echelons. By 1980, after a reshuffle when incumbent Central Military Commission Chairman Hua Guofeng was out of the country, 15 of the 22 top military region posts were held by generals who had fought directly under Deng, says historian Warren Sun.
None of this was lost on the young, ambitious princeling Xi Jinping. After all, Hua was Xi's nominal boss at the time, yet Deng swept him aside. The lesson learned? "Without the gun in your hand, who will obey you?" as Xi's close family friend puts it. "So the first thing Xi did after his rise was seize military control."
Guang Niu/EPA
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