The Long Shadow of the People’s Liberation Army on China’s Foreign Policy

The long shadow of the People’s Liberation Army

 on China’s foreign policy

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Author: Marco Rossi

Group: B9

Course: Geopolitics

Academic year 2015/2016

Character count: 17.470

Abstract

While gradually opening to the world since the early 1980s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been undergoing major changes in a comprehensive range of fields. The participation to the globalization process fueled an economic development that profoundly reshaped PRC’s attitude and ambitions in its internal and foreign policies. As of 2015, PRC has clearly resurfaced as one of the globe’s preeminent powers; a double-digit GDP growth lasting the whole first decade of the third millennium made PRC much more concerned with its stake in the world’s geopolitical balance to protect its strategic goals, ignited also by a resurging latent nationalism. This increased interest translated in two different and potentially antithetical approaches. On one side, PRC reiterated a new concept of leading power, fostering the so-called “peaceful rise” or “peaceful development”, on the other it stimulated a profound restructuring and increase of capabilities of the military forces, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which supported recent assertive actions in East and South China Seas. This paper investigates the latter phenomenon analyzing the structural developments of the PLA in the first part and tries to shed light upon its geopolitics implications in the imminent and medium-term future in the second section.

People’s Liberation Army development

Being surrounded by several territories which proved to be home to threatening enemies throughout the centuries- ranging from the nomad tribes that caused the construction of the Great Wall to Russia’s and Japan’s trespassing on Chinese soil during the twentieth century- China has always centered its military attention on the mass mobilization to defend its borders in case of invasion. The birth of a communist China ratified by the establishment of the PRC in 1949 originated an initial orbiting under the influence sphere of the USSR, yet the Sino-Soviet split officially erupting in 1962 converted the first military priority into the resistance against the USSR in an eventual mainland conflict, even perhaps involving nuclear weapons. Consequently, strategic priorities were the development of conflict-deterring nuclear capabilities and a massive deployment of troops and reserves given the constant state of threat. The PLA entered the 1980s with an estimated total amount of personnel of 11.360.000 -split into 3, 6 million active ground troops, 0,76 million belonging to navy or airforce and 7 millions of paramilitary manpower (Cordesman, 2014). However, such colossal amount was countervailed by old and outdated equipment (Cliff, 2015) and lack of expertise among all the hierarchical layers of command. The progressive dismantling of the USSR as a significant threat for internal security plus the renovated focus on economic growth fostered a steep decline in personnel and a shift in strategic priorities. The culminating point was the keynote speech by Jiang Zemin in 1993, revolving around the new concept of war symbolized by the Gulf Wars and promoting capability to fight “local wars under modern high technology conditions”, which entails rapid response and joint operations capabilities (Fravel, 2008). These so-called “Military Strategic Guidelines for the New Period” were grounded on three main pillars (Finkelstein, 2007):

1. Development, acquisition and fielding of new weapons systems and combat capabilities.
2. Institutional and systemic reforms to raise the level of professionalism.
3. Development of new warfighting doctrines (joint operations and high-intensity short campaigns).

By adhering to these directives, PRC envisioned the PLA able to back with sufficient credibility all the possible disputes arising in close proximity of its borders, the Taiwanese sovereignty claims being the first intended area of interest. The immediate effect of this policy was the reduction of total military personnel, cut from over 14 million to just above 4 million from 1990 to 2000 -then progressively diminished to reach the current figure of just above 3,5 million total active personnel (Cordesman, 2014). Consequently, resources were shifted to substitute the old arsenal, especially in the naval and aeronautical divisions. Another significant evolution undergone by the PLA is the progressive organizational restructuring, a process following a staircase development throughout the years and one of the main concerns of current PRC’s president Xi Jinping (Chase, 2015). It envisioned a rationalization in terms of military regions (MRs) and report lines along with the reinforce of the control of central government over the highest levels of command, in a constant effort to centralize power and fight the plague of corruption that affected the PLA (Meng, 2014).

However, these restructurings did not initially gather massive international attention, due to the fact that Chinese effective operations did not rapidly increase in number or magnitude. Furthermore, the size of investments remained considerably little if compared to the other dominant players such as the US, Japan and Russia. The noteworthy figure that is crucial to understand the scope of these policies in real terms is the defense expenditure, annually published in the central government budget. A crystal clear final judgement is obstructed by Beijing’s reluctance to conform to foreign standards of transparence on defense budget, sparkling an intense debate on the reliability of this strategic information. Nevertheless, constant and heated accuses of underreporting the total numbers (Shanker, 2005) managed to reduce China’s opacity on several entries, and even if today the neat borders of the budget are still to be defined, e.g. size of military R&D, a clear trend appears. PRC emerges as a nation that has been consistently increasing its military expenditures from the 1990s to present, but accordingly to an outrageous economic growth and presumably within reasonable boundaries of a normal development (Liff and Erickson, 2013).

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Graph 1, Source: Personal elaboration on National Bureau of Statistics of China data

As clearly depicted in graph 1, the development of the budget expenses follows strictly the progressive increase of the GDP, awarding credibility to the Chinese version of a natural expansion of military spending in accordance to greater security needs. Even the inflated budget independently estimated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) would fall impressively close to the 2% ratio on GDP, which turns out to be the baseline suggested by NATO to all its state members to maintain sufficient security capabilities. Moreover, it is evident that China’s alleged concern over military investments did not reverse a clear declining trend in reducing the weight of defense expenditures in the total allocation of the budget, as illustrated in graph 2. This reinforces the view that Beijing considers welfare expenditures in fields such as education and social security more crucial than upgrading military potential, in accordance with a socio-economic paradigm of power in the 21st century.