Oman Daily Observer
December 25, 2013
China’s annual military spending is now second only to that of the US armed forces and the PLA navy is projecting power further into the Pacific, writes David Lague.
It is part of the lore of modern China. When paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was handing over power a generation ago, a widely recounted tale goes, he had some advice for his successor. For every five working days, spend four with the top brass of the People’s Liberation Army.
The latest leader of China, Xi Jinping, shows every sign of applying that lesson. A month after assuming power in November last year, Xi visited the province of Guangdong on his first major political tour. Of the five days he spent there, three were at a military base, according to official coverage of his trip.
The son of a Communist revolutionary commander, Xi built his career as a friend of the army, and at times an official in it. But he still feels compelled to ask his generals for something in return: loyalty.
“First, we must keep in mind that the military must unswervingly adhere to the party’s absolute leadership and obey the party’s orders,” he said on one of his many military inspection tours.
Xi’s injunction that the party comes first is a sign of the insecurity modern Chinese leaders feel at the top of their nation’s huge and increasingly powerful armed forces, military experts say. As it grows mightier, the People’s Liberation Army is growing trickier to govern.
The PLA’s rising global profile is integral to Xi’s stated vision for the nation: the “China Dream,” a rejuvenated country that’s both peace-loving and militarily powerful. But Xi is less a true military man than Deng and the founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong. He is fundamentally a career bureaucrat, like his immediate predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin.
Like them, Xi has to win over the force that keeps the Communist Party in power. But he must do so at a time when the PLA is more self-confident than ever, mounting the first serious challenge to the naval dominance of the United States since the end of the Cold War.
“It will take time for Xi to take control of the military,” says Huang Jing, an authority on the PLA at the National University of Singapore. “Most of the senior generals were not appointed by Xi. Instead they were all appointed by his predecessors.”
The rise of a nationalistic leader with military leanings comes as the People’s Liberation Army, with 2.3 million men and women under arms, is the hard edge of a rising China. China’s annual military spending is now second only to that of the US armed forces. The PLA navy is projecting power further into the Pacific. Years of buying, copying and sometimes stealing technology have helped the PLA narrow its capability gap with the United States and other rivals in Asia.
Xi, as chairman of the Central Military Commission, is commander-in-chief alongside his roles as party general secretary and president. He now oversees armed forces that are influencing events far beyond China’s borders.
Fleets of Chinese warships patrol disputed territories in Asian seas. On December 5, a Chinese warship forced a US guided missile cruiser, the USS Cowpens, to take evasive action in the South China Sea, the US Navy said. The incident, in international waters, appeared to be an attempt to prevent the US ship from observing sea trials of China’s new aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, naval experts said. PLA fighters now scramble to guard the controversial air defence zone that Beijing imposed last month off its east coast. The Chinese navy also cruises the Indian Ocean, contributing to international anti-piracy efforts, while PLA peacekeepers are on duty in Africa and the Middle East.
In hardened silos and on mobile transporters, the PLA’s Second Artillery Corps is modernizing China’s modest but expanding armory of nuclear missiles, Chinese and foreign military analysts say. During Xi’s tenure, likely to last another nine years, this force is expected to be bolstered with China’s first effective ballistic-missile nuclear submarines. If PLA engineers can make them stealthy, these subs will be capable of retaliating if China comes under nuclear attack, according to Chinese and foreign military assessments.
All this has been a dramatic change. In the late 1990s, visiting foreign military officers scoffed at China’s poorly equipped army. After more than three decades of soaring military spending, infusions of foreign and domestic technology and improvements in training, the PLA is transformed.
