The Economist
Feb 28th 2015
To be a good soldier in China is to be a good Communist.
Ensuring that troops remain loyal to the Communist Party has been a central aim of military training since the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was founded in 1927 as a guerrilla force in the countryside. President Xi Jinping wants to make them even redder.
Political education is already time-consuming. In basic training, troops spend about 40% of their week studying the history of the Communist Party and the military writings of party leaders. After boot camp they continue to devote 20-30% of it to ideology. The top brass are not exempt: an official report last year on a meeting of the Central Military Commission, the armed forces’ high command, of which Mr Xi is chairman, said that participants had genned up beforehand on the military thoughts of Mao Zedong and the like. Political officers, responsible for instilling party discipline, command jointly with officers in charge of soldiering.
Mr Xi, who enjoys more clout in the armed services than any of his predecessors since Deng Xiaoping, says he wants to modernise the PLA and boost its readiness to fight. He sees ideological training as crucial to this; a “magic weapon”, he says, for winning victories. This month he declared that “corrupt ideas and cultures” could damage morale. Soldiers, he said, should be “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure and absolutely reliable”.
Indoctrination is increasingly focused on ensuring devotion not just to the party, but to Mr Xi personally (he has reason to be a little nervous: his campaign against corruption has targeted numerous high-ranking officers). In November the PLADaily, a military mouthpiece, said “implementation of Xi Jinping’s directives” would be used to assess officers’ performance. By the end of June troops are required to have spent at least six days studying how to become “a new generation of revolutionary troops”. No prizes for guessing whose speeches form the core of the curriculum.
