Book Review - The Chinese Army Today: Tradition and Transformation for the 21st Century
Written by: Dennis J Blasko,
London and New, Routledge, 2012,
ISBN 9780415783224, 312pp,
Reviewed by: Dr Jingdong Yuan, Acting Director and Associate Professor, Centre for International Security Studies, University of Sydney
Most recent studies of China’s military focus on the modernisation programs of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Navy, Air Force and the Secondary Artillery Corp. The Chinese Army Today, now in its second and updated edition, is perhaps the most comprehensive single-volume overview of the PLA’s ground forces. Written by Dennis Blasko, a former US Army Attache to China, this meticulously researched, well structured and highly informative volume presents a detailed and objective analysis of a modernising military still making the transition from the traditional emphasis on the people’s war to preparation for local war under conditions of informationalisation.
By any measure and to various degrees, the PLA has made great strides in the past two decades, especially in four key areas: doctrine, recruitment, procurement and training. Using Chinese-language sources, the author carefully chronicles the major developments and milestones in each of these areas, assessing where progress has been made but at the same time noting the constraints and limitations that the Chinese military must overcome.
The PLA has long moved away from the Maoist people’s war doctrine. Blasko goes to great length in dissecting and discussing the Chinese concepts of active defence, deterrence, joint operations and how these inform the PLA’s orders of battle, training and procurement priorities. While traditional strategic culture continues to influence and provides the conceptual tenets of how the Chinese military will fight, technological advancement, modern warfare conditions, and where the PLA is most likely to be engaged dictate that new concepts must be developed to meet the overall military strategies and campaign needs. Joint operations have emerged as a priority area which is having an important impact on the PLA’s force organisation, command structure and real-situation training. While steady progress is clearly noticeable, it will take time for the PLA to fully embrace and integrate joint operations as an essential component of how it will conduct future military campaigns. This will not be easy, as the author points out, and will require constant and routine training of units to achieve the necessary level of proficiency in joint and combine military operations.
A new feature of this updated edition is the author’s attempt to compare the PLA with its peers, and in particular the US military. While the Chinese military is acquiring and developing the types of modern weapons systems such as anti-satellite capabilities, anti-ship and land-attack ballistic and cruise missiles, and stealth technologies, the manner in which these systems will be deployed and used and their geographic scope will be quite different given their different missions and experiences. On the later account, it is obvious that the PLA lacks real-world combat experiences since its brief encounter with Vietnam in 1979, while the US armed forces have been engaged in almost constant military operations from DESERT STORM in the early 1990s to the Afghan and Iraqi wars over the past decade. The PLA high command is fully aware of this deficiency and indeed is redressing this situation with enhanced training and participation in joint military exercises with foreign counterparts and dispatches of naval task forces in international anti-piracy operations to earn valuable experiences.
In many aspects The Chinese Army Today is a unique and welcome resource handbook, with detailed coverage of the PLA ground forces not found elsewhere. The author’s carefully constructed description and explanation of what the PLA is, how it is structured and different from other para-military and security apparatuses, and its personnel recruitment and retention systems clarify some of the confusions and offer insights into where its future direction lies. Of all the developments over the past two decades, two of the most important have been the restructuring of the PLA ground forces away from a largely infantry-based organisation to one that is increasingly more mechanised, mobile and with special units from anti-chemical warfare to communication and reconnaissance; and a reduction in the number of enlisted soldiers and the steady increases of the number and role for non-commissioned officers. While the former strengthens the PLA’s rapid reaction and power projection capabilities, the latter ensures professionalisation over time.
The author also touches on the PLA’s role in and relationship to Chinese society at large. Clearly, the Chinese military undertakes many functions other than combat, from disaster relief to domestic stability. The more important question of the still opaque civil-military relations in China remains how Beijing formulates and implements its national security and foreign policy, and where the PLA sits in the policy-making process. This is a critical question to ask, given the increasingly complex external environments China is facing today, from territorial disputes in the South China Sea, to its critical relationship with the United States, and the occasional discordance and mixed signals coming out from a rising power.
