The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard Mcgregor

  Xu had spent the weeks ahead of 4 June sitting in hospital with an injured leg. As he watched the demonstrations unfold, he found himself increasingly sympathetic with the students’ cause. Xu initially pleaded to be left out of leading his army into the city because of his injury. When pressed, he refused his orders outright: ‘No matter what kind of charges are laid against me,’ he replied. ‘I will absolutely not lead the troops myself.’ Xu was then relieved of his post. Some of Xu’s former colleagues now dispute this account, saying that the commander did not resist orders until he had led his unit into the battle in Beijing. What is not in dispute is that Xu was court-martialled after 4 June, and sentenced to five years in prison for his actions in this period.

  The siege mentality in Beijing lasted for at least six months after the crackdown. Army units camped out in think-tanks, research institutes and universities whose members had been involved in the protests. PLA personnel were dispatched to oversee a pro-military propaganda drive inside civilian media organizations. Within their own ranks, the military also investigated, purged and punished commanders who had disobeyed orders and troops who had abandoned their posts. Each part of the PLA, at headquarters, in operational units, research institutes, universities and factories, has always had a political department and party committees. The same kinds of mechanisms the Party uses to control the government and business and so on are all replicated within the military. After 4 June, the Party determined that its penetration of the military should go even deeper. As a result, the slimmed-down modern PLA, which has about 2.3 million men and women on its books, now has an astounding 90,000 different party cells operating inside it, about one for every twenty-five people enrolled in the forces.

  It is no coincidence that the PLA garrisons three armies near Beijing to protect the capital and deploys large combat forces around major cities for the same reason. In Tibet, the most distant outpost of the Chinese empire, PLA troops, along with its paramilitary wing, the People’s Armed Police, were called on to quell large protests as late as 2008. In Xinjiang, the PLA stations four divisions near areas where there were violent ethnic protests in the 1990s. The 800,000-strong People’s Armed Police were substantially re-equipped and re-trained post-1989 to relieve the army of direct responsibility for putting down major civilian disturbances. To the satisfaction of policy-makers, keen to remove the army from the domestic frontline, the PAP was largely responsible for quelling the bloody ethnic violence which killed nearly 200 people in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, in July 2009. The PLA maintained only a symbolic presence in Urumqi. At the end of the day, however, the PLA still remains the final arbiter of security in a crisis.

  The ceaseless pro-party commentaries represent more than just the enduring post-1989 paranoia. They are also a recognition that the same long-term trends transforming modern Chinese society and undermining old-fashioned political controls are at work in the military. The modern PLA is leaner, more focused, better equipped and more highly trained than it has ever been. Updating the answer to what the military call the Frank Capra question of ‘Why We Fight’, after the title of the US film-maker’s World War II propaganda movies, however, has proved harder than simply ordering new hardware. The expectation that loyal cadres in uniform will mutely serve at the Party’s pleasure no longer cuts the ice in the market economy. Like modern armies around the world, the PLA has to compete with the bounty the private sector offers to attract talented young men and women to enter its officer ranks, the kind of competition the Red Army in the Soviet Union never faced. China’s new breed of military officers needs high-grade technical, strategic and language training, and they have to be certified as true believers in the Party into the bargain.

  Alongside the stale traditional ideology, staff colleges have tried to imbue the military with the new mood of nationalism being stoked by the Party. But even here the Party has laid traps for itself, with divergent groups emerging in political debates competing to define the military’s mission. China’s swelling defence budget has thrilled a vocal throng of the neo-nationalist intelligentsia and a part of the populace alike, who see a strong military and even the prospect of war as something to savour, whether the PLA is ready for battle or not. The clash of civilizations, with China finally coming out on top after a century of humiliation, is an ennobling prospect for the country in the eyes of this crowd. Wang Xiaodong, a well-known conservative rabble-rouser, cited fashionable theories of Darwinian socio-biology in pressing for a re-invigoration of China’s martial spirit. ‘Without pressure from the external environment, a species will only degenerate,’ he wrote in a 2009 hyper-nationalist best-seller, Unhappy China. ‘The same applies with human societies.’ Ask Wang the question of ‘Why We Fight’, and his answer is not so much to win the unavoidable war, but for the sake of the battle itself and the country’s blood honour.

  Few reforms have been as fraught for the Party as the modernization of the military. The more the Party pushes the PLA to develop into a modern fighting force, the greater the risk the military establishment will drift away from its traditional moorings and develop its own autonomous instincts at odds with its political masters. The trend is already well entrenched, according to Chinese officers and scholars. ‘This army has become a more professional army and therefore more of a national army than the Party’s army,’ said a prominent international relations professor in Beijing. ‘It is just that we cannot say that out aloud.’

  In violently putting down the 1989 demonstrations, the PLA had–eventually–proven itself willing to fulfil its duty to protect the Party in its moment of gravest danger. But the military that performed that duty, a lumbering, oversized, low-tech force, backed by an armaments industry banished to the hinterland to protect it from bombardment in the Cold War, was ill-equipped for the challenges that lay ahead. The new PLA being built for the Party has multiple roles. It is an instrument of international statecraft for China, a defender of the motherland abroad and a policeman on the beat at home. Protecting the Party’s grip on office in the future will require much more of the army than simply the ability to shoot unarmed protesters in city streets.

  At the time China discovered oil in the late fifties, the country had no resource giants like Standard Oil or Exxon the government could rely on to get the resource out of the ground. Instead, Mao looked to a man known as the one-armed general, and tens of thousands of his fellow military men, to drain the gushers in the country’s north-east. Yu Qiuli, born in 1914 and a member of the Party by the time he was a teenager, had risen through the PLA ranks as a political officer during the anti-Japanese war and the subsequent internal conflict against the Nationalists. He had lost his left arm in battle on the long march in 1936 in an act of heroism that would be on daily display for the rest of his life. After the Party took power, Yu held positions in the central military command before being appointed in 1958 as Minister for the Petroleum Industry, a job which would turn him into one of China’s most famous communist industrialists.

  Yu was only one year into his new job when China found oil, big time, in Daqing, in a corner of Manchuria that was a mosquito-infested marshland in summer and frozen over by sub-zero temperatures every winter. Desperately in need of labour, Yu turned to the largest employer in the country, the military, for skilled working men. At its peak after the Korean war, the PLA, which covers land forces, navy and airforce, had 5.5 million people under its command. Yu won approval from Mao for 30,000 decommissioned soldiers to be sent to Daqing to work on the fields. Another 3,000 former officers were ordered to the area as well. The military was a natural recruiting ground for impatient industrialists like Yu. In the early fifties, the PLA had already acquired industrial know-how through spearheading the development of the nascent oil industry. The 19th Army had hived off a division to become communist China’s first petroleum engineering corps. In Daqing itself, military teams built roads, pipelines, pump-stations and all manner of basic infrastructure.

  When the demobilized soldiers and
officers started arriving in the oil town from March 1960 onwards, many of them Korean war veterans, the race to develop the fields was immortalized in party lore as ‘the battle of Daqing’. Zhou Enlai, the Premier, in an address to city leaders, compared the party secretary of the Daqing fields to a marshal who stations himself personally at the frontline. ‘Concentrate all your troops to fight a battle of annihilation,’ Zhou told the workforce, ‘taking one front at a time.’

  Since its inception, the PLA has always performed extra-curricular duties beyond its purely military missions. It has been in business for itself, either to make money or supplement its meagre official budget. Alternatively, military units have been demobilized or their members borrowed to work on industrial projects, like Daqing, on behalf of the country. Millions of soldiers were demobilized in the late fifties and another million in the mid-eighties. The government was under instructions to try to find work for them all. Large bands of demobilized soldiers were settled in China’s remote regions, simultaneously reducing the burden on the budget and placing trained men in far-flung strategic areas. About 170,000 former PLA members formed the Xinjiang Soldier Corps in the early fifties, which has since become a huge business empire with its own stand-alone security forces. More than 80,000 ex-soldiers were sent to work in local commerce bureaux in the same period. During Deng’s first purge of military ranks in 1981, 57,000 demobilized men and women were reassigned to work in the legal system. Many became judges, even though few had ever stepped into a courtroom in their lives, let alone studied law. In 1982, tens of thousands of soldiers were also sent to Shenzhen, a new economic zone, as the workforce for construction firms.

  The PLA’s involvement in money-making businesses surged in the eighties, at the direction of Deng, who wanted to focus budget spending on economic development. By its peak in the late eighties, the PLA’s commercial empire had nearly 20,000 companies. On top of oil services, a business spun out of the Daqing oil fields, the military had their hands in everything from five-star hotels, pharmaceuticals and light manufacturing, to trading and smuggling commodities and making weapons for export. The profits were meant to fund improved living conditions for ordinary soldiers. In reality, much of the money went into the pockets of venal generals and their relatives and cronies.

  More secretive than even the Party itself, the military developed into a state-within-a-state, distinguished as much by the underground commercial interests of its officer corps as the discharge of its duty to defend the Party and the country. Business corrupted and distracted many senior officers. Reliance on the revenues generated by its multiple enterprises had, in turn, distorted the management of the military budget. Relative to the economy, the military had been a laggard in China’s modernization, ill-equipped for the multiple strategic, economic and societal challenges landing in the civilian leadership’s lap. Once the economy started to take off in the nineties, the Party decreed it was time for the restructuring of the military to be accelerated, to force the PLA to catch up.

  It was not only a decade of fiscal neglect the military had to overcome. The military, like Chinese society, had to rid itself of a Maoist legacy of a deep, institutional involvement in party politics and a sprawling, irrational structure left behind by the Cold War. Deng’s early market reforms had set off an explosion of opportunity and, for some, wealth unknown in the Mao years. China itself was beginning to spread its wings as a power around the world. For the military to match this mission and become a genuine fighting force would require disposing of hundreds of thousands of more soldiers, on top of the huge demobilizations in the fifties and eighties, and literally thousands of businesses.

  Nothing symbolized the transformation of the country’s strategic setting more than oil. Within five years of striking oil in Daqing, the field’s production had made China self-sufficient in the resource. Yu was rewarded later with a Politburo seat, where he headed the earliest version of the Petroleum mafia, economic conservatives who supported traditional central planning and heavy industry. The legacy of Daqing lasted only until 1993, when China became a net oil importer. China’s reliance on oil imports, which has been growing every year since, marked a turning point for its economy and redefined its broader security interests for ever as well. The year the oil started to run out was the beginning of the annual double-digit increases in the PLA’s public budget that have continued ever since. It was also the year when China adopted a new military strategy, its own revolution in military affairs, in response to the dazzling high-tech firepower displayed by the US forces in removing Iraq from Kuwait. The traditional reliance on a massive land-based army trained to fight a ‘people’s war’ was to be displaced by a smaller military, lighter on manpower, but sharper on technology, mobility and inter-services operability. Whereas the PLA once provided workers for start-up energy projects, the PLA’s emblematic new mission was to build capability to project power beyond China’s borders, to protect supplies of oil, gas and other resources, shipped from the Middle East and elsewhere, or pumped overland through pipeline networks from neighbouring countries.

  The ties between the military and Chinese big oil endured beyond Daqing. When Iraq couldn’t raise the money it owed for arms bought during the Iran–Iraq war, it paid in kind in 1996 by offering PetroChina a $1.2 billion oil concession in tandem with Norinco, the state weapons manufacturer. The US ousting of Saddam Hussein delayed the project, and work did not begin on it until 2009. Likewise, Chinese investment in oilfields in Sudan was done in parallel with arms sales by a state-owned weapons firm to the Khartoum regime. By and large, however, the heroic frontier business exploits of the likes of the one-armed general are a thing of the past. The changes forced on the PLA by the Party’s civilian leadership since the early nineties have left the old Chinese military behind for good.

  Slowly but surely since the early nineties, the Party has deliberately pushed the PLA back into barracks. The Politburo has not selected a military man for the Standing Committee, the leadership’s inner circle, since the 1992 congress. Only fifteen years previously, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, a period during which the military held the country together, more than half of the Politburo were military officers. Now, only two out of twenty-four Politburo members wear uniforms. In 1998, Jiang issued a definitive order for the military to get out of large-scale commercial businesses. Hu Jintao, then his designated successor, oversaw the directive’s implementation.

  The fact that privileged pockets of the military still operate outside the law is on display on the streets of major Chinese cities every day. Porsches, SUVs and BMWs bearing military licence plates, often with expensively dressed women behind the wheels, are a common sight. Whether speeding blithely through the traffic or parked illegally outside nightclubs and gyms, the military-plated cars seem to exist in a legal dimension beyond that of ordinary citizens. As blatant as they are, though, these displays of privilege are largely a lagging indicator of the PLA’s halcyon days of corruption and power. Party insiders striving to create a more rules-based state in China boast that the military’s powers and duties have been codified much like the rest of the bureaucracy. ‘They used to be a very privileged organization,’ said an adviser to Hu Jintao. ‘Any demobilized soldier would automatically get a job in government. This is no longer the case. These privileges have been withdrawn. This is a great achievement of the Party.’

  Forced out of formal politics and business, the generals have a single brief for the twenty-first century, to build the Party a world-class army, navy and airforce. The trade-off for the military of confinement to barracks is that their quarters are more plush and modern than they have ever been. The pay of soldiers has been substantially increased. Operational budgets have been lifted and military scientific research institutes lavished with funds to develop technology for the high-tech wars of the future. But this new task has brought with it a different set of slow-boiling tensions, between the growth of a professional military ethos, rooted in western traditio
ns, and the overriding preoccupation of the Party to keep control of its most vital asset. As in much of twenty-first-century China, the often flashy modern overlay is still anchored, and weighed down, by old-fashioned political oversight.

  At the top, Hu Jintao sits above the army as commander-in-chief, as the chairman of the Central Military Commission. In a still evolving institutional setting, the commander-in-chief role comes to Hu by virtue of his leadership of the Communist Party, but not immediately on taking office. Jiang Zemin did not hand over leadership of the military until nearly two years after stepping down as party secretary, infuriating many in the political and academic establishment. In doing so, he set a precedent that many expect Hu to follow when he finishes as party secretary in late 2012.

  When you drill down into the ranks, into the day-to-day practice of political supervision, however, the Party’s ubiquitous web of controls and its 90,000 party cells seem increasingly archaic, quaint to insiders and confusing to longtime students of the system abroad. ‘What kills the military is the political system,’ a retired officer told me. ‘We don’t have a sergeant system, and the sergeants and the like are the ones who do most of the real military work.’ What the Chinese officer called the sergeant system is the tradition in western militaries of vesting substantial authority in non-commissioned officers. Commanders in western armies have a well-established practice of listening to NCOs, sergeants, corporals, warrant officers and the like, who have the delegated authority to make many on-the-ground decisions. ‘In our culture, delegating actually enhances authority. It shows that a commander listens,’ said a senior US military officer who has studied the PLA. ‘It is difficult to have an NCO system in a culture which does not like to delegate authority. In China, where so much is vested in face, you maintain your authority not just by being in charge but by appearing to be in charge.’