China Today Series. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. xix, 284 pp. (Tables, figures, map.) US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7456-7078-2.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (the PLA, as China’s army, air, naval, and strategic missile forces are collectively known) has experienced a wave of growth and change in the twenty-first century. The ongoing changes to China’s military forces and the inevitable implications for Asia-Pacific security have attracted great academic attention in the West, especially in the United States. As a leading scholar in the field, You Ji provides a timely research monograph on the PLA’s transformation into a professional and technical modern army in the years from 1990 to 2014. Based on the available Chinese sources, You, head of the Department of Government and Public Administration at the University of Macao, offers objective surveys and an insightful interpretation by analyzing the civil-military relations, security concerns, organizational change, and new defense strategy of the Chinese military. His historical approach, concise narratives, and many figures and tables throughout the volume are very helpful for readers’ understanding of the recent and complicated evolution of the PLA.
His book focuses on the key issues the PLA faces today, such as CCP (Chinese Communist Party) control, the anti-corruption movement, combat readiness, and tensions with the US armed forces over the disputed islands in the South China Sea. He provides a “roadmap of how the PLA has modernized itself as a credible fighting force globally” (227) by pointing out that the PLA has transformed itself “from a tactical homeland defensive force to one that is capable of strategic offensive missions beyond national borders” (144). The book should be read by international strategy analysts, Chinese military experts, Asian studies specialists, military historians, and those who have an interest in contemporary China, the US-China relationship, and Asia-Pacific security.
The first chapter, titled “China’s Changing Civil-Military Relations,” examines the PLA’s evolution from the Party’s army or the “Party in uniform” (25), to its partial “autonomy” after Deng Xiaoping (leader from 1978 to 1989) (41–42). In the next chapter, “PLA Politics under Jiang and Hu,” the author continues to explore the changes in China’s civil-military relations from Jiang Zemin (1989–2002) to Hu Jintao (2002–2012), who had transferred power from the old-guard party/military leaders to postwar technocrats. “Institutionalizing civil-military interplay is a key attribute in this evolution,” You writes (47). The third chapter discusses the PLA and National Security by detailing “the PLA’s directional leadership in China’s policy-making process concerning its national security and defense-related foreign affairs” (23–24). The fourth chapter analyzes the formation and function of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), including its organization (totalling 1.3 million troops, chain of command, and operations. The author emphasizes that “[a]s China is experiencing rampant corruption, social injustice, and public disorder, increasingly more mass protests can be expected. … In sum, the PAP is a crucial armed force for PLA internal security missions” (115). His fifth chapter, “National Defense Strategy,” concentrates on the PLA’s primary functions—war fighting—to explain why and how the high command had made major changes five times in its national defense strategy, which as “practical and realistic” guided its force employment and war preparation (138). The next chapter, “Aerospace Power,” explores Beijing’s vision and preparation for air and space war in the near future on “how to combine air and space power in terms of building a joint command chain, a mutually supplementary force structure, and interconnected software and hardware weapons systems…” (145). In his last chapter, “China’s Deep Ocean Expansion,” You examines the PLA Navy (PLAN)’s transformation in the 2000s to 2010s when it was “extending its operations from coastal defense to far-seas power projection” (181). He, however, is critical of PLAN carrier-centric development, writing that “[t]he vulnerability of carriers to saturated air and undersea attack has been proven” (200). In his conclusion, the author believes that the PLA is still in the middle of its transformation since “[i]t is an ongoing process to catch up with the breakthroughs of global hi-tech technology, changing security environment, and evolution of military theory” (215).
The book offers a Chinese perspective with unique insights into the important facts which have shaped military reform and made unprecedented changes over the past thirty years. Some Western historians have overlooked the complex nature of the PLA transformation from one generation to the next. For example, You examines the institutional and ideological separations of the army from the party as part of the PLA’s modernization, while others look at the Chinese military modernization through “a process of normal equipment upgrade facilitated by natural technological progress” (225). You concludes that the PLAN would not risk a naval war over the disputed islands in both the South China Sea and East China Sea since its “carrier-centric transformation” would not guarantee any victory in the conflict against the American and even Japanese navies around these areas (203–208). Currently, many American as well as Japanese strategists and naval analysts predict that there will be a naval clash sooner or later between their navies or air forces and the PLAN or PLA Air Force (PLAAF), both of which have become more and more aggressive over the disputed areas in the seas.
Although You has done an incredible amount of research on such a broad subject in one volume, his work could have provided more coverage on the military budget process, financial resources, weapons procurement, and defense industries as important topics in the study of the PLA. While having used 23 out of 33 pages to criticize Beijing’s carrier development, the chapter could have gone into more detail on China’s deep ocean expansion, as its title indicated. As the second-largest navy in the world, exceeded only by the US Navy, the PLAN has more than 600 warships, including nuclear submarines, 430 warplanes, and more than 300,000 sailors, soldiers, and marines, while it has only one aircraft carrier.
Xiaobing Li
University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, USA
pp. 557-559