介绍:
CG: China’s military reform continues, with the establishment of the Rocket Force and the Strategic Support Force of the People’s Liberation Army.
BK: Professor Shen Dingli, would you say that this is a break away from the Soviet model – an attempt to “Americanize” the PLA, as some observers are putting it?
Prof. Shen Dingli: It’s neither of them, it’s not a break away from the Soviet model, in the Soviet model the Party leads the military, and actually through this reform the Party would reinforce its control over the military, but also it is to use American advantages to conduct a whole area, I mean global-wise, ability to operate our military. Therefore, the military need to be more professional, need to use different divisions; army, navy, air force and rocket force, to conduct effective operations. They are a credible deterrence, so it combines the merits of the Soviet and US military to create a Chinese version.
TY: And Dr. Finkelstein, from your perspective, what is so special or peculiar about the reforms to be carried out this time compared to the last major military overhaul China took some 30 years ago?
Dr. David Finkelstein: Well, there are various dimensions of this that are very different and very significant. First of all, past reorganizations of the PLA have either been about downsizing the force or about creating new tactical level units or about adding new national level headquarters to the legacy organizational framework. This current reorganization is significantly different. What this is doing is basically changing the entire framework of the national and theater level systems to something very different. So this is not just about downsizing, it’s about recreating and redefining the command-control relationships and authorities between the central military commission, the services and the soon-to-be-established joint theater command and I’ve got to say that from an operational perspective, this very massive, sweeping and potentially dislocating reorganization of the PLA really is a tacit acknowledgment by the military leadership and the Party leadership that the legacy organization of the PLA was ill-suited and incapable of conducting joint operations as they aspire to conduct them. So this is a major significant corrective where an organization that was irrationally organized and commanded is being radically changed in order to fight modern, joint operations.
BK: Well talking more about those details there, we’re now seeing three new military divisions established, the General Command for the army, the Rocket Force and the Strategic Support Force. So Dr. Finkelstein, why exactly have these three been established? What is the special significance going on there?
Dr. David Finkelstein: It looks as if the four General Departments as we have known them, the General Staff Department, the General Armaments Department, the General Political Department and the General Logistics Department, are going to go away. So in the case of the ground forces, traditionally it has been the four General Departments under the CFC that have been responsible for leading, managing and modernizing the army. But now the army, the ground forces, are going to have their own independent headquarters, in fact they haven’t used the term headquarters, they have used the term ‘leading organ’. So the army is going to become a stand-alone service and be cut loose from the four General Departments, so that’s pretty clear. The strategic Rocket Forces; of course, the second artillery, since its establishment in the 1960s, has been a branch of the ground forces. Now it’s been elevated to an independent service in recognition of the national-level strategic mission that it has. That’s pretty straightforward. I think one of the big unknowns, really, because there’s been so little officially said about it, is the establishment of the Strategic Support Force. Very little has been said about it officially by the Ministry of National Defense or the official PLA press, but there’s a lot of speculation that this reorganization will have the responsibility for outer space, cyber space, and what the PLA generally calls new-type operation forces. It will also have responsibility, it seems, for civil-military integration, in other words trying to bring the best of civilian off the shelf of research and development into the military more efficiently, as well as some logistics. We just don’t know at this point, it’s really too early to tell what this organization is going to do.
BK: Obviously we are seeing this anti-corruption campaign going on both across the country and within the military. What do you think its role is, very briefly, to the military reforms?
Prof. Shen Dingli: This would eradicate the cancers within the armed forces. That would not harm the morale of the armed forces, but rather make it upright. In the meantime, the military would have more resources saved through such a kind of anti-corruption. It would be more able to dedicate additional resources to improving officer and soldier welfare.
Dr. David Finkelstein: I think this is a very important point about the anti-corruption campaign, by the PLA’s own press it’s very clear that the PLA has not had independent oversight of its own operations and that the lack of independent oversight is a major systemic shortcoming, self-admitted by the PLA, that had resulted in the rapid corruption across the officer corps, and within its upper legions as evidenced by the high-profile cases made public over the last couple of years. So with the establishment of an independent audit agency, the establishment of an independent political and legal office directly under the CMC, and not part of the old General Political Department, there are aspirations, at least, that some of the systemic lacuna in the system that allowed some of this corruption to go unchecked will now be checked, so we’ll have to wait and see.
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