The PLA is the collective term for the ground forces, strategic rocket forces, naval, and air forces of China. There are about 2.8 million active duty officers and soldiers in the PLA, but its total numbers can vary. Beijing has engaged in a game of "smoke and mirrors" over the strength of the PIA. When the Chinese government conducted a one millionman reduction in the PIA in the 1980s, the PAP grew by about 500,000 men to a current strength of 800,000. More recently, despite the announced troop reductions in the white paper Beijing issued on national defense, we have seen entire divisions of the PLA change uniforms and overnight become members of the PAP. [28] The PAP is a paramilitary organization controlled by the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party and the Ministry of Public Security. The Continental Emphasis China is a continental power, a fact that is reflected in its massive ground force capability. For centuries, Chinese leaders were concerned about consolidating their control over the populace on the Asian mainland. Historically China's leaders devoted little effort to naval expansion or maritime issues. [29] Of the 24 combat armies of the PLA, 17 are deployed in the north and northeast of China, positioned to defend the traditional invasion routes and to repel the traditional enemies China has faced-Russia from the north, and Japan and the Western powers over the Korean Peninsula and from the east. Most of the research and development money devoted to new weapon systems for the Chinese military is going to the air force and the navy, but two-thirds of the PLA is devoted to land power. That figure goes up to 75 percent if the light infantry divisions of the PAP are counted as part of the PLA. Beijing has the luxury of choosing whether to concentrate on defending its littoral waters, focusing on naval force projection in an effort to become a maritime power, or maintaining its continental orientation. Clearly, today China defines its military power through its Army. Beijing's strategic orientation is important when making judgements about future potential. A nation will seek to develop military capabilities to defend what its leaders see as the important interests of the country. The current national strategy of China calls for the development of national strength through economic and scientific development. The main goal of China, according to the report by Jiang Zemin at the 15th Communist Party Congress, is to build a "socialist economy. [30] The challenge for Chinese leaders is to spread the primarily coastal economic development inland. Two ways China is doing this is to expand trade, telecommunications, and transportation from China's Sichuan and Guizhou Provinces southwest into Vietnam's northern highlands, Laos, and Burma; and to expand trade and commerce west through Xinjiang and into Central Asia. At the annual Kunming Trade Show, for example, the small border counties and provinces of Burma (Myanmar), Laos, and Vietnam are heavily represented selling food stuffs, light industrial goods, and textiles to residents of Sichuan. Kunming, in fact, has become something of a hub for the economic development of the region. Boeing Aircraft Corporation, partnered with another U.S. firm, Flight Safety, has established a regional flight simulation center there, hoping to draw regional airline pilots there for training. These are positive steps that have the potential to contribute to the economic development of China and its neighbors. The old French-built rail lines into Laos and Vietnam are operating again, and road links are being developed. China's economic development and integration with Burma is also strengthening. The old World War II-vintage "Burma Road" has been expanded to a four-lane highway in some places and rail lines are being installed between Kunming and Rangoon. In addition, China is building a port complex in Rangoon to facilitate shipping. This outlet on the Bay of Bengal is designed to serve as the transshipment point for goods from south China. In the west, to develop Xinjiang and to secure an alternative source of oil, China has agreed with Kazakhstan to develop and build a major oil shipment pipeline. Along with this pipeline, Beijing will improve the rail and road links to the west. Kazakhstan has the potential to become a new zone of competition among China, the European powers, Russia, and the United States. By 2010, China may require imports of as many as 7 million barrels a day of oil, some of which could come through the Kazakhstan pipeline. Investing in the oil fields there is a strategic move on China's part that will surely also include the installation of fiber-optic cable to improve telecommunications and control rail traffic. [31] Central Asia is also something of an agri- cultural basin. Agriculture accounts for between 37 percent and 60 percent of the net material products of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, TaJikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Although China today is self-sufficient in grain, the World Bank predicts that by the year 2020 China will need to import between 30 million and 90 million metric tons of grain annually. Good transportation links with countries that have small populations, but an abundance of arable land like the Central Asian republics will be important in the future. Beijing plans to lay four oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia and Russia into China for a total cost of $12.5 billion. China will build a 1,000-kilometer pipeline from the Uzen oil field in Kazakhstan through Turkmenistan and Iran to the Persian Gulf. [32] Clearly, China has launched a number of commercial trade activities that will simultaneously improve the regional military lines of communication. Once a nation develops vital economic interests in a region, by necessity it will factor those interests into its security equation and build a capability to secure and defend them. A careful reading ofboth Clausewitz and Sun Tzu will tell us this. It is simply a fact of history and geopolitics. For the United States Army, these matters affect most seriously the U.S. presence in the Republic of Korea. With an infantry division stationed on the Korean Peninsula, U.S. Army planners and government policymakers must remain continually mindful of China's presence. Senior Chinese military officials have told American officers that, even in the event of a collapse of North Korea, neither the United States nor South Korea (ROK) should believe that China will simply sit back and watch the ROK and U.S. armies march north, approaching the Chinese border. Referring back to Chinese volunteers crossing the Yalu River in 1950, several Chinese military leaders have made it clear that China should be "consulted and involved" in any humanitarian operations in North Korea. [33] While China continues to insist that it may use force to reunite Taiwan and the Mainland, and makes veiled threats against U.S. forces in Korea, it would be foolhardy for the United States Army to engage in military-to-military exchanges that would improve the PLA's ability to project force. The manner in which China has used its army (and its PAP) as a force to repress popular movements and dissent, as during the Cultural Revolution and in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing, strains army-to-army contacts. Just as the U.S. Army must avoid increasing the capabilities of the PLA to project force against China's neighbors and Taiwan, it must remain sensitive to bilateral programs that improve the PLA's ability to repress the Chinese population. Chinese military leaders are also especially sensitive to U.S. exercises around China's periphery. When the 82d Airborne Division conducted an exercise with the Kazakh Army, dropping an airborne battalion into Kazakhstan, PLA leaders interpreted this as potentially hostile. The PLA is also wary of humanitarian missions in Mongolia, where China remains sensitive to U.S. military activities. [34] The Military Potential of the Ground Forces China's military strength lies in its ground forces, and, despite an antiquated military and a fragile economy, if China's military potential is likely to be realized anywhere, it is on the continent of Asia. The PIA of the future must have the potential to dominate and control terrain, lines of transportation and commerce, population centers, and populations in support of China's national interests. PLA leaders are realistic about the resources they will probably get to improve their military capabilities. They realize that one-third of China's ground forces leave active duty each year, so they cannot count on a military composed of a large body of experienced professional soldiers who are well trained to handle sophisticated equipment. The PLA's leaders also realize that most of the soldiers who enter the army are peasants with a poor education. Therefore, conscious of their weaknesses, they are concentrating on what we would call "asymmetric warfare." This means that the PLA will not seek to match or mirror the forces of any potential adversary. [35] PLA leaders will also analyze how to use technology to complement its strengths. If only a third of the PLA is trained at any time, it will practice putting together smaller building blocks of forces, perhaps of brigade instead of division size, that are fully trained. Instead of seeing fully digitized divisions, as is the goal in the United States, the PLA may build up smaller units of highly educated soldiers and officers to support main force armies. These "information/electronics/modernization" support units will probably be drawn from more educated urban recruits who serve longer careers. They will probably be trained to attack the command and communications systems of advanced armies. But every PLA Group Army may not require such a capability. The Group Armies that are to fight potential battles in Southeast Asia or Central Asia would not need as much "high-tech" equipment. Group Armies on the border with Korea, where there are still U.S. forces, and opposite Taiwan, may be structured differently. The thinkers and strategists of the PLA have grasped the "intellectual side of military modernization." They have focused the war-fighting debate in China on limited technological improvements in areas like reconnaissance and sensor systems, electronic warfare and jamming, destroying enemy command and control systems with "logic bombs," and the use of short-range missile systems to attack [36] an adversary. This sophisticated modemization effort is designed to bring at least some of China's combat divisions [37] to a world-class level. The effort is modeled on what the Chinese military saw the United States do during the Gulf War; that is, to increase knowledge and awareness of the battlefield, to conduct simultaneous operations deep in enemy territory as well as along areas of contact, and to attack an enemy's key competencies and strengths without exposing one's own weaknesses. The other driving force for military modernization, the "manifest destiny" to reunite Taiwan and the Mainland by force if necessary, has led to other modernization plans. Some skeptics will ask: "Can the PLA assimilate these techniques?" Between 1979 and 1983, after studying and working out the doctrines and concepts in the U.S. "Air-Land Battle" system, the PLA managed to transition from a force that could conduct only sequential, single-arm (artillery, infantry, armor) operations, to a force that could conduct integrated, combined-arms operations on the battlefield. Then, after some experimentation on the use of helicopters, between 1984 and 1990, the PIA was able to successfully incorporate air-mobile (heliborne) operations into the tactics of some of its group armies. After watching the Gulf War and rethinking its doctrines again, between 1991 and 1995, the PIA began to grasp simultaneous operations in various forms of battle-space (air, undersea, sea surface, and space with missiles). The 1996 demonstrations of force against Taiwan showed what the PLA had accomplished. They used a force of ships, paratroopers, amphibious troops and marines, and aircraft in the exercises supported by sophisticated jamming and short-range ballistic missiles. Using its older platforms, type 69 and other Russian-derived tanks, the PLA integrated new laser range finders and night vision technologies into its ground force tactics. For limited numbers of divisions, and using limited assets, the PLA has demonstrated that it can incorporate new technologies and employ them on the battlefield. At the August 1997 exhibition in the Military Museum in Beijing, designed to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the PLA, China teased observers with a limited view of what it would like to produce to improve the lethality and force projection capabilities of its military. On display were a combination of systems that, if mass-produced and fielded, would give the Chinese ground forces the ability to sustain forces away from bases of supply without relying on the old methods of "People's War" where combat forces were sustained by local militia. Included in the displays at the exhibition were significantly improved field mess (kitchen) systems to feed and sustain deployed troops; forward area refueling points for armored warfare and airmobile, or helicopter-borne forces; and the sort of sensor-to-shooter target acquisition systems that depend on remotely piloted vehicles linked to a sophisticated intelligence and communications architecture. Combined with global positioning satellites, these sensor-to-shooter systems would permit the PLA to target enemy forces in deeper battle space on a real-time basis with cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, or air strikes. These improvements would permit the PIA to more effectively maneuver and support combat forces in such places as along the strategic lines of communications into Xinjiang, Central Asia, Vietnam and Burma. More importantly, the systems displayed would permit better sustainment and logistics for these forces and improved "battlefield awareness," something that was severely lacking in China's 1979 attack into Vietnam. [38] China's leaders may claim their intentions are peaceful and defensive; but if economic collapse threatens because of the loss of markets or resources on which China has come to depend, Beijing will use military force to defend its vital interests as quickly as it used military force to crush domestic political threats to regime survival in the Cultural Revolution, and in Tianamen Square in 1989. Beijing has acted responsibly to assist in securing regional stability on the Korean Peninsula. But where its vital interests were at stake, it gave Pakistan a nuclear and missile capability to be used against China's long-term rival for power-India. When it saw that Vietnamese forces were poised to crush the Khmer Rouge supported by China in Cambodia and threaten Thailand, China attacked Vietnam. One cannot know just how advanced the PLA is in employing its force projection systems, but if the systems engineering and production capabilities of the Chinese national defense industries develop, the PIA will be a significantly more capable force, able to dominate Taiwan or other regional opponents. In the more open terrain of the steppes of Central Asia, the PLA could well have the type of forces that the United States fielded in the GulfWar against Iraq. Building that type of force is one of the goals of China's military leaders. [39] Back to Table of Contents China's Military Potential Back to SSI List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by US Army War College. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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