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The New Officer Corps: Implications for the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

June Teufel Dreyer
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Extract

In early 1975, in a speech to the cadres of the headquarters of the General Staff Department of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), Deng Xiaoping delivered his blueprint for the military of the future. The radical restructuring of the military and its officer corps that it entailed was purportedly proposed by Mao Zedong himself. However, the fact that the speech was not made public until 1983, allegedly because it had been suppressed by the Gang of Four, makes it more likely that the architect of the reorganization, with its far-reaching implications for the PLA's officer corps, was Deng himself. Two decades later, at the close of the Deng era, it is important to examine the thrust of this document in assessing trends for the officer corps of the future.

Type
Management of the PLA
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 146 , June 1996 , pp. 315 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1996

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References

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5. Translated in FBIS-CHI, 8 September 1988, pp. 37^11.

6. Author's interview with Major Kenneth Allen, United States Air Force (retired), 13 March 1995. Major Allen served as Assistant Air Force Attache in Beijing at the time of the demonstrations. The author wishes to thank not only Major Allen but a large number of Western military, government and intelligence officials and two PLA officers who gave generously of their time and knowledge, all of them on condition that they not be identified by name. She is also greatly indebted to her discussants, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Blasko and Colonel John Corbett, United States Army, and the other participants of the conference from which this volume is drawn, for their many valuable suggestions.

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39. After, of course, originally being purged for being ultra-right and, later, “left in appearance but right in essence.”

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52. Ibid.

53. An American military officer who visited Lhasa was astounded to see soldiers sitting on blankets at a local bazaar selling PLA uniforms and combat boots.

54. Xinhua, 2 November 1988.Google Scholar

55. Kyodo (Tokyo), 25 October 1993.Google Scholar

56. Xinhua, 21 July 1993.Google Scholar

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60. Willy Wo-lap Lam, “Top cadres to pledge allegiance to central authorities,” South China Morning Post,6 December 1994, pp. 1, 11.Google Scholar

61. A source quoted in one Hong Kong paper described the internal transfer of more than a thousand PLA commanders between late 1992 and late 1993 as “quietly taking place to beat regionalism,” and predicted that it would be intensified, accompanied by central government efforts to regain control over economic and financial matters. See “Central leadership moving to bolster power,” South China Morning Post, 2November 1993, p. 1. Other motives might include purging members of the Yang faction, and enforcing retirement ages.

62. See Ch'ü, T'ung-tsu, Local Government in China Under the Ch 'ing(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 20–21, 172–73 for a more detailed explanation of this law and its consequences.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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64. Xinhua, 8 June 1994.

65. There are seven military regions, and therefore 14 individuals who might be expected to be promoted to general. However, the senior commissar post in the Shenyang Military Region remained vacant, and that in Nanjing had only a few months before been assumed by Fang Zuqi, who received a promotion from major general to lieutenant general at that time.

66. See, for example, Commentator, “Solid action must be taken to put things in practice,” JFJB, 10 June 1994, pp. 45–46, which notes, inter alia,that “if politics, principles, and guidelines [established by the CMC] exist only at meetings, in documents, and in people's remarks, they will not play any guiding role, no matter how good they are.”

67. Lam, Willy Wo-lap, “Jiang Zemin urges PLA to avoid internal politics,” South China Morning Post,20 February 1995, p. 1.Google Scholar