The Inherited Military System

The Chinese armed forces represent a virtual way of life for large numbers of Chinese. Although there have been periodic efforts to curb the size of the military establishment, these attempts have focused on the PLA as a fighting force, rather than as a full service institution. The army's allocative and distributive reach within Chinese society and the economy is unusually broad. It employs, feeds, and houses millions of people. Its claim on the national budget, while much diminished at present, was virtually unlimited in previous decades, and its proprietary access to resources remains very great.

The principal anomaly in the power of the military is its understated leadership role. Except in the early 1950s and between the mid to late 1960s and the early 1970s, the PLA has not assumed power in an overt political sense. The army frequently achieved disproportionate representation in national and provincial-level leadership bodies, but rarely chose to exercise this power fully. The Party and the army achieved a compact or at least a tacit understanding: in exchange for its obeisance to CCP rule, the PLA remained emperor of a vast realm of its own. Except for post—Korean War cutbacks and the retrenchment following the "high tide" of military influence under Lin Biao, the Party leadership very rarely intruded upon the societal, organizational, and economic domains controlled by the armed forces.

By dint of these understandings, the power and prerogatives of the PLA became embedded deeply in Chinese administrative and economic life. The military's entitlements ranged very widely, including control of

airfields, ports, air space, communications networks, and industrial facilities, as well as access to goods and services from abroad. These inherited assets and jurisdictional claims, being reserved for the near exclusive use of the armed forces, inhibited infrastructural and societal development as a whole.

Some of the most telling consequences were found in the Chinese defense industrial system. Created and designed under Soviet guidance in the 1950s, but subsequently cloned at Mao's behest in interior provinces during the 1960s, the defense economy kept millions employed.^[1] Except for high-priority national defense projects, there were neither incentives nor opportunities for meaningful reform. The creation of "third line" defense industries frequently replicated the inefficiencies of existing plants and facilities, with these units granted proprietary claim on budgetary, technical, and manpower resources, as well as preferential access to industrial materials and energy supplies.^[2] Gross inefficiency and the absence of effective innovation went hand in hand, with Chinese factories producing endless amounts of antiquated equipment at heavily subsidized state prices. A vast, highly duplicative defense industrial system produced on demand for a military hierarchy that sought only to keep all key organizational constituencies "well fed."

Few within the leadership ever challenged the army's entitlements. As a consequence, the army grew by accretion and inertia, bloated by a personnel logjam, especially at the upper reaches of the system. The army was rewarded for its loyalty and service to the state in successive national crises, garnering progressively larger forces and budgetary resources. But size did not beget organizational efficiency; military preparedness was deemed important only for elite national defense units.

Different levels of the military system, however, performed invaluable services for state and society. The PLA built bridges and railways, furnished personnel and facilities for internal security, maintained order at times of upheaval, contributed labor and materials to major national projects, and safeguarded national security. By its reach throughout the provinces and by the strategic positioning of key military units, it also served as the ultimate guarantor of political and social control. But these arrangements gradually transformed the military system into a person-

nel, administrative, and economic network of staggering and unmanageable proportions.

Thus, to conceptualize the PLA as a military establishment and guardian of national security is somewhat misleading; to many, it was a way of life, insulated from society as a whole and highly privileged and protected. At the same time, soldiers and civilians employed by the army generally enjoyed living standards superior to other institutions. Few incentives existed to alter this general pattern, and the Party leadership (mindful of its dependence upon the armed forces) granted the PLA effective control of its own realm. Deng Xiaoping sought to remake the Chinese defense establishment in the context of these practices and circumstances.