Revamping The Personnel System
When Deng (as PLA chief of staff) first assumed responsibility for military affairs in the mid-1970s, he quickly concluded that the PLA was a deeply troubled institution. In his infamous characterization to a meeting of the Military Commission in mid-1975, Deng asserted that the PLA suffered from "bloating, laxity, conceit, extravagance, and inertia."[3] Deng's reform efforts of this period were aborted by his ouster from power in 1976. By dint of its pivotal role in displacing the "Gang of Four," the PLA completed its recovery from the trauma of the Lin Biao affair, with the leadership settling into a Brezhnevite "stability of cadres" orientation. Except for those directly implicated in the factional politics of the Lin Biao era or for those who were hopelessly decrepit, most disgraced military leaders were returned to comparable or higher positions than those from which they had been ousted. The predominant character of military policy-making was inertial and self-satisfied, and an uncertain, untested Hua Guofeng was only too willing to comply.[4]
The consequences of this complacency, however, were driven home by China's inept military performance in the "pedagogic war" against Vietnam. As Jiefangjun Bao observed much later: "War is the mirror of training. The war of self-defensive counterattack against Vietnam in 1979—this small mirror—reflected the state of PLA's training at that time. ... A generation of military men ... had been wallowing [in] the PLA's glorious history: We are backward, our weapons and equipment are
backward, and ... even more frightening ... our military thinking and training ideas are backward!"[5]
Although there was no single explanation of these circumstances, the sorry state of the officer corps was a principal contributing factor. China's ratio of officers to enlisted men was (and is) the highest of any major army in the world. Many of these revolutionary veterans were simply not competent to lead a modern military force. Once Deng assumed chairmanship of the Military Commission in 1981, a major overhaul of the leadership and personnel system was one of his highest priorities. His goal was to induce accountability, responsiveness, and increased efficiency within a vast bureaucratic system that placed little value on any of these goals. As reforms slowly began to take root, new generations of young, technically competent personnel were recruited and educated, but they awaited job assignments appropriate to their background and training. Thus, senior officials needed to yield their posts, but without excessive disruption or alienation.
Deng's efforts took a long time to bear fruit. In July 1988 Jiefangjun Bao observed that "as early as 1980, Chairman Deng Xiaoping proposed that the system of military ranks should be implemented."[6] Beginning with the replacement of a number of regional military commanders, and proceeding to ever more ambitious attempts to overhaul the procedures governing the military system as a whole, a modern, regularized institutional framework slowly developed. It took nearly a decade for these policies to emerge with any clarity, suggesting the deeply entrenched character of the inherited system. Deng sought to replace hundreds of thousands of superannuated officers, but he proceeded in measured fashion, seeking to restructure the military without humiliating those losing status and power.
According to subsequent accounts, Deng's efforts "to build a powerful, modern, and regular revolutionary army" began in earnest in September 1981, three months after his election as chairman of the Military Commission.[7] But the record of events in the early 1980s is spotty.[8] Although there were limited cutbacks in manpower, reductions in the defense budget, and some transfers of military enterprises to the civilian sector, these steps did not yield major results. Deng is alleged to have
urged "radical measures" during a 1981 speech, but these efforts bore little fruit. Deng remained preoccupied in a more immediate sense with economic and political matters and chose to limit his direct involvement in military affairs. At Deng's behest, Yang Shangkun in 1983 was given overall responsibility to develop policy options for military reorganization; Yang is alleged to have overseen all subsequent reorganization and manpower-reduction measures.[9]
The principal obstacle to institutional reform was the sheer size of the PLA. For all practical purposes, there were no retirement procedures for senior personnel. In a speech to an enlarged meeting of the Military Commission on November 1, 1984, Deng commented on the immensity of the PLA, concluding that such a "swollen" military organization was too cumbersome to conduct actual military operations, let alone organize an orderly retreat. To underscore his unhappiness, Deng observed that the principal shortcoming of the triumphal military parade of October 1 marking the PRC's thirty-fifth anniversary was that "the man who reviewed the troops is an old man of eighty years."
In his November 1 address to the Military Commission, Deng announced the decision to reduce the PLA's manpower by one million men. Reflecting the sensitivity of these measures, Deng observed: "Let me assume responsibility for offending some people on this matter. I don't want to oblige the new chairman of the Military Commission."[10] The issues were subsequently deliberated at an enlarged meeting of the Central Military Commission in May–June 1985, which declared a "strategic shift" in the army's orientation geared toward "structural reform, reduction in strength, and reorganization [as] the central projects for the armed forces during the next two years."[11] Hu Yaobang asserted that the policy changes followed "two years of repeated deliberation and a cool and objective analysis of the international situation and China's own defense capabilities."[12] Although the manpower reductions had a strategic rationale—that China did not anticipate large-scale war for the remainder of this century—this characterization served principally to justify cutbacks and leadership turnover, rather than to explain them.
The principal effects of the 1984–85 decisions were to initiate a reduction in the officer corps ultimately totaling nearly 600,000 men, to pare China's military regions from eleven to seven, and to revamp a hopelessly inefficient system for allocating men, equipment, and materiel. At
the same time, other military units were abolished, deactivated, or transferred to the civilian apparatus, with different military headquarters in Beijing absorbing more modest cuts in personnel. The consequences of these decisions for the combat strength of China's armed forces proved minimal; the moves were intended principally to accelerate the retirement of senior officers, who had been generally exempted from the far more modest cutbacks of the early 1980s. The 1985 measures reached deeply into the leadership ranks of the Kunming, Wuhan, Fuzhou, and Urumqi military regions, each of which was absorbed into neighboring regions. All four military regions had in the past been judged vital to Chinese security planning, and the commanders of these forces evidently believed that they would be exempted from major cuts.
Little is known about the criteria employed by the Military Commission in dismantling "the four big temples." Although Deng and Yang appealed to the leadership of the affected units to keep the "overall situation" in mind and to accept the decisions of the Center, the transition was not smooth. Units purportedly sought to circumvent or subvert the commission's decisions by the squandering of funds, the theft of equipment and resources, and questionable job reassignments.[13] Although it is impossible to gauge the extent of these activities, such behavior reflected the threat to the prerogatives of a comfortably ensconced military elite. As a retired PLA officer observed during an interview, "The most difficult questions in China are those of personnel affairs."
Both publicly and privately, Chinese military officers treat the decisions of the late spring of 1985 as crucial to all subsequent steps toward institutional reform. Having achieved (or perhaps imposed) a consensus within the senior military ranks for a major organizational restructuring, Deng and Yang Shangkun launched a corollary series of steps. Two processes had to occur in tandem: the provision of psychic and financial compensation for those compelled to step down, and the specification of professional criteria for those moving into vacated positions, including the procedures and standards for future promotions.[14]
Different but simultaneous criteria were therefore devised for the two separate populations. For those stepping down from military service, the size of their pensions and their attributed status (in the forms of different categories of medals) derived principally from longevity—that is, the
date of entry into the army and their rank as of 1965.[15] One interviewee (a recent retiree) described some of the steps in the process. The officer acknowledged that retirement was compulsory, not voluntary. Retirement is resisted because of the decline in status and the lack of protection against inflation. The pension arrangements entail a combination of criteria: cadre rank (there are twenty-one grades in the military), retirement bonuses, and a variety of miscellaneous allowances all form part of the package. In the estimation of this retiree, the burgeoning costs associated with the retirement system have yet to yield any of the presumed financial dividends of a smaller military establishment, since the preponderance of the budget is devoted to salaries and pensions, not weapons.
For those moving up, the passage of military-service legislation in July 1988 and the reestablishment of military ranks on October 1, 1988, marked major milestones. For the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, explicit procedures governing appointment, promotion, compensation, job tenure, and retirement were in place.[16] Irrespective of the age and technical competence of particular serving officers, all military careers had suffered from a two-decade-long interruption of standard procedures for professional mobility. When ranks were eliminated in 1965, the prospects for advancement for all officers were frozen. Unlike those in the Party and state bureaucracies, career officers had no independent validation of their position and status. This problem assumed even greater poignancy when (as was noted earlier) officers discredited during the Lin Biao era were reappointed at the same rank or higher, blocking upward mobility for younger officers. The problems in the PLA were compounded by a lower mandatory age for retirement. Thus, a division commander must retire at fifty-five (although this can be extended to sixty if the officer has earned an advanced degree), whereas civilians may work for another five to ten years. Even with these new procedures, the system remains extremely top-heavy and overstaffed, especially at the rank of colonel and senior colonel.
There is also a subtle but significant differentiation between the PLA's military and technical cadres. Military personnel serving in various technical capacities have a rank system nearly equivalent to that of line officers, but their rank designations are slightly lower than those of other active duty personnel. Although some technical officers still wear uniforms, they wear different insignia from the line officers, thereby differ-
entiating the two groups. Thus, there is a pecking order between soldiers and scientists. This mechanism is also an artful means of keeping the total number of line officers at lower levels.
The reintroduction of ranks represented a significant turning point in Chinese military development. Positions in the PLA hierarchy would no longer derive principally from date of entry into the Red Army; rank and promotion would purportedly be linked with professional competence, merit, and technical expertise. The promulgation of these policies constituted a crucial transition in establishing explicit, institutionalized personnel arrangements for the military system as a whole, in the hope that the armed forces would again represent a highly desirable career option. Over time, therefore, the senior leadership hopes to recruit capable, well-educated officers who will view a military career with motivation, purpose, and long-term commitment. Should they fail to establish and institutionalize appropriate, predictable criteria for professional development, the prospects for creating a modern military establishment remain dim.