Civil-Military Relations in China: Assessing the PLA's Role in Elite Politics (INSS China Strategic Perspectives, Number 2, August 2010)

This study reviews the last 20 years of academic literature on the role of the Peoples Liberation Army PLA in Chinese elite politics. It examines the PLAs willingness to support the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party CCP and to obey directives from top party leaders, the PLAs influence on the selection of Chinas top civilian leaders, and the PLAs ability to shape the domestic political environment. Over the last two decades the discussion of these three issues has largely been shaped by five trends identified in the literature increasing PLA professionalism, bifurcation of civil and military elites, a reduced PLA role in political institutions, reduced emphasis on political work within the PLA, and increased military budgets. Together, these trends are largely responsible for the markedly reduced role of the PLA in Chinese elite politics. First, we identify and assess key trends in civil-military relations over the last 20 years. This analysis seeks to identify key changes in civil-military relations that affected and mostly reduced the militarys role in Chinese elite politics. The second section contains a brief review of the main approaches to civil-military relations that have been employed in the literature, and analyzes the evolution in analytical approaches over time. The third section reviews cases where authors writing on the role of the Chinese military in elite politics made specific predictions that can be assessed against actual outcomes. Although there are relatively few specific predictions, the ones that do exist provide an additional means for assessing the predictive value of analytical models. The fourth section presents our conclusions about the literatures ability to apply analytical models to specific cases and generate firm predictions about the militarys role in elite politics. We conclude that most of the literature has been descriptive and interpretive rather than predictive.