The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

waged a campaign of rhetoric to reassure the officer
corps that this will not be a problem. Moreover, they
have attempted to make the new historic missions and
MOOTW more palatable to China’s soldiers. According
to one set of authors writing from their location
in the Shenyang Military Region headquarters of the
Middle Echelon, “MOOTW expands the traditional
scope of army tasks and enable the military forces
to play a greater role in a broader scope of time and
space.” The authors opined: “Relatively speaking, understanding
of the military strategic guidelines has focused
more on preparing for and winning wars . . . and
insufficient attention has been given to MOOTW. This
is not only because the strategic position of MOOTW
has not been explicitly specified, but also that the
strategic guiding principle for MOOTW has not been
clarified.” The authors tentatively suggest the concept
of “selective active participation” rather than trying to
do everything. 51
Challenge #3: Can the Warfighters and their
Politico-Military Chain of Command Mitigate/
Manage the Tensions?
Among the unintended consequences of this for
civil-military relations could easily be growing tensions
between the PLA and Party-State. While New
Historic Missions provide expansive justification for
continued defense spending, they can also raise unrealistic
expectations among civilian leaders (and even
among the Chinese people) of what the PLA can or
should be able to do. Certainly these new missions
preempt the possibility of a peace dividend looming
in the absence of a Taiwan imperative. 52 As tensions in
the Taiwan Strait recede and perhaps even gradually
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