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

ment of most serious Party disputes, proven by its
role in 1966, 1976, and in 1989. Yet one major change
in China’s political system is despecialization of PLA
status in both state apparatus and society, partly due
to the design of CCP leaders learning the lesson of
the Cultural Revolution, and partly due to the PLA’s
own choice of reducing its involvement in nonprofessional
affairs. In the public’s eye, the PLA is one of the
important institutions in government, not above any
other in the system, such as the State Council.
The changes in the fourth category are subtler. The
PLA shares the Party’s determination to maintain the
existing system and makes itself available to answer
the Party’s call for actions against any organized opposition.
Therefore, the remnants of symbiosis are
still visible, and today the Party and the PLA firmly
stick together. The military supports the CCP, which
respects the military’s voice on major national issues
and provides it with the best resources possible.
Thence, the PLA has little incentive or need to disobey
the Party when its privileges are guaranteed. At a time
short of crisis, the current formula of the PLA backing
the civilians’ political agenda in exchange of their support
to its modernization will continue to hold.
Within civilian-military relations, many longterm
and strategic challenges lie in the domestic front,
namely how the PLA positions itself in the tripartite
relations between the Party and society, in which the
latter two are not always in harmony. The number of
organized protests in China is mounting. 11 But these
protests have been social and economic in nature, posing
no immediate pressure on the military to make a
choice. However, given the nature of the country’s
stressful state/society relations, when these protests
are resolved, they are social and economic, but when
138