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

they become hard to suppress, they become highly
political. The prospects that the PLA is ordered to do
the mission of cleaning the street remain constant.
China has entered a risky period of transformation. 12
The Tiananmen event has made PLA officers reluctant
to be drawn into a clampdown on large-scale civic
protests. 13 This shows that the real test would come
only when a major social crisis occurs. The PLA’s unconditional
support to the Party is a foregone conclusion
in a symbiotic relationship, but as the nature of
this relationship changes over time, such a conclusion
cannot be drawn with high confidence in a situation of
major social crisis.
A hypothesis can be raised that symbiosis is a transitional
phenomenon, found in transitional regimes
and reflecting a course of gradual transformation. In
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the
ties between the ruling party and the military seemed
to be symbiotic in peacetime. Yet once they no longer
saw their common survival in the same boat, the military
placed its own interests above those they used to
share. 14 This was a natural and an unavoidable choice
under enormous internal and external pressure, as
the Soviet Red Army decided in 1991 that defending
the Party would be too costly and fundamentally
jeopardize its own key interests. A painful divorce
occurred. The Soviet case revealed that the symbiotic
civil-military relationship is neither a given, nor
unshakable. This divorce was the result of a military
embracing professionalism, deemphasizing ideology
and protecting its own prestige. The trigger for this
is often irreconcilable confrontation between the state
and society, which imposes the ultimate choice upon
communist armed forces.
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