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

a natural requirement for officers operating sophisticated
high-tech equipment. PLA history has proved
that this discourse is inherently self-contradictory and
underlies the Party’s continuous call for the PLA to
resist western ideas of “delinking party-military ties,”
“depoliticization,” and “nationalizing” the PLA. 27 The
danger to CCP control over the gun is clear: Party
control, based on ideational indoctrination, is progressively
diluted as the PLA undertakes internal changes
driven by IT/RMA transformation. This explains why
the CCP continues to emphasize its “absolute control
over the gun.”
Specifically, rising PLA professionalism can be
gauged by the military’s retreat from societal politics,
as it is no longer an organ of CCP grass-roots mobilization.
Furthermore, the PLA has relinquished “people’s
war doctrine” and related combat models, as
these are irrelevant to its future mode of engagement:
no land invasion of China is imaginable for a long
time to come. Thus, these events gradually undercut
the so-called natural ties between a revolutionary
military and a politicized population that previously
enhanced the symbiotic civil-military relationship in
the name of a “nation-in-arms.” The PLA has ridded
itself of many nonprofessional missions that impeded
it from exercising its primary functions of national defense.
Increasingly, professionalism defines the value
judgments of PLA soldiers and encourages them to be
preoccupied with the business of war. Indirectly the
emphasis on “expert” erodes a foundation of “red.”
Additionally, corporate identity is a double-edged
sword for civil-military relations in all transforming
societies: a united military contributes to the ruling
party when both sides share strategic interests, but
this could become a problem if their interests diverge
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