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

and the CMC military affairs). This has been codified
in order to govern the interactions between these two
most powerful institutions. 30 These codified rules are
sanctioned by an emerging culture in civil-military
relations, which has created a deeply rooted taboo in
the minds of both civilian and military leaders not to
step beyond this red line. 31 The leaders who intrude
into areas of responsibility other than their own have
been punished politically, as seen by the lesson of
Yang Shangkun (杨尚昆) and Yang Baibing (杨白冰)
who in 1992 used the PLA to back up Deng’s way of
reform without CMC approval. This unauthorized
PLA interference with civilian leadership was the immediate
cause for their removal from PLA top command.
Since then, no such case has been repeated.
Clearly, this lesson has been learned with sincerity
from both sides. Indeed, institutionalization cuts both
ways for the CCP and the PLA, and it has placed the
commander in chief in a most advantageous position
for moving between exerting party leadership over
the PLA and soliciting military support for his policy
initiatives. Jiang and Hu have effectively used existing
civilian institutions for control and to compensate
for their weakness vis-à-vis the generals and have had
PLA support for their major policies.
In principle, the decisionmaking process concerning
matters of national defense and national security
is now structured in regular and formal meetings of
the relevant parties after lengthy consultations and
debate among different interests. 32 Less known, however,
are the concrete channels of communication between
the PLA and state agencies over specific cases
that have strong domestic and international significance.
One example is the PLA shooting down Feng
Yun-1C, a meteorological satellite, on January 11,
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