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

2007. Because of the foreign ministry spokesman’s ignorance
of the event during a news conference at the
time, some analysts believed that it was an independent
PLA act. 33 This chapter argues that this is not the
case. There is no doubt that the antisatellite weapon
(ASAT) proposal came from the CMC, where Hu’s approval
was crucial and needed to be cleared by civilians
in the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). This
conforms to Hu’s leadership style, which stresses collective
responsibility and civil-military coordination
on key national security matters that are of grave international
consequence. Technically, the satellite was
owned by a civilian body, the Central Meteorological
Bureau under the State Council. It is inconceivable
that the PLA could knock it down without any prior
consultation with the State Council, because the political
consequences were simply too huge. Moreover,
the PLA needed specific data from the Bureau in its
long preparation for the operation, e.g., data acquisition
of the satellite. Therefore, the PLA could not do
the test without civilian assistance. The question is at
what level the bureaucrats were notified about it. It
is apparent that neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
nor the State Meteorological Bureau was senior
enough to be involved in the decisionmaking process,
but this does not mean that their top heads were not
informed before the missile launch.
The civilians at various state agencies are not in a
position to monitor, still less oppose, any PLA initiative
proposed by the CMC, approved by the PSC and
pursued in the name of national security. Their role
is simply to help the PLA implement the initiative,
as seen from the PLA’s missile exercises in 1996 and
the Sino-Russo joint exercise in 2005. Yet civil-military
coordination on matters that could have a deep im-
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