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

internal chaos, two staff officers from Jiangxi province,
writing in Guofang, argued that the snow and ice
emergency showed how such a scenario might work
in practice. 25
Given that south China’s transportation and communications
infrastructure would play an important
role in military operations in the Taiwan Strait or the
South China Sea, PLA analysts Cui and Li recommended
that China’s defense planning put more emphasis
on building capacity to carry out rapid repairs
on transportation and power infrastructure and that
future construction of transportation and communications
infrastructure be done in such a way as to
ensure multiple lines of transportation and communication
and with an eye to dual civilian and military
use. 26 Yang Jinkui, an officer in the Chengdu Military
Region (MR), writing in the PLA Daily (解放军报) suggested
that the PLA should reflect on what might happen
if severe weather coincided with war. Stating that
the United States had used cloud-seeding as a weapon
during the Vietnam War, Yang argued that the PLA
should be prepared for climate manipulation in wartime
and take the experience of fighting the severe
winter weather of 2008 as a lesson in overcoming the
problems that such weather might bring to command,
joint operations, and logistics. 27
In January and February 2008, it seemed that the
winter weather emergency would become a defining
moment in the PLA’s experience of disaster response
and relief and a major source of lessons to be learned
regarding relief and rescue operations. However, the
severe weather emergency was soon eclipsed by a disaster
of far greater magnitude: the Wenchuan earthquake.
The earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.9, occurred
at 2:28 p.m. on May 12, 2008, with its epicenter
245