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

the Wenchuan earthquake showed that the PLAAF
needed to undergo a fundamental “transformation”
in its theoretical understanding of its roles and responsibilities
in MOOTW, to establish appropriate
emergency response plans and mechanisms, and to
integrate these with the emergency response plans
and mechanisms of the civilian government. 40
These criticisms of the PLAAF and of the mobilization
of resources for the earthquake relief effort came in
the context of an on-going discussion of the weaknesses
of China’s emergency response system. One of the
main themes appearing in this discussion is that if the
PLA, PAP, militia, and reserves are going to be regularly
called upon as emergency response forces under
the rubrics of diversified military tasks and MOOTW,
there needs to be a comprehensive, integrated national
defense/emergency response mobilization system,
backed up by appropriately organized, equipped, and
trained military units and operating under an effective
command and control system. Some of the critiques
of PLA/PAP/militia/reserves performance in the
Wenchuan earthquake relief effort focused on lack of
search and rescue, communications, and engineering
equipment, even stating flatly that China’s emergency
response and rescue techniques are “primitive.” 41
Other critiques focused not on equipment but on
the organization of China’s emergency response and
its relation to the national defense mobilization system.
At one level, this involves the idea that China’s
national defense mobilization system needs to be
thoroughly reorganized to create an integrated “dual
response” system that would be prepared to mobilize
military and civilian resources (human, material, and
financial) for both war and for peacetime emergency
response. 42 This would also involve standardizing,
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