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

ing out of internal security tasks. Among the observations
made at a national conference on public security
work in 2008 were that there was a need for advance
contingency plans for dealing with sudden incidents,
that command and control relations and authority in
handling mass incidents needed to be clarified, and
that there be plans in place for early detection, early
reporting, and early control in order to bring mass
incidents under control before they could grow into
major events. 69 The recently passed law on PAP handling
of mass incidents very likely incorporates lessons
learned from these incidents. 70
LESSONS LEARNED: TIBET AND XINJIANG
Openly published literature is less than forthcoming
on lessons learned from the PAP’s involvement
in handling mass incidents: it is nearly mute on the
lessons that the PAP and the PLA might learn from
their participation in internal security operations in
the PRC’s Tibetan ethnic areas (the Tibet Autonomous
Region [TAR], Qinghai province, and parts of Gansu,
Sichuan, and Yunnan Provinces) and in the Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region. In these areas, the same
economic tensions and alienation of ordinary people
from overbearing and corrupt local government is exacerbated
by ethnic tensions between the minority Tibetan
and Uyghur populations on the one hand, and
the Han Chinese who command superior economic
and political power, on the other.
To complicate matters further, the Chinese Communist
Party and the Han Chinese public are, to a high
degree, conscious of the fact that Britain, the United
States, and Russia/Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) and India all, at various times in the past, have
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