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

CONCLUSION: CHINA’S INTERNAL SECURITY,
THE PLA, AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS FOR
THE UNITED STATES
China’s military—PLA, PAP, militia, and reserves—has
faced severe internal security challenges
over the past 2 years, including natural disasters, mass
incidents, and ethnic unrest in Tibetan areas and in
Xinjiang. Overall, what can the Chinese military’s reactions
to these challenges and the lessons that they
have learned from them tell us about its operational
capabilities? What implications do these experiences
and lessons have for American policy makers?
First, as a number of Chinese analysts have observed,
mobilization for natural disasters shares some
similarities with mobilization for war. In this respect,
the PLA’s reaction to the winter weather emergency
and particularly to the Wenchuan earthquake indicates
some significant institutional and operational
weaknesses. On the institutional side, China continues
to struggle with problems both in the legal framework,
organization, and mobilization for internal MOOTW.
Discussions in China National Defense, PLA Daily, and
other openly published news media indicate a strong
interest in building a more complete corpus of legislation
to define the duties and powers of the military as
an emergency responder and in consolidating and improving
China’s national, provincial, and local emergency
response plans.
There appears to be particularly strong interest in
unifying war mobilization and emergency response
plans and institutions. It is worth noting that some
Chinese analysts suggest that the United States (along
with Japan and Russia) might serve as a useful model
for China’s emergency management and for the role
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