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

103. Patel, “Chinese Disaster Relief Operations,” p. 114. The
2-month “Stride 2009” exercises involving 50,000 troops conducted
in the summer of 2009 were in part designed to address the
PLA’s weakness in the area of force projection. Trefor Moss, “PLA
takes largest ever exercise in its ‘stride’,” Jane’s Defence Weekly,
August 13, 2009.
104. Clearly, the scale and challenges of a hypothetical PLA
occupation of Taiwan could be far greater than anything that the
PLA and PAP have experienced in dealing with isolated mass incidents
in China or even with the endemic underlying unrest in
Tibet and Xinjiang.
105. Wu Sha, “大力加强群体性突发事件处置工作全力维护社
会政治稳定" (“Resolutely strengthen handling of mass incidents,
go all out to protect social and political stability”), 公安研究 (Public
Security Studies), Vol. 12, 2004, pp. 48-53; Zhou Zhongwei, “
瓮安事件对处置群体性事件的启示” (“The Weng’an incident’s lessons
on the handling of mass incidents”), 江西公安专科学校学
报 (Jiangxi Public Security Officer School Journal), Vol. 6, No. 126,
November 2008, pp. 22-25; Liu Chang, “委员建议处理群体性事件
慎用警力” (“Committee member suggestion caution when using
police force to handle mass incidents”), 北京青年报 (Beijing Youth
Daily), November 3, 2009.
106. For a discussion of regime fragility and its implications
for American policy, see Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
107. Charles-Antoine Hofmann and Laura Hudson, “Military
responses to natural disasters: last resort or inevitable trend?” Humanitarian
Exchange Magazine, Vol. 44, September 2009, available
from www.odihpn.org/report.asp?id=3030; Kathleen J. Tierney, “Recent
Developments in U.S. Homeland Security Policies and Their
Implications for the Management of Extreme Events,” in Haridán
Rodriguez, Enrico Louis Quarantelli, and Russell Rowe Dynes,
eds., Handbook of Disaster Research, New York: Springer, 2006, pp.
410-411. Following the disastrous landslides caused by typhoon
Morakot, Taiwan President Ma Yingjiu suggested that Taiwan’s
military would play a much larger role in disaster relief in the future
and that Taiwan would need to establish a modern national
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