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Executive Summary
This study reviews the last 20 years of academic literature on the role of the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) in Chinese elite politics. It examines the PLA’s willingness to support the
continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and to obey directives from top party
leaders, the PLA’s influence on the selection of China’s top civilian leaders, and the PLA’s ability
to shape the domestic political environment. Over the last two decades the discussion of these
three issues has largely been shaped by five trends identified in the literature: increasing PLA
professionalism, bifurcation of civil and military elites, a reduced PLA role in political institutions,
reduced emphasis on political work within the PLA, and increased military budgets. Together,
these trends are largely responsible for the markedly reduced role of the PLA in Chinese
elite politics.
The theoretical models of Chinese civil-military relations that exist within the literature
during the period divide into three distinctive categories. “Traditional models” including the
Factional, Symbiosis, Professionalism, and Party Control models, dominate the literature from
1989 to 1995. Scholars worked to integrate information becoming available as the PRC opened
to the world into these already existing models of Chinese civil-military relations. However,
evolving political dynamics within the PRC following Tiananmen marginalized the utility of
the models. From 1995 to 1997 many scholars argued that these traditional models should not
be considered mutually exclusive but complementary. This concept of a “combination model”
was short lived as it became increasingly apparent that even a combination of traditional models
had little predictive or even explanatory power in light of rapidly changing political dynamics.
Two new models, the Conditional Compliance and State Control models, emerged in the period
of 1997–2003. Both incorporated elements of the traditional models while attempting to
address the implications of new political and military dynamics in the PRC.
Examining the predictions of these models against four case studies involving major developments
in civil-military relations, we found that although each model had some descriptive
and explanatory power, none possessed strong predictive ability. The traditional models help
explain the PLA’s reaction to intensified Party control following Tiananmen, but none was able
to predict how Chinese civil-military relations evolved subsequently. Civil-military models offered
their most specific (and ultimately least accurate) predictions regarding the leadership
succession from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin. Most models predicted a strong role for the
PLA in the succession that did not materialize. This was the period when traditional civil-military
models began to run up against the reality of changing political dynamics within the PRC.
When the PLA was forced to withdraw from most commercial activities in the mid-1990s, the
models predicted a far slower, more contentious, and less complete divestiture than ultimately
occurred. Most analysts correctly predicted that the PLA would have only limited involvement
in the leadership transition from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao following the 16th Party Congress in
2002, but subsequent explanations for why the transition went smoothly emphasize different
factors. The models did agree in their emphasis on the importance of greater political institutionalization
in reducing PLA influence and highlighted the implicit role and future potential
importance of the PLA in elite politics, especially if divisions among the civilian leadership
produce a political crisis in the future.
Based on this assessment, we conclude that existing models serve a useful role in identifying
key variables for analysis in the study of Chinese civil-military relations. However, most
of the literature has been descriptive and interpretive rather than predictive. The widespread
practice of using elements of multiple models to analyze civil-military relations makes it difficult
to assess the validity of individual models or to generate falsifiable predictions, thus limiting
the predictive ability of current models. Although China is a much more open society
today, lack of reliable information continues to make the study of civil-military relations in
China difficult, forcing analysts to rely on indirect evidence and dubious sources to speculate
about the military’s influence on elite politics and about the relationships between top civilian
and military leaders.
Since 2003 the literature on Chinese civil-military relations has successfully exploited new
sources of information to offer useful analysis of the PLA’s relationship with the Chinese economy
and society at large.Yet there has been a notable lack of effort to develop, employ, or test
new theoretical models that could help produce a new unified theory of Chinese civil-military
relations. Future work may find fertile ground in exploring the nature of official and unofficial
interactions between the PRC’s bifurcated civilian and military elite, comparing how broader
trends in China’s civilian government are implemented in the PLA, or conducting a more genuinely
comparative analysis with the experiences of other one-party states, transitioning democracies,
or other Asian states.
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