The Transformation And Stability Of Civil-Military Relations In China Since 1949

It is hard to define China’s civil-military relations with the ’symbiotic model’as the decline of the revolutionaries such as Deng Xiaoping.At the very beginning of Jiang Zemin’s rise to the power, most observers argued that the technocrats, due to lack of military experiences, were not able to maintain the stability of the civil-military relationship.As a result, they expected, the PLA would overthrow the civilian authority and even conduct a coup. The reality, however, shows that the stability of China’s civil-military relations has remained for over 20 years since 1989.This puzzle, namely the tension between the expectation of the pessimists and the relative optimistic reality, forms the research question of this dissertation. In other words, this study attempts to explain why a new type of civil-military relations in the post-Deng era can remain stable. The study is based on an agent-centric framework of ’threat perception’. "Threat perception’, underpinned by actors’ particular beliefs and preferences of political structure, is one of the most significant determinants of the logic for the development of an army and has a great impact on civil-military relations within a country.After the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong tried to reconstruct a ’revolutionary political structure’ which shapes a perception on ’the urgency of a general war’. This kind of threat perception makes the PLA inclined to adopt a ’politics-centered’ army building strategy emphasizing on the importance of manpower and so-called ’revolutionary experiences’ by downplaying the role of technology, equipments and even weapons. At that time, civil-military relations could be seen as a relationship between a group of revolutionaries and a’manpower-experience’ army. This kind of civil-military relation was reinforced in the environment of militarization in the’Cultural Revolution’.After the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping returned to the center of Chinese politics and became another paramount leader. He then revised the political structure as ’daily politics’ and accordingly substituted Mao’s threat perception for his own perception in which a delayed, limited war seems more possible to China. In this context, the modernization project of the PLA has been relaunched. But Deng set the sequence to realize the ’modernization’ under the new threat perception. In a word, for Deng,’institution first’ is the most acceptable strategy. This strategy laid the foundation for the transformation of China’s civil-military relations.Deng’s strategy has been followed by technocrats.The latter has refined the Deng’s threat perception and, by stressing the military gap between China and Western countries, established a new, ’technology-oriented’ logic of army building. As a result, the PLA has transformed along the lines of’capital intensification’ and ’knowledge intensification’. Consequently, a rationalized relationship between a group of technocrats and a ’capital-knowledge’army has been formed. The elements of civil-military demarcation and interdependence contribute to the stability of the stability of China’s civil-military relations in the post-Deng era.