Despite the steady modernization of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the international community is skeptical of its warfare capabilities. Late last month, US think tank RAND Corp published two reports revealing the PLA’s two greatest hurdles: personnel challenges and structural difficulties.
The first RAND report, by Jennie W. Wenger, titled Factors Shaping the Future of China’s Military, analyzes the PLA’s obstacles with recruitment, stating that China has long been committed to attracting young talent from top universities to augment the PLA’s modernization needs. However, the plan has two major constraints: demographic changes and the adaptability of the PLA’s military culture.
First, the changes to China’s demographics are shrinking the PLA’s recruitment pool by the day. As China’s birthrate falls, the number of young Chinese falls precipitously. Under declining demographic dividends, the PLA would need to contend with the corporate world for superior candidates and personnel. However, younger generations’ acceptance of military life is also decreasing, and many young Chinese would rather make a career in the fields of technology or civil service than join the military.
Second, the Chinese military’s culture conflicts with the values and worldview of contemporary Chinese youth, leading to added recruitment difficulties. The PLA emphasizes strict discipline, following orders and a collectivist mindset, yet modern Chinese youth value their personal growth and freedom, which directly contradict each other. Even if Beijing could provide higher salaries and more career advancement and development opportunities, the military’s internal hierarchical culture, bureaucracy and political censorship would dampen potential talent recruitment.
With the fast rise of technological warfare, future wars could be further reliant on artificial intelligence, uncrewed drones and high-tech weapons. Such technological applications would require personnel who possess a high degree of technical expertise, but the PLA’s competitiveness in this area is lacking. If the PLA is unable to bring in and cultivate personnel who could adapt to the demands of future warfare, its modernization program might not come to fruition.
The second RAND report, The Chinese Military’s Doubtful Combat Readiness by Timothy R. Heath, analyzes the PLA’s structural issues. Heath states that the PLA to this day maintains the prioritization of political loyalty ahead of its warfare capabilities. This issue has traditionally led to doubts concerning China’s military preparedness. The PLA’s command structure has long been overseen by political cadres, and each military officer in a command theater must obtain agreement on strategic decisions from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres embedded in the command structure, which causes process complications, gridlock and rigidity in strategic decisionmaking. This further leads to throttled wartime decisionmaking, which could impact the PLA’s operational resilience. In an intense conflict, quick decisionmaking and timely responses are crucial to victory, yet the CCP’s commanding officers must rely on the approval of party cadres before they can take any action, so opportunities might be fleeting. Additionally, many party cadres lack backgrounds in military expertise, leading to their strategic decisions frequently originating from political considerations, not tactical necessities.
Yet another issue is that promotion within the PLA continues to be primarily contingent upon party loyalty rather than military exploits or strategic capabilities, which also impacts the PLA’s warfare capabilities. Historically, the Qing Dynasty’s Beiyang Fleet incorporated some of the most advanced naval vessels of the time, but due to the Qing’s internal corruption and strategic incompetence, the fleet took on severe losses against the Imperial Japanese Navy during the First Sino-Japanese War. Whether the CCP’s PLA could effectively respond to the challenges of modern warfare remains unknown. China’s military equipment continues to advance, but if the military’s internal decisionmaking structures are incapable of meeting the demands of future warfare, its advanced weaponry might struggle to achieve its intended effects. If the PLA does not resolve these core issues, its warfaring capabilities would remain questionable.
Liao Ming-hui is an assistant researcher at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research.
Translated by Tim Smith
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