The Chinese Military System: An Organizational Study of the Chinese People's Liberation Army--Second Edition, Revised and Updated by Harvey W Nelsen

Author:Harvey W Nelsen [Nelsen, Harvey W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000315417
Google: YgiiDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49789815
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

5

Military Life

A Civic Action Army?

The official Chinese media projects an image of the soldiery selflessly serving the people whenever not actively engaged in military training; millions of words have been devoted to the subject of soldiers assisting sowing, harvesting, capital construction, and industrial production. This represents a long-standing revolutionary ideal of Mao Tsetung. In 1949, following the successful conclusion of the civil war, he stated that the PLA should be converted into a work force and great training school for cadres.1 Although the military has served as a training ground for Party officials, it has never been a significant work force in support of the civilian economy. According to calculations by Bernhard Grossman, the military contribution to civilian agriculture has never exceeded five hundredths of one percent (0.05%).2 Moreover, there has been no serious attempt to use the PLA as a labor force. By far the highest level of PLA work days in the civilian sector was in 1960, when the nation was suffering severely from economic failures of the Great Leap Forward combined with drought. The PLA devoted over 40 million man-days to civilian work—mostly disaster relief. However, impressive as that figure may sound, it amounted to only 4.6 percent of the total available man-hours.3 Under Lin Piao’s leadership the PLA’s contribution as a work force declined steadily, despite the fact that Lin had a highly political approach to the PLA as opposed to the “bourgeois military line” which argues that soldiers should spend their time soldiering.4 Since Lin’s demise, the situation seems little changed: PLA personnel do token farm work in the civilian sector and contribute somewhat more to various capital construction programs. Medical and veterinary troops use their expertise to teach veterinary skills, train some of the paramedical “barefoot doctors,” and assist communes in the care of domestic animals.5 Even though the Cultural Revolution absorbed billions of PLA man-days in the civilian sector, in that instance the military was serving as a surrogate political control mechanism, rather than as a productive work force.

Instead of directly supporting the civilian economy, the PLA has attempted to become as self-sufficient as possible, running its own farms on its own lands and establishing many small-scale industrial plants, machine shops, and the like to support its technical and maintenance needs. In general, units are assigned on a rotating basis to training and soldiering, agricultural production, and construction/industrial production.6 It is not uncommon for a peasant youth to be inducted into the PLA only to spend a year or so of his three years of active duty slopping hogs on a PLA farm. Company-size units within the Canton Military Region average thirty pigs each. Naturally, the main force infantry corps spend less time in such pursuits than do the regional forces, but all participate to some degree.

While these production efforts by no means meet all the needs of the PLA, they make it, man for man, one of the least expensive standing armies in the world. But this does not explain why Peking

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