Modernization of the People's Liberation Army

Based on Wikipedia: Modernization of the People's Liberation Army

In the late 1970s, China's military was a mess. Soldiers had spent years acting as political enforcers during the Cultural Revolution, factories were churning out outdated weapons, and the People's Liberation Army—the PLA—had just embarrassed itself in a brief, bloody border war with Vietnam. Something had to change.

What happened next was one of the most ambitious military transformations in modern history. Over four decades, China took an army built for revolutionary guerrilla warfare and turned it into a modern fighting force capable of projecting power across Asia and beyond. The man who started it all was Deng Xiaoping, a diminutive leader who had survived political purges, forced labor, and the chaos of Mao's final years to emerge as China's paramount leader.

Getting the Generals Out of Politics

Deng's first challenge wasn't building better weapons. It was getting the military out of civilian politics.

During the Cultural Revolution—that decade of ideological frenzy from 1966 to 1976—the Communist Party had essentially deputized the PLA to maintain order as civilian institutions collapsed into factional chaos. Military officers found themselves running factories, overseeing farms, and adjudicating political disputes between rival groups of Red Guards. By the time Mao died in 1976, the line between soldier and bureaucrat had become hopelessly blurred.

This was a problem. Professional militaries work best when they focus on military matters. An army distracted by political infighting, industrial management, and ideological campaigns isn't an army that can win wars. Deng understood this viscerally—he had seen how the PLA's political entanglements had weakened it.

So he set about pushing the generals back to the barracks.

His methods were shrewd. First, he appointed his own supporters to key positions—the Central Military Commission, the Ministry of National Defense, the various general departments that ran the PLA day to day. Officers who objected to Deng's vision found themselves replaced with more cooperative alternatives. Second, he slashed military representation in political bodies. The percentage of PLA officers on the Politburo—the Communist Party's inner circle of power—dropped from 52 percent in 1978 to 30 percent just four years later.

But Deng didn't just rely on personnel changes. He revitalized the civilian party apparatus, rebuilding institutions that had withered during the Cultural Revolution. The message to military leaders was clear: the Party is back in charge, and it's capable of running the country without your help.

There was also a propaganda campaign to discredit the PLA's political activism. The military's support for leftist factions during the Cultural Revolution was officially declared a mistake—it had caused "factionalism within the military." Political education for soldiers began emphasizing professional military skills rather than ideological fervor.

The Vietnam Wake-Up Call

Deng had a secret weapon in his campaign to reform the military: the PLA's own failure.

In February 1979, China invaded Vietnam in a punitive expedition meant to punish Hanoi for its alliance with the Soviet Union and its invasion of Cambodia. The war lasted barely a month, but it exposed devastating weaknesses in the Chinese military. Coordination between different units was abysmal. Logistics broke down. Casualties were shockingly high for such a brief conflict—estimates suggest China lost somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 soldiers.

The PLA had assumed it could rely on the same tactics that had worked against the Japanese in the 1940s and the Americans in Korea in the 1950s: masses of infantry overwhelming the enemy through sheer numbers and revolutionary fervor. Against a Vietnamese army battle-hardened by decades of war against France and the United States, those tactics proved catastrophically outdated.

Deng used this failure brilliantly. When military leaders resisted his reforms, he could point to the Vietnam debacle as proof that change was necessary. The PLA needed to learn combined-arms warfare—the integration of infantry, armor, artillery, and air power into coordinated operations. It needed better training, better equipment, and better officers. It needed, in short, to become a modern military.

A New Kind of People's War

The reforms that followed touched every aspect of military organization.

Start with doctrine—the fundamental ideas about how an army should fight. For decades, China had embraced Mao's concept of "people's war," a strategy built around guerrilla tactics, popular mobilization, and the willingness to trade space for time. If an enemy invaded China, the logic went, they would be swallowed up by the vast interior, harassed by guerrilla fighters, and eventually ground down by the weight of China's enormous population.

This made a certain sense when China was poor, weak, and technologically backward. But by the 1980s, China had cities worth defending, industrial centers that couldn't be abandoned, and nuclear facilities that absolutely could not fall into enemy hands. A strategy of strategic retreat was no longer acceptable.

So the PLA adopted what it called "people's war under modern conditions." The new doctrine envisaged forward defense—stopping enemies near China's borders before they could threaten the heartland. This required modern weapons, professional soldiers, and the ability to conduct the kind of coordinated combined-arms operations that had humiliated Chinese forces in Vietnam.

The organizational changes were equally sweeping. China reduced the number of military regions—the geographic commands that controlled forces across the country—from eleven to seven. It formed new "group armies" designed to fight as integrated combined-arms units rather than as collections of separate infantry divisions. It civilianized many PLA units that had been performing essentially civilian functions, transferring control of defense industries to civilian authorities and opening military facilities like airports and ports to civilian use.

The Military Service Law of 1984 overhauled the entire personnel system. Recruitment standards went up. Officer training was professionalized. Promotion began to depend more on competence and less on political connections. The PLA even got new uniforms and insignia—a symbolic break with the drab egalitarianism of the Maoist era.

The Defense Industry Puzzle

Building a modern military requires modern weapons, and China faced a puzzle in the 1980s. Military budgets were tight—Deng's economic reforms prioritized civilian development over defense spending. But the PLA desperately needed better equipment.

The solution was to reform the defense industry itself.

China reorganized its military research and industrial base to integrate more closely with the civilian economy. Defense factories began producing consumer goods alongside weapons. The National Defense Science, Technology, and Industry Commission—a bureaucratic mouthful, but an important one—was created to coordinate military research, weapons procurement, and civilian-military integration.

China also began selectively importing foreign technology to upgrade its weapons. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, this primarily meant buying from Russia. Russian jet engines, in particular, remained superior to anything China could produce domestically. Russian fighters, submarines, and missile systems found their way into the PLA inventory.

But China wasn't content to remain dependent on foreign suppliers. The long-term goal was always indigenous production—the ability to design and manufacture advanced weapons at home. This required enormous investments in research and development, and it required patience. Some capabilities would take decades to develop.

The defense industry reforms also opened an unexpected revenue stream: arms exports. China began selling weapons on the international market, often to countries that Western suppliers refused to touch. This brought in hard currency and gave Chinese manufacturers experience producing weapons for demanding customers.

From Imitation to Innovation

For years, China's approach to military technology could be summarized simply: copy the Russians.

Chinese fighter jets were based on Soviet designs. Chinese tanks were based on Soviet designs. Chinese submarines, missiles, and small arms were all derived, in one way or another, from Soviet or Russian originals. Sometimes this was done with Russian cooperation; often it was done through reverse engineering, espionage, or simply purchasing Russian systems and taking them apart to see how they worked.

This strategy had obvious limitations. Copies are rarely as good as originals, and China was always one step behind the technological frontier. Russian suppliers, understandably annoyed by Chinese intellectual property theft, became increasingly reluctant to share their most advanced systems.

But something changed in the 2000s and 2010s. Chinese industry began catching up.

By 2015, according to some analysts, Chinese military technology had reached rough parity with Russian technology in many areas. In some fields—particularly those related to electronics, computing, and artificial intelligence—Chinese industry was arguably pulling ahead. The vibrancy of China's civilian tech sector, with its giant companies and armies of engineers, was spilling over into the defense industry.

China's 2015 Defense White Paper made the aspiration explicit: "independent innovation" and the "sustainable development" of advanced weaponry. China no longer wanted to be an imitator. It wanted to be a leader.

Gaps remained, of course. Chinese jet engines still lagged behind Russian and Western equivalents—propulsion technology is fiendishly difficult to master. Some sophisticated electronic systems proved stubbornly resistant to indigenous development. But the overall trajectory was unmistakable. China's defense industry was maturing rapidly.

The Xi Jinping Acceleration

When Xi Jinping rose to power in 2012, he inherited a military that had been modernizing for three decades. But Xi wasn't satisfied with the pace of change.

The original goal had been to complete military modernization by 2049—the centennial of the People's Republic. In 2017, at the Communist Party's 19th National Congress, Xi announced a new timeline. Modernization would be completed by 2035, fourteen years ahead of schedule.

This wasn't just bureaucratic reshuffling. The accelerated timeline reflected both genuine progress and growing urgency. The PLA had made enormous strides since the dark days of 1979. But China's strategic environment was also changing. Tensions with the United States were rising. The Taiwan question—the Communist Party's claim to sovereignty over the self-governing island—remained unresolved. In the South China Sea, China was asserting territorial claims that brought it into conflict with neighbors and with American naval power.

Xi also launched sweeping structural reforms. The PLA's traditional four general departments were reorganized. New theater commands replaced the old military regions. A new Strategic Support Force was created to handle space, cyber, and electronic warfare—the domains that would define 21st-century conflict. Anti-corruption campaigns swept through the officer corps, removing hundreds of senior officers accused of graft.

The reforms weren't without problems. Analysts noted persistent shortfalls in some areas—the air force's combat readiness, infantry capabilities, the development of certain advanced systems. China was building impressive hardware, but questions remained about whether the PLA could actually fight a modern war. Doctrine and training are just as important as weapons, and they're much harder to evaluate from the outside.

The Blurred Line

One thing hasn't changed much since Deng's day: the line between civilian and military leadership in China remains remarkably blurry.

All high-ranking military officers hold positions in the Communist Party. Many senior party officials have military experience. When military leaders participate in national policy discussions, it's often unclear whether they're representing the PLA's institutional interests or the interests of political factions that cut across institutional boundaries.

This creates a distinctive dynamic. In periods of strong leadership consensus—like the 1950s under Mao, or the 1980s under Deng—the military tends to stay in its lane, focusing on professional matters and leaving politics to the politicians. But when the leadership is divided, factions form, and those factions often have military allies. The PLA gets drawn into civilian disputes.

The Cultural Revolution was the extreme case. Civilian institutions essentially collapsed, and the military was forced to step in to maintain basic order. Military officers found themselves running everything from schools to steel mills. It took years to untangle the mess.

Under Xi Jinping, the leadership appears unified—or at least, Xi has accumulated so much power that any dissent remains invisible. The military seems politically quiescent, focused on professional development and the president's modernization agenda. But the institutional arrangements that could draw the PLA back into politics remain in place. A future succession crisis or leadership split could change things quickly.

From Revolutionary Army to Modern Force

The transformation of the People's Liberation Army over the past forty-plus years is one of the most significant military developments of our time.

Consider where China started. In 1979, the PLA was essentially a massive ground force optimized for revolutionary guerrilla warfare—lots of infantry, outdated equipment, primitive logistics, and commanders selected more for political reliability than professional competence. Its navy was a coastal defense force. Its air force flew copies of 1950s Soviet designs. Its nuclear arsenal was small and vulnerable.

Today, China operates aircraft carriers. Its navy is the largest in the world by number of ships. Its air force flies stealth fighters. Its missiles can strike targets across the Pacific. Its cyber and space capabilities are among the most advanced on Earth. The PLA remains the largest military in the world by personnel, but it has evolved into something very different from the revolutionary army of Mao's era.

This transformation has global implications. For decades, American military dominance in the Western Pacific was essentially unchallenged. That's no longer the case. China's modernized military can now contest American power in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. The balance of power in Asia is shifting.

The story isn't over, of course. Military modernization is a continuous process, and China still faces significant challenges. Some advanced technologies remain elusive. Combat experience is limited—the PLA hasn't fought a major war since 1979. Training and doctrine may not have kept pace with hardware improvements. And the fundamental question of whether an authoritarian political system can produce a truly first-rate military remains open.

But the trajectory is clear. The massive, politicized, technologically backward army that stumbled into Vietnam in 1979 has become something else entirely—a modern military force that the rest of the world must take seriously.

Public Perception and the Soldier's Reputation

There's a Chinese proverb that captures the traditional view of military service: "One doesn't make nails out of good iron; one doesn't make soldiers out of good men."

The saying reflects centuries of experience with armies that were often little more than organized banditry—poorly paid, poorly disciplined, and prone to abusing the civilian population. Soldiering was not a respectable profession. Good families kept their sons out of uniform.

The Communist revolution temporarily changed this. In the 1950s and 1960s, the PLA's prestige was sky-high. The army had liberated the country, fought the Americans to a standstill in Korea, and was held up as a model of revolutionary virtue. Joining the military was a path to social advancement, especially for rural youth with few other options.

The Cultural Revolution wrecked this reputation. As the PLA took on police functions and political enforcement duties, soldiers became associated with arbitrary power and factional violence. Civilians resented military privileges and abuses. By the early 1980s, with Deng's agricultural reforms creating new opportunities in the countryside, military service had lost much of its appeal. The old proverb came back into circulation.

Restoring the military's reputation became a deliberate project. State media extolled martial virtues and highlighted modernization achievements. The PLA's role in disaster relief—earthquakes, floods, and other emergencies—provided opportunities to show soldiers in a heroic, non-political light. These efforts have had some success. The military's public image has improved, though it probably hasn't fully recovered its 1950s prestige.

The Architecture of Control

Understanding how China controls its military requires understanding a peculiar dual structure.

At the top sit two Central Military Commissions—one belonging to the Communist Party, one belonging to the state. On paper, these are separate organizations. The party's commission answers to the party Central Committee. The state's commission, created by the 1982 constitution, answers to the National People's Congress.

In practice, they're the same thing. The membership overlaps almost completely. The chairman of both commissions is typically the paramount leader—Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, Xi Jinping today. The dual structure exists to satisfy constitutional requirements while ensuring that the party—not the state—maintains ultimate control over the armed forces.

Below the commissions, three general departments handle day-to-day operations. The General Staff Department manages operations and organizational matters—it's essentially the headquarters for the entire PLA. The General Political Department handles political work, including ideological education and the parallel system of political commissars that exists throughout the military. The General Logistics Department manages supply and support.

This structure creates parallel chains of command. Operational orders flow through the General Staff Department. Political guidance flows through the General Political Department. Logistics flows through the General Logistics Department. Each chain has its own communications systems, its own hierarchy, and its own concerns. The complexity is intentional—it makes it harder for any single commander to build an independent power base.

Looking Forward

The modernization of the People's Liberation Army is, in many ways, a story of catch-up. For decades, China was technologically backward, institutionally chaotic, and strategically defensive. The goal was simply to close the gap with more advanced militaries.

That phase may be ending. In some areas, Chinese military technology is now at or near the global frontier. The question is no longer whether China can build a modern military, but what it will do with one.

The answer has enormous implications for global security. A China with the world's second-most-powerful military (and aspirations to first place) is a very different actor than a China focused on internal development and regional defense. The modernization that began as a defensive project in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution has created a force capable of projecting power far beyond China's borders.

Whether that power will be used—and how—remains to be seen. But the transformation is real, and it's not going away. The People's Liberation Army that exists today would be unrecognizable to the soldiers who marched into Vietnam in 1979. Four decades of determined modernization have created something new: a military that the world's other great powers must respect, and perhaps fear.