China military newspaper reminds soldiers of their absolute duty to the Communist Party
Tom Rogan
An article on Tuesday for China’s military newspaper, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, emphasized absolute loyalty to the Communist Party. While this idea is nothing new, the repeated emphasis on this loyalty factor highlights a critical difference between the PLA and other armed forces globally: whereas most military forces at least nominally exist to serve their respective nations, China’s military serves the Communist Party rather than China itself.
Referencing Mao Zedong, the PLA Daily article declares that “If the political quality [of armed forces personnel] is not high, there is no way to talk about high quality [soldiering more generally]. Highlighting political standards is the consistent policy of our party and our army in selecting and employing personnel.”
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Calling for more robust discipline inspections to ensure personnel are utterly committed to the party’s leadership and doctrine, the article concludes with a call to arms. It says that “people with political and integrity problems will have nowhere to hide” under the ideal inspection regime, while also “ensuring that the barrel of the gun is always in the hands of those who are absolutely loyal and reliable to the party.”
So the PLA, quite overtly, is not the servant of the Chinese people or nation. Instead, it is the servant of the Chinese Communist Party under the supreme command of Xi Jinping. The centrality of Xi’s authority is critical to the PLA’s identity. Indeed, the PLA’s website — as with all other Chinese state media websites — is always littered with articles on Xi’s thoughts, public appearances, and other activities.
In practical terms, the PLA’s reinforced communist political identity is designed to ensure that the military conducts its operations through the prism of what the party wants rather than how the nation’s best interests might be served. Contrast this approach with that of the U.S. military. Where a U.S. military commander would be obliged to refuse an unconstitutional or otherwise illegal order, China’s civil-military doctrine essentially centers on the sacrosanct law of doing whatever Xi says, full stop.
This bears particular note considering the rising prospect of a bloody PLA invasion of Taiwan and the deaths of ethnic Chinese that such an invasion would surely cause. Xi doesn’t want his soldiers asking whether those deaths are justified by China’s national interests. In turn, this underlines Xi’s paranoia about ensuring absolute loyalty to himself. If he allows his leadership credibility to suffer, after all, he risks hemorrhaging the party’s credibility and vice versa. Xi needs soldiers who are indoctrinated to fight without hesitation or consideration of national interests.
So it is a serious mistake to view China’s armed forces as a national military. They are really servants of Xi and his party.