I. The Big Story: PLA Promotions
The Central Military Commission (CMC) has promoted the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) four senior ranking officials this week. Xu Qiling, Wang Xiubin, Liu Zhenli and Ju Qiansheng were promoted as Generals. Furthermore, Gen Xu was made the Commander of the Western Theatre Command, which oversees the boundary with India. Gen Wang was made the Commander of the Southern Theatre Command, responsible for the South China Sea and also the Taiwan contingency if needed. Gen Liu was made the head of the PLA Army, and Gen Ju was made the head of the Strategic Support Force.
These changes are most likely due to the retirement of the former generals. However, the Western Theatre Command’s (WTC) case is interesting. In the past one year, there have been three changes in the WTC's leadership. Until December 2020, Gen Zhao Zongqi was the WTC Commander. Gen Zhang Xudong replaced him in December 2020. So this is the third change in less than a year. Gen Zhao was 65 when he was succeeded by Gen Zhang and was rewarded with the post-retirement appointment as the National People’s Congress Vice-Chairman. However, Gen Zhang Xudong was born in March 1962. So he was only 59 when succeeded by Gen Xu as the WTC Commander. This is also not a retirement age for theatre commanders in China. This means, 1) Either something is incredibly wrong in the WTC, and the leadership is upset about the ongoing stand-off or 2) Gen Zhang Xudong is possibly being considered for the CMC post (Both of the CMC vice-chairmen, Zhang Youxia and Xu Qiliang, are over 70 – the maximum retirement age – next year, meaning the four CMC members, or those generals retired from the five theatre commands and service forces, will become candidates for these posts).
This also means that half of the 10 top PLA commanders, covering the five theatre commands and services, are now aged 60 or younger. Gen Xu is 59, Gen Wang (STC) is 57, Gen Liu (PLA A) is 57 and Gen Ju (PLA SSF) is 59.
Their Profiles:
- Gen Xu Qiling (WTC) served as a deputy director of the combat department and a division commander in the former Jinan Military Region. In 2012, he served as the chief of staff of the 54th Army, known as the “Iron Army”. The 54th Army Corps is known for its involvement in the crackdown on a Tibetan uprising in 1959 and the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. In 2016, Xu was appointed as the Central Theatre Command’s Army’s Deputy Commander. In April 2017, he became the commander of the 79th Army under the Northern Theatre Command. In January 2019, he was appointed as the Deputy Commander of the Eastern Theater Command and the Commander of the Army and was promoted to Lieutenant General Rank in December 2019.
In June 2020, after the ongoing stand-off started, Xu was appointed as the Western Theatre Command’s Army’s Commander. Now he is appointed as the WTC Commander. He has experience with four of the PLA’s five theatre commands.
- Gen Wang Xiubin (STC) served in the Nanjing Military Region for a long time. He served as the Commander of the 1st Army Infantry Division and the deputy commander of the 31st Army. In 2015, he was transferred back to the 1st Army as the deputy commander. In 2017, Wang served as the Commander of the 80th Army under the Northern Theatre Command. In 2019, he was appointed as the Deputy Commander and Chief of Staff of the Eastern Theater. Now, he is appointed as the Southern Theatre Command’s Commander.
- Gen Liu Zhenli (PLA A) served in the Beijing Military Region for a long time. In 2012, he became the Commander of the 65th Army. He was the youngest PLA commander at that time. In 2014, Liu Zhenli served as the Commander of the 38th Army. In 2015, he was promoted to the Chief of Staff of the Armed Police Force. After the military reforms, he was transferred to the Chief of Staff of the Army. Now, he is appointed as the Commander of the PLA Army.
-Finally, there is very little public information available on Gen Ju Qiansheng (PLA SSF). Before this, he was the Deputy Director of the General Staff’s Technical Investigation Department. He was also the Commander of the PLA SSF’s Network System’s Department in 2018.
Check the table below if the PLA’s rank and grade structure look confusing:
Source: Dr Joel Wuthnow
*Service leader is an addition and not a part of this hierarchy/ structure
Alongside the PLA promotions, Xi also signed an order to commend Xinjiang's armed police anti-terrorist squadron. The People's Armed Police's special-operations squadron in Xinjiang has conferred the title "Anti-Terrorist Sharp Knife Squadron" for its "outstanding performance in fighting terrorism."
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II. Research Papers
Beijing’s thinking on Arms Control
Henrik Stålhane Hiim and Magnus Langset Trøan’s article for the Journal of Contemporary China titled Hardening Chinese Realpolitik in the 21st Century: The Evolution of Beijing’s Thinking about Arms Control traces the evolution of arms control views among Chinese strategists and experts during the last decade. The authors argue that most Chinese strategists tend to view arms-control efforts through a strong realpolitik prism. Many lament US domination of the arms-control agenda and believe US initiatives are intended to undermine Chinese nuclear deterrence. They argue that these views have hardened in recent years. The two recent developments under the Trump administration are primarily responsible for the hardening of the Chinese views. First, through the NPR from 2018 and Missile Defense Review from 2019, the United States signalled an intention to bolster its nuclear weapons arsenal and missile defence infrastructure. Second, during the same period, the nuclear arms-control agenda started to unravel. The US and Russia formally withdrew from the INF treaty in August 2019, with US policymakers arguing that the lack of restrictions on China was a major reason for the treaty’s demise. China’s official reaction to both these developments was highly critical.
“Broadly speaking, there are two interpretations of US policy in China. One group, which tends to be dominated by civilian arms-control experts, emphasises the Trump administration’s shifts in nuclear policies. According to this group, the administration’s explicit rejection of Obama- era initiatives and existing nuclear arms control and disarmament initiatives have seriously harmed prospects for halting an arms race. Other observers—many of which are affiliated with the PLA—see a stronger continuity between the policies of Obama and Trump. According to these observers, the Trump administration’s nuclear-development program inherited ‘the hegemonic “soul” of US nuclear strategy, even if it bore the Trump trademark.”
Thus, the Chinese strategists increasingly see arms control as an arena for zero-sum military and political struggle, conclude the authors.
Jamestown China Brief
PLA’s Military Diplomacy under Covid
The PLA has been responsible for conducting military diplomacy since 1949. There are four major objectives of military diplomacy: Supporting China’s diplomacy, shaping the security environment, collecting intelligence and learning new skills, tactics, and procedures. Kenneth Allen’s article divides China’s military diplomacy into senior-level visits, dialogues, naval port calls, military exercises, functional exchanges and non-traditional security operations.
Senior-level Visits: Senior PLA leaders devote a significant amount of time to interacting with foreign counterparts. However, generally, all senior PLA leaders aside from the Defense Minister and the Central Military Commission’s (CMC) Chief of the Joint Staff (former Chief of the General Staff) are limited to one trip abroad per year by regulation. But since Covid started, China’s defence minister has not hosted any counterpart and has only travelled to Indonesia and the Philippines in 2020, and Hungary, Greece, North Macedonia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh in 2021. No PLA officers have travelled since the start of the pandemic.
Dialogues since Covid started: 2020 ASEAN and ASEAN Plus forums, 2020 Xiangshan Forum, China-EU defence and security policy dialogue, Corp-Commanders’ level talks (China-India), China-Japan 12th round of high consultation on maritime affairs and 6th China-Vietnam border defence friendship exchange (most of them through video conference).
Naval Port Calls: No information on Port calls since early 2020.
More in the paper on military exercises, functional exchange and non-traditional security operations.
Military-Political Work at CCP’s Centenary
Maryanne Kivlehan-Wise’s submission highlights the importance of the military-political work and traces continuity and change to it as the CCP approached its centenary. The term “political work” was first used by Zhou Enlai at a Whampoa Military Academy speech in 1925, called “Political Work in the Military.” Mao first used it in an essay on “Military Issues” authored in 1928. However, when discussing the origins of PLA political work, Chinese authors often point to the 1929 Gutian Conference, which formally articulated the principles of building a military under the leadership of the CCP.
Over time, the author argues, the military regulations have sought to 1) Reaffirm the party’s absolute leadership over the armed forces 2) Establish systems and promote increased standardisation 3) Emphasise the decisive role of the human dimension in warfare 4) Promote increased combat efficiency 5) Respond to the changing nature of warfare and incorporate lessons learned by foreign wars.
The author concludes that the PLA’s military-political work would likely evolve in an age of great power competition and the US analysts and policymakers should be prepared for the following: Expect to compete with all elements of national power, anticipate intense competition in the battle of the narrative and prepare for the competition in human capital.
Precision Munitions ‘Eyes’ and a ‘Brain’
Alex Barker’s submission examines the writings by PLA-affiliated authors and private sector researchers leveraging open-source research—much of which is developed in the US—to improve China’s automatic military target recognition capabilities. Sources were drawn from the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and ultimately focused on 16 research papers.
These are the important highlights from his submission:
1) The PLA writing focused on the informatised warfare (信息化, xinxi hua) since the 2000s. But in the last four years, it has focused on intelligentisation (智能化, zhineng hua).
2) One of the most active fields of PLA AI research is applying machine learning to computer vision—teaching computers how to interpret the visual world. Deep learning (深度学习, shendu xuexi) is a form of “unsupervised” machine learning that allows a program to use layered algorithms, called a neural network, to train itself on how to make conclusions from datasets. Papers on deep learning for military image recognition, usually called “military target recognition” (军事目标识别, junshi mubiao zhi bie) increased by an average of 20 percent from 2016 to 2019.
3) Authors repeatedly stress the need to “install ‘eyes’ and a ‘brain’ in weapons,” or “to give weapons a human-like ability to recognise military targets.
Challenges: 1) Chinese authors argue that combat conditions introduce challenges, and deep learning is also still immature. 2) The PLA also has a reliance on outside sources for image recognition algorithms (SSD300 and YOLO). 3) Deep learning also finds it challenging to recognise smaller targets, and finally, building a database of sample images is particularly challenging. (There is much more in the paper. Read the complete paper using this link.)
Chinese Submarine Options in Arctic
Adam Lajeunessea and Timothy Choib, in their article to the Journal of Strategic Studies, examine the strategic advantages which may lead China to deploy submarines into the polar waters. They also study the dangers and disadvantages of such missions. They argue that China has stepped forward to insert itself into northern development, shipping, and governance structures as the Arctic grows in economic and strategic importance. “Whether those initiatives will be followed by a military presence remains to be seen, though Beijing’s increasingly aggressive foreign and defence policies have convinced many in government and academia that it is only a matter of time before PLAN warships make a similarly aggressive move into the North.” The authors argue that China’s submarine deployments in the Arctic would be an expensive affair. Furthermore, it would be a dangerous and inefficient diversion of some of China’s most valuable naval assets from its core areas: the three seas, the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
They argue that that the Arctic is a very hard place to operate for the Chinese Submarines. In contrast to the general belief that such an under-ice presence is both imminent and dangerous to the US and its allies, they suggest a more nuanced appreciation for the limited value of the Arctic as a realm of Sino-American competition.
The article also reviews the literature on Chinese capabilities, interests and limitations in the Arctic. Please check the paper for it. Also, it’s behind a paywall.
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III. Developing Stories
China and India
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly greeted the Dalai Lama on his 86th birthday this week. Such public greetings had stopped after 2015. Modi tweeted, “Spoke on the phone to His Holiness the Dalai Lama to convey greetings on his 86th birthday. We wish him a long and healthy life.” Apart from PM Modi, other ministers in the union cabinet like Hardeep Singh Puri and Nitin Gadkari, Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu and Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal also wished him.
Meanwhile, India’s Foreign Minister, Dr S Jaishankar, said there had been a lot of concern about the India-China relationship since last year because Beijing has not observed agreements on the border issue that has “disturbed” the foundation of the bilateral relationship.
“I would say for the last 40 years we had a very stable relation with China…China emerged as the second-largest trade partner. But for the last one year, there has been a lot of concern about the relationship because China had not observed agreements that it had signed up to when it came to our border. After 45 years, we actually had a border incident with casualties. And peace and tranquillity on the border, for any country, is the foundation of a relationship with a neighbour. So naturally, the foundations have got disturbed, so has the relationship,” said Dr Jaishankar in response to a question on China-India relations at the Primakov Institute of World Economy & International Relations in Moscow.
Do read this interesting op-ed in the Indian Express by Prof Pratap Bhanu Mehta on how the idea of national humiliation shapes India and China. He writes that the nature of traumas for China and India were different. The Chinese construction of humiliation was directly structured around military defeats: First, the opium wars and then the brutal Japanese invasion. Because both the West and Japan were implicated, the theme of humiliation could become an organising frame for foreign policy. The CCP was both a military force and a political party; the fusion of the two in narratives of national resistance, unification and regeneration, perhaps makes a singular construction of national humiliation possible. At least in terms of the scale of political violence and significance, India’s traumas turned out to be more self-inflicted. No war defines Indian victimhood or trauma. Ironically, it is perhaps 1962 that is marked as a national humiliation. But its suffering and trauma cannot be deployed in the same way in which the Chinese deploy memories of WW II as Rana Mitter has shown in his wonderful book, “China’s Good War”. I found this paragraph from the op-ed extremely interesting. My first thought after reading this op-ed was that an interesting PhD thesis could be written on this topic.
Taiwan and China
Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister said the country needed to defend Taiwan with the United States if the island was invaded. “If a major problem took place in Taiwan, it would not be too much to say that it could relate to a survival-threatening situation (for Japan),” Japan’s deputy prime minister Taro Aso said this week. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson replied to it, saying that such remarks are extremely wrong and dangerous as they severely violate principles set out in the four political documents between China and Japan and undermine the political foundation of China-Japan relations. “China deplores and rejects this and has lodged solemn representations with Japan. Japanese militarism once committed numerous crimes in the aggression against China. However, some politicians are still coveting Taiwan to this day. This fully shows that they haven’t learned the lesson from history. Today’s China is no longer what it was back then. We will never allow anyone to meddle in the Taiwan question in any way. No one should underestimate the resolve, the will, and the ability of the Chinese people to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said the MFA spokesperson.
Meanwhile, the US and Japan are conducting war games in preparing contingencies for a conflict with China over Taiwan. This includes top-secret tabletop war games and joint exercises in the South China and East China seas, reports the Financial Times. The paper also quotes two high-level sources claiming that the disaster relief training in the South China Sea was used as cover for joint military exercises between the US and Japanese forces.
Also, check this SCMP report by Minnie Chan, which claims that China would have to reconsider the ways for invading Taiwan because of the Kuroshio Current. It is a warm ocean current that originates off the Philippines Island Luzon and flows towards mainland Japan. These currents could help the Chinese submarines to conduct offensive operations. But if they came under an attack and tried to escape back to the mainland, it would be harder to escape because they would be running against the current, claims the report.
Finally, check this Jamestown China Brief article by Kristian McGuire on China leveraging Taiwan’s water crisis. The author argues that the Chinese leadership’s decision to repeatedly exploit a drought in Taiwan to attack the DPP and promote deeper cross-Strait integration has likely confirmed the suspicions of Taipei, already wary that Beijing would use the Four Mini-Links to undermine Taiwan’s sovereignty. The “New Four Links” (新四通, xin si tong) or “Four Mini-Links” (小四通, xiao si tong) are water, electricity, natural gas and bridge links. This is especially true for the offshore islands of Kinmen and Matsu. Furthermore, this crisis is compounded by the Chinese propaganda: 1) The DPP bears responsibility for Taiwan’s water shortage 2) China’s provision of water to Kinmen demonstrates an inevitable trend towards greater cross-Strait integrated development 3) The DPP is trying to obstruct cross-Strait integrated development, hurting the people of Taiwan and 4) The people in Taiwan and China need to push ahead with integrated development, especially the Four Mini-Links.
The South China Sea
German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and China’s Defence Minister Wei Fenghe discussed the situation in the South China Sea. This includes the upcoming German frigate deployment in the region. Several western countries have deployed warships to the South China Sea in recent months and years in an attempt to counter China’s growing influence over the disputed waters.
Meanwhile, China’s largest research vessel is expected to make its maiden voyage into the region. The vessel is manufactured by Shanghai Jiangnan Shipyard, which has also built China’s second and third aircraft carriers. The vessel is dubbed as a mega mobile lab on the sea. Vietnam has protested against China’s plans to send the largest research vessel in the region. Spokesperson Le Thi Thu Hang of Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “All exploration, survey, and scientific research activities in the waters of Spratly and Paracel islands without Vietnam’s permission are infringing upon Vietnamese sovereignty, illegal and void.”
Elsewhere, the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative, in its monthly report, claimed that the US only conducted 36 reconnaissance flights over the South China Sea in June 2021. That’s because its attention was turned towards the East China Sea and the Russian drills near Hawaii.
Do watch the BBC report on the battle for Scarborough Shoal. It’s a very interesting reportage.
The PLA Conscriptions
China published draft regulations for wartime conscription. There are two main highlights: 1) Focus on college students and prioritise the recruitment of college graduates with technical skills 2) Make retired soldiers a top conscription priority during wartime.
The former aims to address the demand and supply problem within the PLA. Demand for skilled soldiers for the modern navy, rocket force and strategic support force. The latter looks like a way to assimilate veterans’ demands.
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IV. News Updates
- A research team in China has unveiled an underwater drone that can recognise, follow and attack an enemy submarine without human instruction. The secret project, funded by the military, was partially declassified last week with the publication of a paper that gave a rare glimpse into a field test of the unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), seemingly in the Taiwan Strait more than a decade ago, reports SCMP. These robotic drones are now working mostly individually, but with technological upgrades could patrol in packs.
- China is holding military drills in the Yellow Sea off its east coast for the next five days, according to a notice put out by the maritime safety authority and the PLA. A no-go zone has been declared from Friday to Tuesday in an area spanning from southeast of Rongcheng in Shandong province down to waters near Lianyungang in Jiangsu. The notice was jointly issued by the PLA’s unit 91208 and the Northern Theatre Command.
- Chinese astronauts have performed the country's first tandem spacewalk, working for seven hours on the outside of the new Tiangong station in orbit around Earth. Tiangong's construction is a significant step in China's ambitious space programme. China has previously landed a rover on Mars and sent probes to the moon. Last month, three astronauts blasted off to become the station's first crew, where they will remain for three months in China's longest crewed mission to date. On Sunday morning, two of them left the station for about seven hours of work in the first spacewalk at Tiangong, the China Manned Space Agency said.
Finally, do read Prof Matthew Kroenig's piece in the Wall Street Journal on China's Nuclear Silos and the Arms Control Fantasy.
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| This newsletter is written by Suyash Desai, a research associate, China Studies Programme, at the Takshashila Institution. He has previously completed his M Phil from CIPOD, JNU. |
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