China's paper army
Charles Douglas-Home
We have to thank the Korean War for the myth of the Yellow Peril. A whole generation — or two — have been nourished on the image of the human wave of Chinese soldiers swarming over trenches and tanks, impervious to casualties. Thus when you get to Peking it is a surprise to see literally thousands of soldiers of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) still clad in the fearsome, shapeless green fatigues and evocative peaked cap with the red star on it. These soldiers seem to have little to do: they shop; they drive jeeps; they dig on construction sites; they guard embassies and hotels; they go to the Great Wall or the Forbidden City as tourists, alone or with their families. There is not a rifle to be seen.
There are, in fact, two things to be said about the PLA. One is that the army is allpervasive in Chinese society because it has had, and still has, an important internal security role to play in support of the Communist Party. The other is that the PLA has no strategic, and little tactical, mobility. To paraphrase Jorrocks, the motto of the Chinese soldier may be 'where I eats I fights' because it would be impossible to lift him in a crisis and send him to fight anywhere else; the transportation just does not exist. Before the war with Vietnam earlier this year, it took four or five months to build up their forces without paralysing the Chinese railway system, or its internal road network, with the movement of 20 divisions to the border area.
In China a sombre post-mortem on the war with Vietnam is now in hand. A preliminary conclusion is that the PLA discovered in practice that an army formed and trained with equipment of the Fifties is not a good match, however numerically superior, for an army equipped and trained for the Seventies. What tactical objective has China achieved as a result of the war? The Vietnamese continue to hold on in Kampuchea and there is no lasting guarantee that China could attack them again without provoking the Russians into some kind of counter measure.
It was as well for the Chinese that the operation was limited in time and space. The longer it had gone on the more obviously would China's chronic military shortcomings have been revealed! Whatever detailed conclusions are drawn, a general one must be that China is militarily weak. This modest assessment must be added to the review of China's future industrial and economic strategy which is now in progress. The nation's grand strategy for the next, say, 25 years, can only be worked out in practice when it is clear what will be the political and economic conditions in which that strategy will be applied.
China's strategic priorities remain unchanged: the unity of the state and the primacy of Communist Party leadership. As with all communist regimes, internal security therefore is the top priority. The nation's external defence strategy depends on the party's view of its ability to preserve its position as the leading organisation of the state.
The army has traditionally been the instrument of both external and internal security. It is more successful than the party since it alone maintained its cohesion — and therefore the country's — during the ten chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution. It has probably also been more popular, in view of its peasant origins and revolutionary achievements. So the main ethos of the army has been its domestic role, guarantor of the nation's unity, underwriter of the party's authority, symbol of revolutionary triumph. It is not an expansionist or imperialist army and its three forays beyond China's borders (Tibet being a special case) all follow the same pattern. Korea, India, Vietnam, were border defence raids which all, under scrutiny, showed the ponderous immobility of China's forces, its need for long periods of preparation, and its logistic inability to maintain long campaigns.
However, the PLA's role and its preparation for the defence of the state against invasion has hitherto relied on the philosophy and practice of a guerrilla army, nourished on its experience of the Long March and the radicalisation of peasant groups during the guerrilla war against Chiang Kai-shek and then the Japanese occupation. Now it would no longer be effective in those under-populated areas of north and west China which would be most threatened by a Russian invasion or partial occupation. The 'people's defence' philosophy just does not make sense in the under-populated tracts of Singkiang.
If the army's effectiveness is thus virtually reduced to internal security, underwriting the party and keeping the state united —how can it be modernised to meet an altogether different kind of threat from the more modern war machines on its Russian and Vietnamese borders? The question for Peking strategists is: can the political and economic conditions of the next 25 years enable China to repair these deficiences? The answer must be a negative one.
The modernisation of the whole state is a clearly defined strategic objective born of this real sense of military weakness. But the mechanics and economics of the modernisation programme mean that the military will come last in the queue — since agriculture, light industry and even heavy industry, will all have to be developed first, to export enough or save enough in imports to acquire the foreign exchange necessary to buy military hardware. The defence base can only be brought into new technologies on the back of a more general economic and industrial growth. Throughout every phase of the next 25 years China's political leadership will he wrestling with the question of control. The force of modernisation will progressivelY threaten the party's ability to control its pace and direction. A nation of 900 million peasants inhabiting a largely rural economY with a manual technology and a few centres of excellence carefully contained, is one thing; a modernised, industrialised superstate is quite another. Under such circumstances, the party is bound to choose control even at the expense of modernisation.
Meanwhile the technologies of the West, and even of Russia, will be racing on ahead. In 25 years' time China will be no more of a threat than she is now. China now has four million men under arms; if she had propor' tionately as many men in uniform as has the United States, that figure would be eight million; as Russia, 12 million. Amerca i spends three times as much on defence as d° the Chinese; the Russians five times more. Why is it then, that the Russians are — or pretend to be — so obsessed with the Yellow Peril, and indoctrinate their people to ualise a threat which they know not to extsi,7 nor likely to within the foreseeable futur.e.: Until they receive a proper answer to truf question in Peking, they have every reaso" to be worried about the Russians.
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