87 4. Compensating for Deficiencies: Doctrinal Evolution in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army: 1978–1999 By Paul H. B. Godwin198 Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. —Carl Von Clausewitz Past as Prologue Immediately following the Korean War, China began, with extensive Soviet assistance, to develop the military capabilities of a great power. China’s military leadership was seeking to overcome the challenge they had faced since the Red Army of Workers and Peasants was founded on 1 August 1927: How to defeat an adversary superior in the means of war? Defense modernization programs initiated in the mid-1950s were to ensure that a future Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA—as all four services are collectively named) would never again face an enemy equipped with superior arms. To meet this challenge, Beijing sought the entire panoply of modern weaponry from nuclear- tipped ballistic missiles through long-range bombers to fighter aircraft, tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, destroyers, and submarines. When in the late-1950s the USSR refused support for nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile submarines (SSN/SSBN), China initiated its own programs. Doctrinal adjustment followed the weaponry being acquired. By the late-1950s, Marshal Ye Jianying would dub these changes “People’s War Under Modern Conditions.” Mao Zedong’s domestic and foreign polices brought these modernizing ambitions to an end. His 1950s clash with an officer corps that he believed too willing to accept an expensive, technology-heavy Soviet military doctrine and to reject his principle of “man over weapons” has been thoroughly examined in ________________ 198The author is Non-Resident Scholar, Asia-Pacific Program, Atlantic Council of the United States. 88 Ellis Joffe’s now-classic study.199 This initial conflict with his military chiefs must be seen in the larger context of Mao’s split with the USSR and his radical domestic policies to build a revolutionary society. Following a series of foreign policy disagreements and growing distrust between Mao and Khrushchev, Moscow sought to bludgeon Beijing into accepting the USSR’s leadership and policies. The Soviet Union canceled its support for Beijing’s nuclear weapons program in 1959 and in the summer of 1960 severed essentially all of its assistance programs—both civil and military. With the exception of the nuclear weapons programs, succeeding years saw Chinese defense industrial base and research and development (R&D) infrastructure erode inexorably into obsolescence. By the mid-1970s, China’s defense industries were capable only of building weapons and equipment based on Soviet technologies of the 1950s. The defense R&D infrastructure was equally harmed and incapable of designing and developing weapons and equipment meeting the demands of late- twentieth-century warfare. Eroding defense industrial and R&D capabilities were paralleled by the PLA’s years of involvement in Mao Zedong’s monomaniacal domestic political campaigns, especially the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. Over a decade of less-than-adequate training reduced China’s armed forces to an ineffective fighting force. Deng Xiaoping’s mid-1970s assessment that the PLA had become an aging, overstaffed, arrogant, obsolescent giant incapable of conducting modern warfare200 was borne out by its poor performance during the 1979 incursion into Vietnam.201 On the eve of the reform period in the late- 1970s, therefore, the modernization and doctrinal evolution of the PLA were at a historic low point. This chapter analyzes the developments in these two realms since 1978 and is divided into the following three sections: general war with the USSR; limited, local war; and post-Desert Storm high-tech war. In each of these three time periods the assessment of the security environment and the PLA’s doctrinal evolution confronted serious deficiencies in equipment, personnel, and training and required corrections that relied more on creative workarounds than on technology. ________________ 199Ellis Joffe, Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer Corps 1949–1964 (Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1967). 200Deng Xiaoping, “Speech at an Enlarged Meeting of the Military Commission of the Party Central Committee” (14 July 1975), in Joint Publications Research Service, China Report (hereafter JPRS-China Report), 31 October 1983, p. 19. 201See Harlan W. Jencks, “China’s ‘Punitive’ War on Vietnam: A Military Assessment,” Asian Survey, Vol. XIX, No. 8 (August 1979), pp. 801–815. 89 Definitions Three terms are at the center of this analysis: military doctrine, strategy, and operations. Doctrine consists of the fundamental principles guiding those who plan the use of military forces. These principles are drawn from experience, analysis of past wars, and speculative analysis of potential future wars. Strategy defines the way in which military forces are employed to achieve the desired outcome of an actual or potential conflict. Doctrine and strategy are intimately linked, for doctrinal principles have a strong determining effect on a chosen strategy. Operations are the campaigns conducted or planned to achieve a strategy’s objective. Operational doctrine consists of the principles guiding the use of military forces to conduct the operations. For the past two decades, Chinese military journals have focused primarily on analyses of operational doctrine. Defense Modernization Strategy in 1979: Walking on Two Legs Deng’s approach to defense modernization was part of a much broader strategy to bring China into the ranks of the world’s leading powers early in the twenty- first century. In the mid- to late-1970s, China’s military security community had sought to raise the threat of Soviet invasion to crisis proportions. Deng’s defense programs, however, were not focused primarily on improving the PLA’s ability to defend against a possible Soviet attack. He viewed Moscow’s “threat” as neither imminent nor dangerous enough to warrant the massive diversion of resources from civil to military requirements sought by much of China’s security community.202 Defense modernization therefore followed a two-part strategy that in Maoist terms could be called “walking on two legs.” The long- term strategic objective was to create a largely self-sufficient defense establishment capable of developing and sustaining modern forces sufficient both for defense and to grant China the military status of a world power. A second objective was to improve the PLA’s near-term combat effectiveness using the weapons and equipment in its current inventory. These two processes were intimately related. If the PLA was to become capable of effectively using its current and then more technologically sophisticated weapons and equipment as they were introduced in the future, the groundwork ________________ 202For a thorough discussion of the debate over defense and security issues for the years 1973 through 1978, see Harry Harding, “The Domestic Politics of China’s Global Posture, 1973–1978,” in Thomas Fingar, ed., China’s Quest for Independence: Policy Evolution in the 1970s (Boulder: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 43–96. 90 had to be laid before more advanced weaponry entered the inventory. In short, defense modernization was to be incremental and slow. Limitations on Doctrinal Change There were six constraints on doctrinal change. First, with investment priorities placed on the civil sector of the economy, defense budgets would be fettered. Second, China’s obsolescent defense industrial base was incapable of placing modern weapons and equipment into serial production. There could be no quick upgrading of PLA weapons and equipment. Third, the bulk of the PLA officer corps (referred to as cadre because there were no formal military ranks until 1987) was over-aged, undereducated, and incapable of understanding and conducting modern warfare. Fourth, the armed forces themselves were neither organized nor trained for contemporary warfare. Fifth, the logistics and command and control systems were incapable of supporting the operational doctrine of a modern battlefield. Sixth, the doctrine, strategy, and concepts of operations directing the armed forces were as antiquated as the PLA’s arms and equipment, requiring Beijing to rebuild the armed forces’ centers of research and professional military education.203 These constraints meant there was no capability within China’s defense establishment to rapidly transform the PLA into a modern combat force. Even if modern arms were available, China’s armed forces were incapable of successfully undertaking the doctrinal, organizational, logistics, maintenance, and training changes required to transform the PLA into an effective, late- twentieth-century combat force. It was thus understood from the very beginning that doctrinal change could not be successful without reconstructing and reforming China’s entire defense establishment. Discussions in China’s military journals and official statements supported the principle that doctrinal change would be cautious. Change was to ensure combat capabilities using existing arms and equipment were maximized and not undermined by doctrinal demands that could not be fulfilled. In the fall of 1979, China’s defense minister, Xu Xiangqian, and Xiao Ke, who was charged with revitalizing the PLA’s research centers and professional military education, laid out the problem. Both were undoubtedly reflecting on ________________ 203In 1979, Xiao Ke, President and Political