CHINA-INTERNAL: PLA REFORM

The South China Morning Post reported on April 24, 2017, that PLA army corps are likely to have their unit numbers changed for the first time in their history. It quoted Chinese military sources as saying “Serial numbers for the 13 army corps are likely restart from 71 and end at 83.” The PLA had up to 70 army corps – numbered sequentially from one – when the CCP seized power in 1949, but now has just 13 after Xi ordered five disbanded this year. Corps facing the prospect of being renamed include the 1st Army Corps, which was part of 1st Field Army in which Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, served as political commissar during the civil war. Analysts said that not even Xi’s powerful predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping had attempted to rename the army corps, but he was taking on the task to curb longstanding factionalism in the army. Another Beijing-based PLA veteran said. “Except for Mao Zedong, no one has dared to implement such drastic moves in the PLA in such a resolute way. The major move by Mao in the early 1970s was just to swap commanders of the eight military commands at the time to prevent factionalism.” The source said the unit name change was aimed at “curbing factionalism in the army and the pernicious influence” left by two disgraced CMC vice-chairmen, Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou. The retired officer said the 13 renamed army corps were among the 84 newly restructured corps-level units announced by Xi Jinping on April 25, 2017, when he met the units’ leaders at the PLA’s headquarters in Beijing. The PLA Daily reported that at that meeting, Xi Jinping demanded their absolute loyalty to the Communist Party. Other corps-level units include provincial military commands, military academies and universities directly under the Defence Ministry, and the head offices of the land, navy, air and rocket forces. Chen Daoyin, an associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said Xi Jinping was attempting to “create something more innovative and superior” than Mao or Deng. “The PLA army corps system changed in the decades after the military was founded in the late 1920s, with Mao playing the key role in creating and remodelling it before the CCP seized power in 1949, while Deng’s key mission was to cut its size from the late 1970s. However, Xi’s ambitions are more aggressive than Deng’s. He is trying to do something surpassing Mao by scrapping the army structure thoroughly and rebuilding it.” Military experts said those that had survived were all elite units that had experienced innumerable combat ordeals. They included well-known army corps such as the 38th, 42nd, 27th and 39th, which had participated in the Korean war. The 38th Army Corps, based in Baoding, Hebei, once defeated the United States’ 2nd Infantry Division on the battlefield.

While Macau-based miliary expert Antony Wong Dong said he was concerned the name changes would erase part of the PLA land force’s “glorious record” in history, Chen Daoyin, an associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, countered that Xi Jinping’s plan to change the army corps’ names was not targeting their “glorious history”, but was a necessary technical measure to simplify the army’s command system so that it could play its role in modern, joint-operations warfare. He said “Xi will keep promoting the glorious history of the PLA because the revolutionary heroism and collectivism of the PLA’s predecessor, the Red Army, is the root of the army’s military spirit, and because that history will help him to control ideological education in the PLA. The renaming is purely an innovative technical decision to let the army corps integrate with the navy, air force, rocket force and other troops to boost the full PLA’s combat capabilities.”

(Comment: The number of PLA army corps shrank in the course of at least 10 massive demobilisations after 1949. A white paper published by the Defence Ministry in 2006 said the PLA had 18 army corps that year.)





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