The Message: News And Views

Beijing, much to the exasperation of Washington, has progressed with leaps and bound, and this fact is the subject of a joint article by David Lague and Benjamin Kang Lim, titled: “How China is replacing America as Asia's military titan.”

In 1938, in the midst of a long campaign to bring China under Communist Party rule, revolutionary leader Mao Zedong wrote: “Whoever has an army has power.”

Xi Jinping, Mao’s latest successor, has taken that dictum to heart. He has donned camouflage fatigues, installed himself as commander-in-chief and taken control of the 2 million-strong Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army. It is the biggest overhaul of the PLA since Mao led it to victory in the nation’s civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949.

Xi has accelerated the PLA’s shift to naval power from a traditionally land-based force. He has broken up its vast, Maoist-era military bureaucracy. A new chain of command leads directly to Xi as chairman of the Central Military Commission, China’s top military decision-making body. Operational leadership of naval, missile, air, ground and cyber forces has been separated from administration and training — a structure that Chinese and Western defense analysts say borrows from US military organization.

The Chinese leader isn’t just revolutionizing the PLA. Xi is making a series of moves that are transforming both China and the global order. He has abandoned reform architect Deng Xiaoping’s injunction that China should hide its strength and bide its time. The waiting game is over. Xi’s speeches are peppered with references to his “Chinese dream,” where an ancient nation recovers from the humiliation of foreign invasion and retakes its rightful place as the dominant power in Asia.

The effort includes signature shows of soft power: Xi’s multibillion-dollar “Belt and Road” program to build a global trade and infrastructure network with China at its center, and his “Made in China 2025” plan to turn the country into a high-tech manufacturing giant.

But the boldest stroke is his expansion of China’s hard power, through his remaking of the PLA, the world’s largest fighting force. At the core of this vision of national renewal is a loyal, corruption-free military that Xi demands must be prepared to fight and win.

His push to project power abroad was accompanied by a power play at home. Xi has purged more than 100 generals accused of corruption or disloyalty, according to the media.

A raw demonstration of his authority came when television broadcast a laudatory documentary series about the PLA, “Strong Military.” In one scene in the 2017 series, an elderly man sits in a military court at a desk marked “defendant,” looking frail in a navy-blue civilian jacket. It is Guo Boxiong, a former general and the most senior officer convicted in Xi’s purge. He reads his confession to charges of bribery from a sheaf of papers gripped in both hands.

“The Central Military Commission dealt with my case completely correctly,” says Guo, who had once served as vice chairman of the body. “I must confess my guilt and take responsibility for it.” Guo was sentenced to life in prison.

In a series of stories, Reuters is exploring how the rapid and disruptive advance of Chinese hard power on Xi Jinping’s watch has ended the era of unquestioned US supremacy in Asia. In just over two decades, China has built a force of conventional missiles that rival or outperform those in the US armory. China’s shipyards have spawned the world’s biggest navy, which now rules the waves in East Asia. Beijing can now launch nuclear-armed missiles from an operational fleet of ballistic missile submarines, giving it a powerful second-strike capability. And the PLA is fortifying posts across vast expanses of the South China Sea, while stepping up preparations to recover Taiwan, by force if necessary.

It means, the US could lose. For the first time since Portuguese traders reached the Chinese coast five centuries ago, China has the military power to dominate the seas off its coast. Conflict between China and the United States in these waters would be destructive and bloody, particularly a clash over Taiwan, according to serving and retired senior American officers. And despite decades of unrivaled power since the end of the Cold War, there would be no guarantee America would prevail.

“The US could lose,” said Gary Roughead, co-chair of a bipartisan review of the Trump administration’s defense strategy published in November. “We really are at a significant inflection point in history.”

Roughead is no armchair theorist: A retired admiral, as former Chief of Naval Operations he held the top job in the U.S. Navy until 2011. His alarm reflects a growing view across the American defense establishment. In their report, he and his colleagues issued a dire warning. The United States faces a “national security crisis,” principally arising from growing Chinese and Russian military power. “US military superiority is no longer assured and the implications for American interests and American security are severe,” the panel concluded.

It is clear that Xi wants to bring the era of U. dominance in Asia to an end. “In the final analysis, it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia,” he said in a 2014 speech to foreign leaders on regional security.

China’s Ministry of National Defense, the US Indo-Pacific Command and the Pentagon did not respond to questions for this article or detailed summaries of its findings.

This account of Xi and the PLA — which despite the “army” in its name comprises all military branches — is based on interviews with 17 current and former military officers from China, the United States, Taiwan and Australia. Many would only speak on condition of anonymity. It draws on the accounts of Chinese officials and people with ties to the senior leadership in Beijing who have known Xi Jinping and his family for decades and are familiar with his career as he rose through the party and government bureaucracy. It also relies on Chinese government publications describing Xi’s political thinking, his speeches and official documentaries showcasing his leadership of the military.

In Washington, the world’s pre-eminent military power is mobilizing to respond. Largely in reaction to this challenge, Washington is boosting defense spending, rebuilding its navy and urgently developing new weapons, particularly longer range conventional missiles. It is expanding military ties with other regional powers, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Singapore and India. And it’s conducting an international diplomatic and intelligence campaign to counter China’s cyberattacks, traditional espionage and intellectual property theft. This campaign includes efforts to contain the global reach of Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE Corp.

The confrontation comes as the administration of President Donald Trump is waging a tariff war aimed at reducing China’s massive trade surplus with the United States. However the trade conflict is resolved, a graver risk is the possibility that the deeper tensions could boil over into an armed clash between Beijing and Washington and its allies in the hotly contested maritime zones off the Chinese coast.

The rise of the PLA is not all Xi’s doing. Long before he took power, the military had been transformed from the massive but rudimentary land force that swept Mao and his comrades, including Xi’s father, to victory over the Kuomintang in 1949. Decades of steep increases in defense spending paid for an arsenal of high technology weapons; millions of soldiers were demobilized. But corruption became endemic.

Xi’s two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, were civilians who took office without a network of support among PLA brass. They fostered loyalty through patronage, pay rises and budget increases, according to Chinese and Taiwanese analysts and retired officers. Under the weak leadership of Hu in particular, they say, senior officers exploited their positions to siphon off money, particularly from the logistic and equipment budgets. Rank buying became rampant.

The military hierarchy Xi inherited had become a law unto itself under Hu, according to Li Nan, a scholar of the Chinese military at the National University of Singapore. “It was out of control, in a sense,” said Li. “Now the power is centralized in the hands of Xi Jinping.”

Xi, a so-called princeling, grew up as a member of China’s Communist Party aristocracy, even though his family suffered separation and persecution in Mao’s chaotic Cultural Revolution. His late father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary military leader who became a top government official in the early years of communist rule. He was later purged in Mao’s upheavals, before emerging a key leader of China’s market reforms in the 1980s.

Xi’s dramatic accumulation of power was unexpected. He took a low profile as he slowly worked his way up the Communist Party and state bureaucracy, according to multiple Chinese familiar with his early career.

His first job out of university in 1979 was serving in a junior post as a uniformed aide to Gen. Geng Biao, then minister of defense. Xi’s official biography records this three-year posting as “active duty.” In this role, he had access to classified military documents, including files on the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam, according to sources with ties to the leadership. He had to memorize hundreds of telephone numbers and was not allowed to rely on a telephone book, in case it was lost or stolen, they said.