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Explainer | China military: how Beijing is pushing forward its plan for a powerful, modern armed forces
- Beijing wants the People’s Liberation Army to be ‘fully modernised’ by 2027, the centenary of its founding during the civil war
- It’s been downsized and restructured, while the government spends more to develop advanced weapons and technologies like artificial intelligence
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As regional tensions rise, a more assertive China has set a goal of turning its vast People’s Liberation Army into a modern fighting force by 2027, and a world-class military by 2050 – but how far has it come, and where is it headed?
The Red Army
The PLA began in 1927 with an armed uprising launched by the Communist Party against the Nationalist Kuomintang forces in Nanchang, Jiangxi province. This motley collection of communists, peasants, Kuomintang deserters and bandits was known as the Red Army. They had no ranks or formal command chain, and used guerilla tactics – irregular, fast-moving and small-scale actions – against their better armed and bigger enemy. It was renamed the People’s Liberation Army in the later stage of China’s pre-1949 civil war.
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What does it look like today?
China’s military has been significantly downsized since the 1980s as it tries to streamline operations, but it remains the world’s largest army with more than 2 million active personnel. That is even after the most recent efforts to reduce the numbers, when some 300,000 troops were retrenched, according to a defence white paper released by Beijing in 2019.
As well as troop reductions, the PLA has also undergone a massive structural reform that began in 2015. The four general departments – staff, politics, logistics and armaments – were reorganised into 15 agencies under the Central Military Commission. And seven military area commands were merged and replaced by five theatre commands.
That put the CMC in charge of overall administration of the military, while the theatre commands focus on operations and troop development, according to state news agency Xinhua, citing an adviser to the commission’s leading group on reform.
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The restructure has also been seen as a move to consolidate the ruling Communist Party’s control over the military – President Xi Jinping is also chairman of the CMC.
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