People's Liberation Army

• 1. Introduction

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  The People's Liberation Army was born not as a national military, but as the armed wing of a political party. On the 1st of August 1927, communist elements of the National Revolutionary Army broke away in the Nanchang uprising, firing the first shots of the Chinese Civil War. Their commanders included Zhu De, He Long, Ye Jianying, and Zhou Enlai. They called themselves the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. Nearly a century later, their descendants control the world's largest military force, with a defence budget that accounts for 12 percent of all military spending on Earth.

  What holds this force together is not a flag or a constitution but a party. The People's Liberation Army answers to the Chinese Communist Party, not to the Chinese state. Its primary mission, enshrined in law, is the defence of the party and its rule. That distinction shapes everything: its command structure, its officers' careers, its political education system, and its growing ambitions beyond China's borders.

  How did a peasant army that survived the Long March become a nuclear power with anti-satellite missiles and aircraft carriers? What does it mean to run a military that is, by design, the instrument of a party rather than a nation? And where does a force that last fought a war in 1979 stand today, as it deploys warships to Cambodia, operates a base in Tajikistan, and prepares for conflict in space and cyberspace?

• 2. Party Commands the Gun

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  Zhang Guotao led the Central Military Commission when it was first established under the CCP in 1925, before Zhou Enlai replaced him in 1926. From those early days, the party-army relationship was built into the institution's DNA. The doctrine is blunt: "the Party commands the gun."

  The mechanism for this control runs through every level of the force. Regiment-sized units and above each maintain a CCP committee and a political commissar. Below that, battalion and company units have political directors and political instructors. The political commissar is officially equal to the unit commander in status. Key decisions flow through party committees, where the political commissar serves as secretary and the commander is only the deputy secretary.

  At the top, the Central Military Commission holds supreme command. Since 1989, the CMC chairman has also been the CCP general secretary, a deliberate fusion that gives the paramount leader direct control over the armed forces. Xi Jinping currently holds both posts, alongside the presidency. The Ministry of National Defense, by contrast, has no command authority whatsoever. It functions as a diplomatic liaison, insulating the military from outside interference.

  Non-CCP political parties are banned from establishing any presence within the PLA. Only the CCP appoints officers at all levels. Even a Politburo member who wants to visit a PLA unit must apply to the Politburo Standing Committee for permission, and once approved, the visit must be arranged through the CMC.

• 3. From Peasants to Professionals

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  After the PLA's victory in the Civil War and the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, the Air Force leadership structure was established in November of that year, followed by the Navy's the following April. The force that built these structures was, in the words of sociologist Alessandro Russo, one that had "overturned the strict traditional hierarchies in unprecedented forms of egalitarianism."

  Formal military ranks were not adopted until 1955, a full six years after the state was founded. The early PLA drew most of its members from the peasantry, and the egalitarian structure that had served the revolution was deliberately preserved. Soviet assistance then began transforming this peasant force into a modern one through the 1950s.

  The Cultural Revolution interrupted this process sharply. Military ranks, adopted in 1955, were abandoned in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution because the Central Military Commission had decided they expressed bourgeois hierarchy and fostered inequality. That decision was reversed in September 1988. The longest-serving military region commanders from the pre-Cultural Revolution era include Xu Shiyou, who led the Nanjing Military Region from 1954 to 1974, and Yang Dezhi, who commanded the Jinan Military Region from 1958 to 1974.

  Zhou Enlai announced the modernization of the military as the last of the Four Modernizations, with Deng Xiaoping's support. Since 1978, the PLA has demobilized millions of personnel and overhauled recruitment, strategy, and training. Deng's directive was direct: quality over quantity. The decision to cut military size by one million was made in 1985 and completed by 1987. Staffing in military leadership was cut by approximately 50 percent during that period.

• 4. Wars, Lessons, and Modernization

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  In November 1950, units operating under the name the People's Volunteer Army entered the Korean War as United Nations forces under General Douglas MacArthur approached the Yalu River. Chinese forces drove MacArthur's troops out of North Korea and captured Seoul, though they were subsequently pushed back to positions north of the 38th Parallel. That conflict accelerated the rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army Air Force.

  The 1991 Gulf War delivered a starker lesson. Chinese leadership concluded the PLA was an oversized, nearly obsolete force after watching how the United States performed. When the US sent two aircraft carrier groups toward Taiwan during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in the mid-1990s, Jiang Zemin ordered a ten-year modernization program. Chairman Jiang Zemin made a "revolution in military affairs" part of official national military strategy in 1993.

  The goal was to shift from a force built on mass and numbers to one capable of winning what Chinese planners call "local wars under high-tech conditions." Short, decisive campaigns with limited geographic and political scope. Greater emphasis on reconnaissance, mobility, and deep reach. Resources moved toward the navy and air force.

  The PLA also drew lessons from the Kosovo War, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Iraqi insurgency. During the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, which ended in a border dispute with Vietnam, western analysts generally concluded that Vietnam outperformed the PLA, despite both sides claiming victory. That outcome sharpened the urgency of reform. China has not fought a war since 1979, and its last major conflicts before that were border skirmishes and regional engagements.

• 5. Commerce, Corruption, and Reform

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  In the late 1980s, the central government encouraged the PLA to expand services and generate revenue as state finances tightened. The military built hotels and restaurants. It was granted more autonomy and permission to pursue commercial activities, in exchange for a reduced political role and smaller budgets. The arrangement also freed resources for broader economic development.

  The consequences were deep and lasting. Weak oversight, ineffective self-regulation, and the fact that neither Jiang Zemin nor Hu Jintao had close personal ties to the PLA allowed systemic corruption to take root and persist through the late 2010s. Jiang's attempt to strip the PLA of its commercial interests succeeded only partially; many businesses remained under the control of associates of PLA officers.

  Corruption lowered combat readiness, blocked modernization and professionalization, and eroded the party's control over its own instrument. Following the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, ideological correctness temporarily replaced reform as the dominant theme in Chinese military affairs. But reform and modernization eventually reasserted themselves.

  Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaigns and military reforms from the early 2010s were designed in part to address these accumulated problems. In December 2023, Reuters reported a military leadership purge after high-ranking generals were removed from the National People's Congress. Prior to 2017, more than sixty generals had been investigated and dismissed. In 2016, the CMC replaced the four traditional general departments with fifteen new functional bodies reporting directly to the CMC.

• 6. Nuclear Arsenal and Space

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  China's first nuclear weapons test took place in 1964, and its first hydrogen bomb test followed in 1967 at Lop Nur. Tests continued until 1996, when China signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, though it did not ratify it. The People's Liberation Army Rocket Force, which controls China's nuclear and conventional strategic missiles, consists of at least 125,000 personnel.

  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Federation of American Scientists estimated in 2024 that China holds approximately 438 nuclear warheads. The United States Department of Defense put the figure at more than 500 operational warheads, making China's arsenal the third-largest in the world. China's stated policy is no first use, maintaining a deterrent retaliatory force. A 2023 study by the National Defense University found that China's nuclear doctrine has historically leaned toward maintaining a secure second-strike capability.

  On the 24th of September 2024, the Rocket Force performed its first intercontinental ballistic missile test over the Pacific Ocean since the early 1980s. Space has become equally central to PLA planning. Having observed how space capabilities shaped American performance in the Gulf War, Chinese planners now treat space as a critical domain in both conflict and strategic competition. China became the third country to send a person into space using its own means, with Yang Liwei's flight aboard Shenzhou 5 on the 15th of October 2003.

  The PLA began developing an anti-ballistic and anti-satellite system in the 1960s, code-named Project 640. On the 11th of January 2007, China conducted a successful test of an anti-satellite missile using an SC-19 class kinetic kill vehicle. In August 2021, China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile that circled the globe before heading toward its target.

• 7. Global Reach and Arms Trade

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  Beyond China's borders, the PLA maintains a support base in Djibouti and a base in Tajikistan, operates a listening station in Cuba, runs the Espacio Lejano Station in Argentina, and has deployed warships on a rotational basis to the Ream Naval Base in Cambodia. In 2009, the PLA held its first military exercise in Africa, a humanitarian and medical training exercise conducted in Gabon.

  From 2014 to 2015, the PLA deployed 524 medical staff to combat the Ebola virus outbreak across Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. As of 2023, this was the PLA's largest medical assistance mission in another country. UN peacekeeping deployments have placed PLA engineers and logistics personnel in Lebanon, the Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Mali, and South Sudan.

  China has also become a significant arms exporter. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China became the world's third largest exporter of major arms in the period 2010-14, an increase of 143 percent over the previous five-year period. SIPRI calculated that China surpassed Russia to become the world's second largest arms exporter by 2020. In the period 2010-14, China supplied major arms to 35 states. Just over 68 percent of those exports went to three countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.

  The PLAN has undergone particular transformation. According to the United States Department of Defense, it is now numerically the largest navy in the world. The force includes three aircraft carriers, with the most recent, the Fujian, launched in 2022. New Jin-class nuclear submarines were launched on the 3rd of December 2004, capable of striking targets across the Pacific Ocean with nuclear warheads.