"More Red but Still Expert: Party-Army Relations Under Xi Jinping" - by CWP alum Joel Wuthnow
Xi Jinping has encouraged the People’s Liberation Army to be able to ‘fight and win wars’ while remaining ‘absolutely loyal’ to the Chinese Communist Party. This latter focus was the result of problems of excessive autonomy invested in the PLA under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, which manifested in military secrecy, corruption, and questions of ideological commitment. Xi has attempted to enhance party control (and his own authority as the ‘core’ of the party) through a multifaceted political strategy that includes centralization of power under his control, renewed ideological campaigns, and improved internal control mechanisms. Nevertheless, Xi is unlikely to meet this standard because the military remains fundamentally a self-policing organization with almost no genuine civilian party oversight. This means that the prospects for party-army tensions and even crises remain and could grow in the post-Xi era.
More Red but Still Expert: Party-Army Relations Under Xi Jinping
Joel Wuthnow & Phillip C. Saunders Published online: 28 Sep 2024 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2024.2400529
Dr. Joel Wuthnow is a senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs within the Institute for National Strategic Studies at NDU. His research areas include Chinese foreign and security policy, Chinese military affairs, U.S.-China relations, and strategic developments in East Asia. In addition to his duties in INSS, he also serves as an adjunct professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
His recent books and monographs, all from NDU Press, include Gray Dragons: Assessing China's Senior Military Leadership (2022), Crossing the Strait: China's Military Prepares for War with Taiwan (2022, lead editor), The PLA Beyond Borders: Chinese Military Operations in Regional and Global Context (2021, lead editor), System Overload: Can China's Military Be Distracted in a War over Taiwan? (2020), and Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms (2019, co-editor). His research and commentary has also appeared in outlets such as Asia Policy, Asian Security, China Leadership Monitor, The China Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Joint Force Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Strategic Studies, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Naval War College Review, and in edited volumes.
Prior to joining NDU, Dr. Wuthnow was a China analyst at CNA, a postdoctoral fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University, and a pre-doctoral fellow at The Brookings Institution. His degrees are from Princeton University (A.B., summa cum laude, in Public and International Affairs), Oxford University (M.Phil. in Modern Chinese Studies), and Columbia University (Ph.D. in Political Science). He is proficient in Mandarin.
Photo Credit: By Tyg728 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62350815
