Reconsidering the PLA as an Interest Group

Isaac B. Kardon and Phillip C. Saunders

MANY OBSERVERS ASSERT THAT THE INFLUENCE OF the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the Chinese national security policymaking process has increased significantly in recent years. They argue that changes within the PLA, in civil-military relations, and in the broader policy environment in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have increased military influence across a range of policy issues. In assessing this claim, it is important to identify where the PLA's interests and preferences may differ from those of civilian ministries and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership and to understand how PLA views are expressed and pursued in the policy arena. One useful approach is to consider to what extent and on which issues the PLA acts as a coherent interest group.

John Garver's essay "The PLA as an Interest Group in Chinese Foreign Policy" provides a good point of departure. Writing in the mid-1990s, Garver argued that despite significant hurdles to effective political action, there was evidence that the PLA acts as an interest group on some issues and under some circumstances. He drew on policy, observed practice, and Hong Kong reporting on PLA activities to support his claim that "the PLA more or less as an institution, in a fairly unified fashion, intervened in the policy process" to chart a more assertive Chinese policy toward the United States and Taiwan. Twenty years later, the factors Garver identified as affecting PLA capacity to act as an interest group offer a good starting point for assessing PLA policy influence. In the context of rapid political and social change, the PLA has consolidated and expanded many of the institutional traits that allowed it to take concerted political action on behalf of military interests. Meanwhile, a number of internal and external obstacles to PLA influence on policy have diminished or ceased to be relevant.

Although the Chinese national security decisionmaking process remains opaque, the PLA demonstrates characteristics suggestive of interest group behavior: professionalization, growing coherence of its corporate interests, increasingly specified "scientific" features of its mission, a monopoly on functional expertise and information in the national security realm, and enhanced capacity to articulate and defend institutional goals and equities to shape public debate and influence policy. Within the Chinese national security policymaking arena, the PLA commands prestige and privileged access to formal and informal institutional channels through which its interests can be represented, defended, and pursued.

The PLA's relationship to the party (it reports directly to the CCP general secretary, in his capacity as chairman of the Central Military Commission) gives senior military leaders direct access to China's top civilian leader. However, the fact that senior PLA officers are all party members and the close relationship between the PLA and the party has historically made it difficult for the PLA to act as a discrete interest group in Chinese politics. In serving the party rather than the state, the PLA is embedded within the broader political apparatus and prone to "divisions and cross-cutting cleavages" that preclude the development and expression of institutional interests. At the extremes, the PLA has sometimes taken action consistent with CCP direction against its own organizational interests. If PLA actors are motivated to political action on the basis of other affiliations — party, regional, and/or factional — then there is little payoff in trying to identify PLA institutional interests and means of pursuing them. However, if PLA actors share certain institutional policy objectives and demonstrate the capacity to mobilize and make political demands on that basis, there is value in understanding those interests and how they are expressed in the policy process.

Conceptualizing the PLA as an "Interest Group" in Chinese Politics

An "interest group," in David Truman's authoritative formulation, refers to "a group that, on the basis of one or more shared attitudes, makes certain claims upon other groups in the society for the establishment, maintenance, or enhancement of forms of behavior that are implied as shared attitudes. ... [They also] share attitudes towards what is needed or wanted in a given situation, observable as demands or claims upon other groups in society." In his assessment of the PLA, Garver established two parallel criteria: 1) "when one or several organizational segments have distinct institutionally-derived interests that lead some of its members to political activity to defend and promote those interests against others who hold antithetical views," and 2) "when there is a pattern of political participation by soldiers designed to achieve an authoritative decision in favor of a particular policy." Garver stressed the centrality of "institutionally-derived interests" (italics added), but cautioned that the organization need not be a "unitary, monolithic actor ... [nor] always act as a group." In other words, only some critical mass of PLA personnel acting in concert some of the time is necessary for the interest group label to be analytically useful.

The PLA in 1996 was an unlikely candidate to be labeled an "interest group." Given its allegiance to the CCP rather than the state, its uneven institutionalization, and its formal responsibilities within a restrictive Chinese political system, the Chinese military lacked the coherence, autonomy, and voice usually associated with an interest group. In its various incarnations — as an organization indistinguishable from the party during the pre-1949 era, as shock troops for intraparty factional battles during the Cultural Revolution, as a marginalized appendage with vast private commercial interests during the early reform period, and now as an increasingly modern and professional military organization — the PLA has seldom functioned like interest groups in the American political...