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Daniel Mattingly is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University, where he studies authoritarian politics with a focus on China. In 2020, he published The Art of Political Control in China, which explores how the Chinese state controls protests and implements sweeping social policies. Recently, he has turned his focus to the military, and is working on a book about the role of the military in Chinese elite politics. We spoke about his current research, Xi’s remaking of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and what the recent corruption scandals in the military mean about the state of China’s army.

Q: What is the military’s role in elite politics in China?

A: In China, like a lot of other revolutionary regimes, the military plays a unique role. There are a lot of countries where political leaders really have to fear a military takeover. And in China, that’s not the case. The Chinese Communist Party is pretty coup-proofed: it’s unlikely that the military is going to come over and kick all the civilians out. But the military can still play a pivotal role in elite political conflict. So even though the civilian [leadership] doesn’t have to worry that military officers are going to come in and kick the politburo out of Zhongnanhai, they do still need to think about the military as a potentially pivotal actor if there’s some 1989-like social movement in China. They need the military on their side. 

A lot of my research is about understanding the role of the military in Chinese domestic politics, which has been something that’s been sidelined in a lot of studies — even though we know that the military has played a decisive role in the past, in Mao’s rise in the 1930s, in the Cultural Revolution and the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the 1989 movement.

Why is China coup-proofed? 

Like a lot of other regimes that have their roots in a Soviet-style Leninist political system, the Chinese Communist Party has a lot of tools to ensure military obedience and compliance. When Mao talked about the importance of the ‘party commanding the gun’, that’s something that it and the PLA have taken really seriously throughout the whole history of the PRC. The military in China is not a national military — it’s the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s not just semantics. It reflects a reality that the party is embedded at every level of the PLA in a way that makes the party and the military inseparable. 

The PLA, unlike a lot of national militaries, has, importantly, a system of political commissars who operate alongside commanders. And each of the key units has a system of commanders and commissars that work together, and the commissars are there to ensure political loyalty. This is a key part of the system that helps the party ensure that it’s going to continue to control the gun. And the military, as a whole, is answerable, not to the Ministry of Defense, but to the Party’s Central Military Commission. 

All of this together makes it really hard for military leaders to operate independently of the party and makes it almost inconceivable that the military would act to kick the civilian [leadership] out of Zhongnanhai and institute military rule. 

Why has the role of the military been sidelined in scholarship?

After 1989, it is true that the military has become a less obviously pivotal player in elite politics, so that’s part of the reason. It’s still important in understanding Xi Jinping’s rise, for example. An important part of that was that he had the military on his side from the beginning and didn’t need to worry about the military or security services defecting from him and supporting some other elite in the political system. 

But it’s also true that the role of the military changed after the revolutionary generation died out in the 1980s and ‘90s. The PLA was no longer quite as completely core to elite politics as it was in the pre-89 era. 

[Xi’s] control over the military is one factor that has freed his hand and allowed him to clean house and purge a bunch of officials and consolidate power at the elite level. 

How did Xi have the military on his side?

First, when he was a junior official, Xi was really careful about assiduously courting the military as a key part of his political constituency. So when he was a county official, a prefecture official, and then a provincial-level official, he was using party and government resources to help win allies in the PLA. Not necessarily in a corrupt way, but in a classic patron-client way. When he was the party secretary and governor of Fujian, for example, he was using government resources to help ensure that military veterans had good post-retirement benefits and to rebuild barracks. So by the time he got to the top, he had this really strong network in the PLA, of officers who had also risen alongside him to the very top in the Central Committee. 

If you look at Xi compared to his two immediate predecessors, he was tied to a much greater portion of the central committee level PLA brass than either Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin. 

The second piece of it is, he’s a princeling. His father [Xi Zhongxun] was a revolutionary hero, so he can call on having this red pedigree as something to help him. And a third thing that I’ve always found fascinating — and it’s hard to think about as part of academic research — is that he married Peng Liyuan. I’m not saying it wasn’t love at first sight, but it was a savvy political move to marry the most famous entertainer in the PLA. 

Also, as one of Xi’s first jobs out of university after the cultural revolution, he was the mishu [personal secretary] for Geng Biao [a senior Chinese military leader], when he was a key figure on the Central Military Commission. There are photos of Xi wearing a military uniform. Arguably that was a key formative part of his political experience. The stuff I’ve read suggests that Geng Biao was like, hey, you should continue on in the PLA. Xi talks about this in an interview somewhere, that he decided that going the civilian route was the better political bet. So he decides not to continue on in the PLA and instead goes to be a county level official. An interesting counterfactual case is Liu Yuan, the son of Liu Shaoqi [China’s former president], who, unlike Xi Jinping, decided to go the PLA route. Liu Yuan makes it very far in the PLA, but it is clear that Xi Jinping made the better political bet in the long run. 

So Xi stayed closely tied to the PLA as a way to help him on the civilian track?

This makes sense if you think about his experience in the Cultural Revolution, understanding that a core piece of politics in an authoritarian system, maybe any system in general, is violence and coercion, which is a core lesson of the Cultural Revolution. And if you think about the politics of the 1980s, where the military remains so crucial. Deng Xiaoping was not General Secretary, Premier or President, he was Chairman of the Central Military Commission. That’s the role that he thinks is important for him to hold as the paramount leader. 

A reasonable interpretation is that Xi Jinping sees that the military is this key political constituency that he needs to court. It’s not everything. As his career goes on, it’s probably not even the most important thing. Early on, they were saying that he was spending around a day a week at the Central Military Commission. I don’t know if that’s still true. 

He’s trying to cultivate the PLA clearly as a key political constituency in a way that then helps him rise to power. And then once he’s in power, it helps him to govern. Because unlike Hu Jintao, who never had the military on his side and always had to worry about whatever the military was doing, Xi does not have to worry about that. His control over the military is one factor that has freed his hand and allowed him to clean house and purge a bunch of officials and consolidate power at the elite level. 

When you say that he is more tied to the military leadership than his predecessors, what do you mean by ties? How do you measure that? 

The way that I’m measuring it is: you have a career tie to a military officer if you served in the same political party unit. So for a civilian leader like Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, in their position as local officials, they were serving as party secretaries to local garrisons, all the way down to the county level. And as party secretary of the local garrison, some portion of their time every month was spent attending meetings and doing things on the military side of their job. So they were meeting these officials and getting to know them. So when I say that people are tied, it means they served in the same local military party body.

How big is that body?

Pretty small. The key officials are the garrison commander [and] the commissar… As people are going up the political ladder and are the party secretary or governor of provinces, there are also group armies in these provinces. Sometimes if you’re also the mayor of a city, there might be a group army stationed in your city, which means you’re also interacting with those group army commanders and commissars, helping to ensure that the party and the government are using resources in a way that supports the local military garrison. It’s pretty small and circumscribed. I’m talking about ties to somebody you sat in the same meeting room around the same table to talk through things. 

So if both of these leaders have risen up, the military leaders and Xi, is that because they both did well or is it because Xi promoted them?

This is a key thing to understand. Initially Xi gets a little bit lucky because when he comes into office, there are a bunch of people that he served with who, for a number of reasons, end up also at the top of the PLA at the same time. Once he’s in office, and people start to retire and cycle out of their jobs, he then replenishes them with other people that he’s served alongside. The fact that he has these ties empowers him at the beginning and helps him replenish and maintain them over time. The Central Military Commission now has He Weidong, the number two vice chair who served alongside Xi Jinping; Zhang Youxia, who’s the number one ranked vice chair, doesn’t have that kind of tie with him, but is also a princeling. So he’s tied to both of the top leaders on the Central Military Commission. 

It’s also important that Li Keqiang, who rose together with Xi in 2007 during the selection process, also has the right background, and is the right age. They’re both credible successors to Hu Jintao. But Li’s ties to the PLA are weaker, the people that he knows have not risen as highly as Xi. So Li gets unlucky. He’s from a different political constituency. He’s playing a different game, he has his Communist Youth League [a Communist Party organization and training ground for young leaders] background. 

If Bo Xilai had made it onto the Standing Committee, there’s a credible case that he would have been a counterweight to Xi. The beginning of the Xi Jinping era might have gone a lot differently had Bo not tried to cover up his wife’s act of murder and various other problems. Bo had a similar profile, he’s also a princeling. He also understood that he needed to cultivate the PLA, and had deep ties to some of these PLA officers and backgrounds in the military where his father was arguably a more important revolutionary official than Xi Zhongxun [Xi Jinping’s father]. 

People often say that Xi has remade the military. What does that mean? 

The crucial thing that he’s done is the enormous military reorganization and reforms to the military. There’s a reasonable case to be made that prior General Secretaries probably wanted to do something similar. But Xi was the one who pushed it through. 

The key piece was trying to make the PLA a more modern, competent, fighting force that could fight wars and do joint operations, and so this reorganization has helped to do that. It also had a political piece to it, which was strengthening party control over the PLA, but especially the chairman’s control over the PLA. Xi Jinping is the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and is now exercising stronger control over the PLA than his two immediate predecessors did. 

There’s this whole line of messaging in the PLA press about the ‘chairman responsibility system’. It’s always been the case that the chairman of the Central Military Commission is supposed to be the number one in charge, but it’s a dig at the Hu Jintao era, where the two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission seemed to play a really important role and the PLA seemed to be more independent. Under Xi Jinping, he’s brought the PLA to heel.

The fact that he installs people that are loyal to him, does that conflict with the goal of making it more a professional, less corrupt fighting force? 

The two things are a little bit in conflict. It’s really hard to get to the very top of the PLA. There’s such strong screening that the people who make it to the top are usually pretty competent, but on the margins there is a trade -off between picking the most loyal person and the most competent person. They could be the same, but they’re not always. There are differences in the degree to which leaders have emphasized one over the other. The general rule of thumb has been that when leaders are really worried about potential domestic threats, they tend to emphasize markers of personal loyalty more. They tend to promote officers to whom they’re directly tied more often. In times where the regime is more worried about foreign threats, they tend to promote officers who have markers of professionalism like combat experience and so forth. So there is a little bit of a potential tension there.

Xi focused in the beginning on the loyalty part in the officers that he selected. But he also, on the bureaucratic administrative side, tried to do a lot to ensure that the PLA was increasingly professional and capable. I don’t think it’s as simple as under Xi, the military is loyal but incompetent. But at the beginning he seemed to be selecting officers to whom he was closely tied, while at the same time trying to do his best to use other tools to ensure that the PLA remains a professional fighting force.

How do you interpret all the recent corruption scandals in the PLA and in particular, the rocket force, which controls the country’s missiles?

The recent corruption cases are extraordinary because you would have thought that, by Xi Jinping’s third term, everyone should be running scared. Nobody should be doing this stuff. If the reporting is right, that there was significant corruption, including corruption that’s relatively recent. I do think that’s somewhat surprising. 

One lesson here is that these problems with corruption are really hard to root out. It’s hard to stop people from being greedy and doing things like putting the wrong kind of fuel in rockets so that they can make some extra money, even though it might cost them a lot, maybe even their lives. 

If you want to understand how leaders are weak or strong in an authoritarian system like China’s, ties to the military and the ability to bring the military to heel are really important. 

But it’s also the case that Xi is able to do this. If this stuff had happened under Hu Jintao, it’s less clear to me that a leader with his weakness would have been able to continue to clean shop in the way that Xi has. 

Why is the PLA in particular a place where corruption seems to be so rampant? 

Anytime you have a lot of money sloshing around, there’s a lot of opportunities to do this. Because Xi and the party are so focused on modernizing the military and making it a world-class fighting force, they’re pouring a lot of money into it, and anytime you pour a lot of money into something, then it just increases the opportunities for greedy people to try to take a little bit off the top for themselves. It’s a common problem for large militaries around the world. The Russian military and the U.S. military have similar problems.

In your research on the ties between civilian leaders and the military, are there any other conclusions beyond the conclusion about Xi’s own rise?

Leaders who come into office with strong ties to the military are better able to consolidate political power. If you think about the three leaders in the history of the PRC who came into the top post with really strong ties to the military, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi, all three of them were pretty powerful. Hua Guofeng, who got shouldered aside by Deng thanks in part to the PLA, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were all arguably weak leaders and all leaders definitively came into office with weak ties to the military. If you want to understand how leaders are weak or strong in an authoritarian system like China’s, ties to the military and the ability to bring the military to heel are really important. 

When I refer to leaders being weak or strong, there are a couple of different pieces to this. One is the ability to control the civilian side of the system and ensure that the people who are allies are appointed to key posts in places like the Politburo and the Standing Committee. It’s also the ability to continue to control the military and to appoint people who you’re tied to key posts in the military. And then a third piece is the ability to control elite ideological discourse. Xi has presided over this narrowing of what’s acceptable political discourse among elites in China. Think about the Hu Jintao era where there was this ‘cake debate’ between Bo Xilai and Wang Yang [The cake is a metaphor for China’s economy; Bo championed a model in which the government focused on dividing the cake more equally, while Wang focused on making the cake bigger]. Something like that now is totally inconceivable. You have a debate between provincial level officials about the proper level of redistribution. That doesn’t happen under Xi Jinping because he has such tight control in the system. 

I think another interesting question is how do you get these strong leaders? Do they emerge intentionally or by accident? Why was Xi Jinping selected? Why was Mao selected? There’s a reasonable case to be made that the party strategically empowers strong leaders in a time of crisis or perceived crisis. If you think about Mao in the middle of the Long March, it was a party in crisis that needed to change direction in terms of its military and ideological sort of strategy. The party empowered Mao with deep ties to the Red Army to be its standard bearer then. After the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s death, the party turned to Deng, again a leader with strong ties to the military, in part because there was a crisis caused by the Cultural Revolution and growing exhaustion of the Maoist model and people’s lack of satisfaction with it. 

Xi is an interesting case. I’m not sure the people in 2007 necessarily thought that he would be a strong leader, but by the time he was installed in 2012, there was a sense that, okay, we need to clear the decks for him and make sure there aren’t rival centers of power — because clearly things in elite politics had gone off the rails in the wake of the Bo Xilai incident and just a more general lack of elite discipline. In 2012, the party was saying Xi Jinping is somebody that we want to empower on a bunch of different dimensions because we need to have a strong leader to potentially save the party from itself. And there’s a bit of a trade-off because we know if we empower him, he might use that power against us; but if we don’t empower him, then things could totally fall apart.There’s a real case to be made that this was a strategic decision by elites in the party to hand over some power to Xi Jinping as a way to ensure the party’s continued survival.

But who is making that decision? Who’s the ‘they’ you are talking about? 

They change over time. It’s still opaque and that’s the hard thing about studying elite politics in China, is that we don’t really know at any given time who the key decision makers are. When you think of Xi’s selection, it seems to have been a time when power was pretty broadly distributed among political elites. There was a straw poll in 2007 where Xi Jinping came out ahead in this vote of around 400 top party leaders. These are key members, sitting members of the Central Committee, plus retired leaders, both in the civilian and military side, both on the party and government side. His victory in that straw poll was reportedly one of the reasons why he was selected. 

Of course, he also had the backing, probably, of Jiang Zemin. But who the key decision makers are has narrowed in the Xi Jinping era. Now, it’s Xi, and then some unknown group of other people who he probably has to accommodate. But we don’t really know. We don’t actually know how much someone like Xi Jinping has to compromise with other elites and who are the other elites with whom he has to compromise. Certainly the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee have some power, but it’s really unclear how much he’s first among equals or just first.

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