China's National Military Strategy: An Overview of the "Military Strategic Guidelines"

S ince the mid-1990s the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), has been engaged in a seminal period of focused and sustained efforts to modernize. For more than a decade the armed forces of China have been undergoing transformative adjustments of such a profound nature relative to the past that one group of mainland military authors considers this ongoing period of reform to constitute the PLA’s “third modernization.” What is the PLA trying to achieve and, more importantly, why? What calculations, assumptions, and assessments are driving Beijing to enact changes in its military forces? What objectives does the leadership of the PLA seek to achieve? These are not merely academic questions. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is also asking these fundamental questions, and the answers the DoD comes up with will have an impact on U.S. military modernization plans and programs. The 2006 DoD report to Congress stated: “China’s leaders have yet to adequately explain the purposes or desired endstates of their military expansion...this lack of transparency prompts others to ask, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did in June 2005: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?” The 2007 report continues to lament that Chinese leaders have not provided a rationale for military modernization. This essay seeks to answer some of the fundamental questions being asked about Chinese military modernization.