Changing Party–Army Relations in China, 1979-1984

Throughout contemporary China's history, the relationship between the Communist Party and its armed forces has never conformed completely to Mao's axiom, "the Party commands the gun and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party." At best the relationship has been ambiguous, with senior leaders holding posts concurrently in both organizations, creating what some analysts call a symbiotic relationship.' The Party has often had to depend on the military for both generating and legitimizing the Party's ideology, at times appearing vulnerable to political leverage by the military, and on occasion the Party and Army have appeared to be rivals. Thus, Party-Army interaction has not been static. For the Party this has meant a contradiction between its desire to limit the political roles of the military and the necessity of relying on the military's organizational structure, social prestige, and ideological heritage to implement policies. This dilemma has been especially acute for China's leaders since the fall of the so-called Gang of Four in late 1976. On the one hand, key leaders of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) played a crucial role in sanctioning the overthrow of the Gang and in stabilizing post-Mao politics. Thus the PLA's diverse opinions on policy issues and on distribution of political power could not be ignored by post-Mao leaders. In the power struggle between Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s, each side made bids to secure PLA support by stressing policies that appealed to different groups in the military. Hua focused