Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms Edited by Phillip C. Saunders, Arthur S. Ding, Andrew Scobell, Andrew N.D. Yang, and Joel Wuthnow Washington, DC: National Defense University, 2019 xi + 768 pp. $22.99 ISBN 978-1-797-05190-1

Starting in late 2015 and continuing into 2016, Xi Jinping announced the most sweeping set of organizational changes in the history of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Part of this major reorganization involved replacing the PLA’s seven military regions with five theatre commands. Another key component abolished the PLA’s four general departments (the General Staff Department, General Political Department, General Logistics Department and General Armaments Department) and transferred many of their functions to offices under the Central Military Commission (CMC). Other major changes included upgrading the strategic missile force to the level of a service and renaming it PLA Rocket Force, and creating two new organizations – the PLA Strategic Support Force (SSF), established to take charge of the PLA’s space, cyber and electronic warfare capabilities, and the PLA Joint Logistics Support Force. The reforms also included a 300,000-person reduction in the size of the PLA, an overhaul of China’s professional military education (PME) system, and the elimination of a number of group armies and conversion of army divisions and some PLA Air Force (PLAAF) divisions to brigades. Subsequently, China placed the People’s Armed Police (PAP) under the military command structure and subordinated the Coast Guard to the PAP. This sweeping reorganization of the PLA is aimed at helping to achieve the long-term vision of military transformation that Xi set forth at the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, when he called on the PLA to basically complete its modernization by 2035 and to transform itself into a world-class force by the middle of the century. The definitive account of these reforms is Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms, a mammoth edited volume consisting largely of updated versions of papers originally presented at two conferences co-hosted by Taiwan’s Council of Advanced Policy Studies (CAPS), National Defense University (NDU), and the RAND Corporation in 2016 and 2017. Easily the most comprehensive and detailed assessment of the reforms available to date, Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA not only catalogues the numerous changes to the organizational structure of the PLA, but also explores the strategic context for and the key drivers of the reforms, as well as the PLA’s attempts to forge a more joint force, overhaul the services, centralize the authority of Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the PLA, and reshape the military’s relationship with society. In doing so, the authors of the various chapters draw upon a wide range of primary sources, most notably Chinese-language books, journal articles and official media reports. These sources provide new insights into a number of topics central to the PLA reforms, including the role of organizational interests, restructuring of the services, civil–military integration and the military’s relations with localities. The introduction and conclusion 262