How Xi commands the guns | Live with Lizzi Lee

In this episode of Live with Lizzi Lee:

Dan Mattingly, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, draws from a new dataset of over 12,000 appointments to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China to describe how Party leaders promote loyal officers to respond to domestic threats, while more experienced officers are chosen to counter foreign threats.

Below is a transcript of the video:

Lizzi Lee: Joining me today is Professor Dan Mattingly, an assistant professor of political science at Yale. Professor Mattingly, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dan Mattingly: Thank you so much for having me.

Lizzi: So, Professor Mattingly, in your new paper, you lay out this framework explaining how authoritarian leaders address the goals of defending against foreign threats and domestic challenges. I wonder if you can elaborate a little more on that framework.

Dan: Absolutely. So, this is a paper that I wrote about the role that the People’s Liberation Army plays in elite politics in China. And the basic idea is that in any authoritarian regime, the military is super important.

You need the military for a couple of different reasons. You need the military first to protect against domestic threats, including unrest. And you also, of course, need the military to protect against foreign threats.

And so the question that I’m taking up in this paper is: How do the leaders of authoritarian regimes shape their military to meet both domestic threats and foreign threats?

And so the paper basically proposes first, that leaders want generals in an army like the PLA that are loyal to the regime. They want people who are loyal to the Chinese Communist Party in the case of the PLA. And they also want generals who are loyal to the individual leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

So under Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, of course, they want generals who are personally loyal to Xi Jinping.

At the same time, as the PLA tries to professionalize and become a world-class army, the PLA also needs to select officers who are professional and competent and can help the PLA reach this larger goal of becoming a world-class, modern army.

So essentially, the leaders of authoritarian regimes have to deal with a tradeoff between promoting generals who are the most loyal and promoting generals who are the most professional, maybe the most competent at war or fighting.

And so, what I propose in the paper is that… Obviously, the regime wants people who are both these things, who are loyal and professional. But in times of severe domestic threat, you can think around, for example, in China, right after the Bó Xīlái 薄熙来 incident, when Xi Jinping became general secretary and the chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the regime really wanted to prioritize loyalty and so promoted a lot of generals that had ties to Xi Jinping.

On the other hand, in times of significant foreign threat, the regime has also emphasized professionalism, especially combat experience a little more.

So that is a general flavor of the paper: How does the CCP manage the PLA both as a tool for meeting the goals of the Chinese Communist Party on the international stage, and also ensuring that the Chinese Communist Party maintains a strong grip on power in China itself?

Lizzi: Fascinating. I wanted to turn to data and measurement a little bit.

I wonder how you measure loyalty and competence in your data and how you define periods of domestic threats and periods of foreign threats in the framework you just laid out.

Dan: Absolutely. This is a case where measurement is a challenge. But there are some interesting features of the Chinese Communist Party that make it possible to unpack some of these things.

So first, when it comes to measuring loyalty, mostly what I’m looking at are overlapping career ties. So, let’s take Xi Jinping as an example — obviously a very important example. So, for Xi Jinping, he was a mayor. He was a governor and then a Party secretary, head of first Fujian and then Zhejiang. And those positions that he had in local government also meant that he was serving in these local military committees, these district-level and regional-level military committees. He’s serving alongside some of these generals.

And what we’ve seen is that the generals that he’s having served alongside, he’s systematically promoted at higher rates than generals from other regions. And so that’s become quite an important tie — these past career experiences.

I think the way that they’re important is… First, they help someone like Xi Jinping get to know somebody and maybe build a little bond of trust. Xi Jinping was quite systematic when he was a local leader in cultivating the PLA and showing that he essentially appreciated the PLA by using some of the scarce resources that he had as a city and then provincial leader to help the local PLA garrisons.

So that’s how I measure loyalty, or basically past career ties, which do seem to be quite important in the Chinese system.

And if you think about past leaders too, Jiāng Zémín 江泽民 and Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛, who also served as local leaders, and they also potentially had these bonds. Someone like Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, who fought in the revolution, was a revolutionary hero.

And so, some of the ties that he had to the second field army were quite important.

Turning to professionalism. The main thing that I’m looking at is professionalism… Really two things and I focus on one of them.

So, the first is education. Starting with Deng Xiaoping, as the PLA tried to become a more professionalized modern fighting force, they emphasized more and more education, having an educated officer corp. So, one way to measure this is just to collect data on the top officers and whether they went to college. That’s a simple measure. You know, basically almost all the elite officer corps went to college.

But another thing that the Party seems to prize is combat experience. And so going through and reading different biographies provided — published biographies by the PLA — and news reports, I was able to identify officers who had prior combat experience.

For the current generation, it’s mostly the combat experience in the conflict with Vietnam that started in 1979 and continued then at a lower level through the ‘80s. There are two current members of the CMC who have combat experience of Vietnam,

This question of how to measure domestic and foreign threats is admittedly trickier.

In the paper, I look at different ways of measuring different periods as periods of foreign threats or domestic threats.

The main way that I measure is… For example, the period after 1989 and around 1989, I code it as one period of domestic threats after the 1989 student-led protests and crackdown.

And looking at the period around 2012, when there is an evident leadership split around the Bo Xilai incidents, I code it as another period of domestic threat.

And then so the paper mostly covers the era from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. I also look at the rise of Deng Xiaoping as potentially another… from 1978 to the early eighties, as another potential period of domestic threat, as an alternative way of looking at it.

Major periods of foreign threats, I think, may be the trickiest or one of the trickier parts of the paper. Again, the paper looks at multiple different ways of measuring it. But the main way that I present is thinking about the period after the second Taiwan Straits crisis, starting really with the U.S. accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, as a period of when there was a real shift in the thinking of the Chinese leadership starting in this period.

There are several Western scholars at least who argue that this is a period in which leaders, both in the PLA and in the Party, started to think about the threat of the United States in a different way starting in the late nineties.

So, in the main paper, that’s how it codes foreign threats. Admittedly there are different ways to think about this. And in the paper, I tried to look at… In the appendix of the paper… different ways of coding these.

Lizzi: So, we know the baseline model, and we know the robustness checks. What’s the takeaway of the paper? Do military promotions during Xi Jinping’s decade of rule follow the previous leaders or follow the theoretical patterns you laid out in the paper?

Dan: They do, and they do it in an interesting way. Well, Xi Jinping has been remarkably successful at getting his generals in office — people that he served alongside, especially in Fujian and Zhejiang into office.

And this is a period where Xi Jinping has consolidated control over the PLA to a level really, I think not seen since Máo [Zédōng 毛泽东]. I think Deng is maybe comparable. But by some measures, I think Xi Jinping has exceeded Deng Xiaoping in the degree to which he’s been able to consolidate control over the PLA.

Looking at the current leadership of the CMC is an instructive example. We’ve seen two current vice chairs at the top leaders of the military since Xi Jinping is the chairman of the Central Military Commission. The two vice chairs of the CMC are people whom Xi Jinping has direct connections to.

So, Zhāng Yòuxiá 张又侠 is a general whose family has deep ties to Xi Jinping’s family and has probably known Xi Jinping since they were children. Somebody Xi has deep ties to. He’s kind of a unique figure. He also has experience from combat experience in Vietnam.

The number two ranked CMC chairman, Hé Wèidōng 何卫东, is also somebody whom Xi Jinping served alongside in Zhejiang. So, another person that he has direct experience with.

And there’s a third member of this small six-member military committee of CMC, who is somebody that Xi Jinping served alongside.

And if you look at the rest of the officer corps, this is a pattern that holds outside of the very elite echelon of the six military officers in the CMC, Xi Jinping has really consolidated control over the PLA. Looking outside the paper, I think that’s one way to think about how Xi Jinping has been able to consolidate civilian power: Partly because he has control over the guns.