Beyond symbiosis: The changing civil–military relationship after Mao

Hu Jingtao’s authority construction since the Sixteenth Congress has testified many novel developments in the country’s social-political transformation. A review of his first term in office can shed new light on our understanding of China’s elite politics in general and its evolving civil-military relations in particular. Concretely, Hu is the first Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader whose power consolidation is not through first controlling the gun; he is the first post-Deng leader whose control of the gun is based on first establishing a high level of popularity in the Party and society; and he is also the first leader who commands the military not through first creating a personnel network within the Party and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This chapter argues that these novelties are Hu’s responses to the challenge of Chinese symbiotic civil-military relations in transition. Generally speaking this challenge is reflected by the fact that the old method of party control over the gun, the way of Mao and Deng, is no longer viable. Yet the new method of control in the form of erecting institutionalized safeguards is still in the making. If not handled properly, a transitional vacuum may emerge with military strongmen or ambitious politicians inclined to manipulate the civil-military relations to their advantage. This has happened many times in Chinese history. In a way Hu’s new method of commanding the gun continues Jiang Zemin’s effort to turn the PLA into a professional and non-interventionist force.1 It keeps abreast with the Party’s deepening institutionalization of power. Although none of these new developments has reached the point of no return, they may have heralded a broad change in China’s political and social system with unpredictable but significant consequences.