China Announces Cut In the Size of Its Military by 300,000

EDWARD WONG, JANE PERLEZ and CHRIS BUCKLEY

September 3, 2015

China Announces Cuts of 300,000 Troops at Military Parade Showing Its Might

BEIJING — President Xi Jinping of China announced on Thursday that he would reduce the country’s military personnel by 300,000, using a parade marking 70 years since the end of World War II to present the People’s Liberation Army as a force for peace and regional stability.

The Chinese military has more than two million members, and Mr. Xi has embarked on an accelerated modernization of the armed forces, which would shift spending from the traditional land forces to more advanced sea and air forces, which require fewer but better trained personnel.

Speaking on a platform overlooking Tiananmen Square, he described the cut as a gesture of peace — at a time when China’s neighbors have grown increasingly worried about its territorial claims and military strength.

“I announce that China will reduce military personnel numbers by 300,000,” he said, after declaring that the military was “loyally committed to its sacred duty of defending the security of the motherland and the peaceful life of the people, and loyally committed to the sacred duty of safeguarding world peace.”

The cut would shrink military forces to two million personnel, the China News Service, a state-run agency, said.

In announcing the cuts, the largest in nearly two decades, Mr. Xi signaled his determination to press forward with his agenda of military restructuring despite China’s economic slowdown. The government will be under pressure to find jobs for the demobilized soldiers, many with limited skills.

The parade, which began immediately after Mr. Xi spoke, was called a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, but appeared to be an attempt by the Communist Party to showcase the nation’s rising military might to a global audience.

Many outside observers saw it as a display of the assertive posture China has taken in the region as territorial disputes have flared, prompting the United States to underline its military dominance of Asian seas.

Rory Medcalf, the head of the National Security College at the Australian National University in Canberra, said the reductions were unlikely to ease regional worries about China’s growing military strength, because they were part of the modernization program to shift the People’s Liberation Army’s resources from traditional land forces.

”It would seem to be a pleasant surprise, because he’s clearly dressing it up as a signal of peace and good will,” Professor Medcalf said by telephone. “But China probably doesn’t need an army as large as it has.”

“Personnel are a massive cost in a military budget, and there’s been a lot of growth in military wages in China in recent years, so there are sensible capability reasons to cut personnel numbers without cutting effectiveness,” Professor Medcalf said. “This could also free up part of the budget for rebalancing the P.L.A. towards more advanced capabilities.”

The reduction announced by Mr. Xi is similar in size to cuts made under his predecessor, President Jiang Zemin, who in the early 2000s trimmed troop numbers by 200,000. M. Taylor Fravel, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the Chinese military, said the move showed that Mr. Xi’s plans for reorganizing the military were continuing, despite the lack of publicly disclosed details since those plans were declared in 2013.

”Xi would not announce the size of the reduction publicly if a plan for how to achieve the reduction had not already been formulated, so the announcement indicates that reforms are definitely underway,” Mr. Fravel said. “Ground forces will likely face the brunt of the reduction, but in the past reductions have been used to streamline layers of command and bureaucracy within the P.L.A.”

The new cuts would be the largest since 1997, when a reduction of 500,000 military personnel was announced.

Mr. Xi started his rise through the Communist Party as an aide to the minister of defense for several years starting in 1979, when China was smarting from a brief but disastrous war with Vietnam. Since he became head of the Communist Party in November 2012, Mr. Xi has closely associated himself with the military, while also pursuing a campaign against corruption that has reached into the topmost ranks of the P.L.A. command.

”Today, peace and development have become the prevailing trend, but the world is far from tranquil,” Mr. Xi said in his speech on Thursday. “War is the sword of Damocles that still hangs over mankind. We must learn the lessons of history and dedicate ourselves to peace.”

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the People’s Liberation Army emerged from the Communist revolution as both a bulwark against external threats and a domestic guardian of the party’s power. Its numbers have always been heavily weighted toward the land armies arrayed across China. But over recent decades, China’s leaders have tried to shift more resources to air and naval forces intended to project influence abroad and assert the country’s claims to disputed islands and waters.

China has about 2.3 million men and women in its military, according to most recent estimates, and the bulk of them are infantry soldiers, often recruited from the countryside to serve for a few years before they re-enter the civilian work force.

Bonnie S. Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the reduction in troops was part of an effort by Mr. Xi to make the military more efficient and professional. “The Chinese have come farther than any other military in the last decade,” she said. “But nobody recognizes the deficiencies of the P.L.A. more than China.”

The Chinese have made significant strides in building a world-class army over the past decade, Ms. Glaser said. But serious challenges remain, including upgrading military weapons and training personnel. “Nobody knows how China’s military is going to stack up against what the U.S. has,” she said. “But in important ways they are certainly closing the gaps.”

Mr. Xi gave no details about how his administration intends to carry out the cuts, and they may be achieved by natural attrition or reduced recruitment, rather than direct reductions. But at a time when China’s economic growth has slowed, the reduced military intake could add pressure on the government. In the past, decommissioned officers and former soldiers unhappy with their job prospects and welfare have become a persistent source of protests outside government offices.

The Chinese government does not issue regular statistics on its military forces. But experts estimate that the army has about 1.6 million personnel, the navy 240,000, and the air force 400,000.

The parade on Thursday began at Tiananmen Square beneath blue skies that followed days of rain and weeks of forced closings of factories across northern China to keep the capital’s infamous smog at bay. (Sarcastic Chinese commentators have called it “anti-fascist blue.”) Before some 12,000 Chinese troops marched past, accompanied by tanks and missiles on the ground and fighter jets overhead, Mr. Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, made a show of greeting foreign officials that included 30 national leaders.

Scheduled for the day after the 70th anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender, the parade was devised to stress Japan’s war guilt and glorify the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the conflict. Many Western nations, now allied with Japan, find the effort to shame Tokyo offensive, and are also uncomfortable with the party’s assertion that the Communists defeated the occupying Japanese forces. Historians credit the Nationalists, their opponents in the civil war that ended in 1949, with most of the fighting.

The turnout of foreign leaders was far more modest than the party wanted, partly because many nations were wary of being seen to support a growing Chinese military. In recent years, moves by China on its Himalayan border and in disputed regional waters — including building artificial islands in part for military use — have set neighboring countries on edge.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia topped the list of foreign attendees, and audience members in the stands clapped loudly when he was shown on TV in the square. The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges, was the most prominent African leader in the stands. Mr. Xi welcomed him here on Tuesday as an “old friend of the Chinese people.”

Though Beijing pressured Western European countries to send high-level officials, few promised to do so. The United States sent its ambassador to China, Max Baucus.

For military enthusiasts in China and many observers overseas, the display of armaments was the most anticipated part of the parade. The People’s Liberation Army, whose budget, according to official figures, grew 10 percent this year, sees the parade as a strategic site for “displaying a capable military and demonstrating the will to use it,” said Dennis J. Blasko, a former United States Army attaché in Beijing and an author of books on the Chinese Army.

For Mr. Xi, just as important as the display of hardware is the optics of aligning the military’s might with his personal command. A large part of his reputation as a forceful leader rests on the fact that he consolidated power quickly after taking office in 2012, particularly his control of the military. Mr. Xi immediately took over the role of chairman of the Central Military Commission, which supervises the military, from his predecessor, Hu Jintao, then moved swiftly to purge top generals in a broad anticorruption drive.

Mr. Xi has cast himself as a savior of the military, saying that corruption must be eradicated for the army to be battle-ready, and he has also strengthened his base by promoting officers in the general staff.

“Xi badly wants to build up an image of being the most authoritative military commander since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian whose father was a minister under early Communist rule. “I believe the parade is mostly for domestic politics since he wants to further assert power in the army.”