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China Party Control
In addition to making personnel changes, Deng revitalized party
control over the PLA and diffused the military's political power by
designating provincial-level, municipal, district, and county party
committee secretaries to serve concurrently as the first political
commissars of their equivalent-level units in the regional PLA. The
percentage of PLA personnel permitted to join the party was limited
by restricting party membership to military academy graduates.
Political and ideological training stressed the military rather
than the social, ideological, or economic role of the PLA. Special
effort was made to discredit the PLA's role in the Cultural
Revolution; the PLA's support for the left was described as
incorrect because it caused factionalism within the military. While
emphasizing the necessity and appropriateness of reforms to
modernize the military, political education also sought to
guarantee military support for Deng's reform agenda. Beginning in
1983 a rectification campaign (part of the party-wide rectification
campaign aimed primarily at leftists) reinforced this kind of
political and ideological training
(see The First Wave of Reform, 1979-84
, ch. 11).
Beginning in the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping succeeded in
decreasing military participation in national-level political
bodies. Military representation on the Political Bureau fell from
52 percent in 1978 to 30 percent in 1982, and military membership
in the party Central Committee declined from 30 percent in 1978 to
22 percent in 1982. Most professional military officers shared
common views with the Deng leadership over military modernization
and the fundamental direction of national policy, and they
willingly limited their concerns to military matters. Nonetheless,
some elements in the PLA continued to voice their opinions on
nondefense matters and criticized the Deng reform program. Dissent
centered on prestigious military leaders, notably Ye Jianying, who
feared that ideological de-Maoification, cultural liberalization,
and certain agricultural and industrial reforms deviated from
Marxist values and ideals. The Deng leadership contained these
criticisms with the help of the personnel changes, political
education, and the rectification campaign just mentioned. In this
way it was able to keep military dissent within bounds that did not
adversely affect civil-military relations.
Data as of July 1987
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