Andrew S. Erickson

Peter Mattis, “Observations on PLA Studies,” China Policy Institute Blog, University of Nottingham, 30 September 2015.

As China’s military modernization accelerated throughout the 1990s and 2000s, an outpouring of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) publications threatened to drown specialists in data. These sources, many of them available on the internet, have been a boon for analysts, providing information on order of battle, organizational structure, officer biographies, write-ups of training exercises, shifts in military policy, and much more. …

The boom in Chinese military publications has brought a new set of challenges to studying the PLA that preclude taking these writings at face value without further analysis. First, the information carried in these publications, including newspapers, is not always up-to-date or accurate. …

Second, using these sources requires close attention to authorship and affiliation to determine the import and authority of the publication. All militaries that want to conduct highly-coordinated, high-tempo operations need to have a professional conversation about equipment and tactics, and this conversation can only occur in the open source. With the exception of factual news reporting, most opinions of military tactics, techniques, and procedures are just opinions, not statements of PLA intentions.

The best set of guidelines available on how to parse PLA sources arose out of the work of the CNA Corporation (previously, the Center for Naval Analyses). According to their methodology, authoritative books are most likely to have principal editors and editorial committees, rather than individually-named authors, and will have been coordinated across relevant PLA departments. Andrew Erickson’s comprehensive study of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile is a good example of how to do this well. Long-time China watchers inside and outside the U.S. Government Alice Miller and Paul Godwin offered a similar sort of framework for parsing Chinese government and officials’ statements and articles in their study of Chinese signalling ahead of conflict. Without appreciating the problem of authoritativeness, Chinese military publications cannot be used in a straight-forward manner to determine PLA capabilities, doctrine, and intentions.

Third, PLA publications often do not distinguish between actually existing capabilities or doctrine and the military’s desired or planned capabilities or doctrine. …

Fourth, only a handful of analysts express any interest in understanding Chinese deception and political warfare; yet, these remain core elements of the effort to “win without fighting.” …

The sad fact is that academia is largely irrelevant to the study of the PLA, and one senior scholar recently told a major PLA conference that the academy had failed the China-watching community in producing knowledgeable analysts. With the notable exceptions of academics like M. Taylor Fravel (MIT), Thomas Christensen (Princeton), David Shambaugh (George Washington), and Oriana Mastro (Georgetown), few scholars in traditional academic positions contribute to the discussion of Chinese military modernization while doing original research. The rest of academia that discusses the PLA does so on the basis of secondary sources, but their work deals largely with broader Chinese foreign and national security policy—not the PLA specifically. PLA watchers largely reside in think tanks, government contractors, military service colleges, and a few university-affiliated research centres. This is largely true for the countries boasting the largest groups of PLA watchers: United States, Taiwan, Japan, and India. A few independent analysts, mostly retired military and intelligence officials, contribute on a regular basis and help provide peer review on draft papers circulating around the community.

Contrary to one scholar’s characterization of PLA studies, influential analysis of the PLA is largely done on the basis of Chinese sources. Whatever criticisms someone wants to level at the annual conference volumes produced from the major annual PLA conferences—the Army War College-National Bureau of Asian Research conference, the RAND-National Defense University-Chinese Council for Advanced Policy Studies conference, and the U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute conference—failing to make use of Chinese sources is not one of them. …

Here are two other must-read guides by Peter Mattis to the state of the PLA studies field:

Peter Mattis, “No Easy Task: The Right Way to Study China’s Military,” The National Interest, 29 June 2015.

…Finding good guidance on sourcing is difficult, and the ubiquitous citations to retired PLA officers or those with academic posts fill more English-language reports than more authoritative voices from senior commanders and operational innovators. Only a handful of studies, like Andrew Erickson’s comprehensive analysis of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missileand Paul Godwin and Alice Miller’s analysis of Chinese signaling, explicitly explain how they think Chinese sources should be evaluated. Moreover, the Chinese publication landscape is filled with deliberately distortive voices that serve political purposes, such as motivating the population or broadcasting messages for deterrence, rather than to inform domestic or foreign audiences. To find this information, however, one would almost have to know already what he or she was looking for.

My recent effort, Analyzing the Chinese Military, attempts to pull together the various strands of the PLA-related analysis in terms of production, publications, and people. The goal is explaining how newcomers can overcome some of the challenges to developing expertise on the PLA, its evolution, and the implications. Providing a catalog of what has been done and how analysts probably should approach the subject hopefully answers some of the questions of aspiring analysts before they are asked—including how to start building a Chinese-language collection. …

Peter Mattis, “So You Want to Be a PLA Expert?” War on the Rocks, 2 June 2015.

One of the challenges of developing a good sense of how the PLA functions is that there are so few places to go for regularly appearing analysis that draws on Chinese sources. Instead of being able to go to a few reliable places, anyone anxious to learn about the PLA has to search and search — or avail themselves of this new shortcut. Even then, it is too easy to miss useful pieces (like this one) that help clarify what the Chinese military means by concepts such as “people’s war” and “active defense.” Below are a few steps and sources from which any would-be analyst should draw their inspiration and guidance before analyzing the Chinese military.

Remember Your ABCs: If for some reason you are having difficulty finding a starting point, then begin with your ABCs: Kenneth Allen, Dennis Blasko, and Bernard “Bud” Cole. These three former military officers offer some of the best analysis available on the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), the PLA Ground Forces, and the PLA Navy (PLAN), respectively. In addition to bringing their military expertise to bear on the challenges of evaluating a foreign military, all three have voluminous publication records. This is not to say that talent is in short supply coming up; one need look no further than the prolific Andrew Erickson on the PLAN, Michael Chase on the Second Artillery (China’s conventional and strategic rocket forces), Daniel Hartnett on military policy, and Timothy Heath on party-army relations among many others. However, chances are if a journal article or book does not make at least a nod to the ABCs of PLA studies, then it should be viewed with suspicion.

Fringes of the U.S. Government, Not Traditional Scholarship: Most analysis of the PLA is not done in traditional academic or think tank settings. Instead, many of the experts sit in federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), defense companies, and the military service colleges as well as the niche think tanks like the Project 2049 Institute. RAND has rebuilt its China capabilities and has a robust and talented staff focused on China. The CNA Corporation possesses a large staff of China security experts, and, while much of their work remains behind closed doors, some of it is freely available. The U.S. Naval War College also has built up remarkable and prolific talent in its China Maritime Studies Institute, which publishes a monograph series. Look to the fringes of the U.S. government and the researchers actively engaged with it for most of the best work. …

Here are my must read journal articles, reports, or book chapters on the PLA:

1. Adam P. Liff and Andrew S. Erickson, “Demystifying China’s Defence Spending: Less Mysterious in the Aggregate,” The China Quarterly, No. 216 (December 2013), 805–830.
2. David Finkelstein, “China’s National Military Strategy: An Overview of the ‘Military Strategic Guidelines’,” in Roy Kamphausen and Andrew Scobell, eds., Right Sizing the People’s Liberation Army: Exploring the Contours of China’s Military (Carlisle, PA: Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2007), 69–140.
3. Dean Cheng, “Chinese Lessons from the Gulf Wars,” in Andrew Scobell, David Lai, and Roy Kamphausen, eds., Chinese Lessons from Other Peoples’ Wars (Carlisle, PA: Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2011).
4. Paul H.B. Godwin and Alice L. Miller, China’s Forbearance Has Limits: Chinese Threat and Retaliation Signaling and Its Implications for a Sino-American Military Confrontation,China Strategic Perspectives No. 6 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies, 2013).
5. Michael S. Chase, Jeffrey Engstrom, Tai Ming Cheung, Kristen Gunness, Scott Warren Harold, Susan Puska, and Samuel Berkowitz, China’s Incomplete Military Transformation: Assessing the Weaknesses of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) (Washington, DC: RAND and U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission, 2015). …

Peter Mattis is a Fellow in the China Program at The Jamestown Foundation and a visiting scholar at National Cheng-chi University’s Institute of International Relations in Taipei. He also is the author of Analyzing the Chinese Military: A Review Essay and Resource Guide on the People’s Liberation Army.