 Thank you for your patience in the course of this day. I hope you all enjoyed lunch and enjoyed getting to know one another. We have had to adjust in real time to the changes of the schedule. It reminds me of how it is in general to study the Chinese military. I am an assistant professor at Georgetown University. I teach in the School of Foreign Service. When I teach a course on the Chinese military, and when I first started the course, it took a lot of time to prepare all 14 lectures. And my senior colleagues at Georgetown told me not to worry because it takes all this time the first time, but then you can teach that material over and over again. And then the Chinese military decided to completely reorganize everything that I was teaching in January. So it's always good to be adaptable, and I hope that we have successfully done so today. And luckily, I guess the upside for us is it leaves us with extra time for our last panel, which is on the changing role of the PLA. We have three very distinguished speakers to talk to you today about this issue. First, we have Dr. Phil Saunders, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. He previously worked at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where he was the director of East Asian Non-Proliferation Program. And he also served as an officer in the US Air Force. I'm going to have Phil speak first, and he's going to look specifically at the role of the PLA in policy and decision making, as well as she's relationship with the military and how potentially the anti-corruption campaign is impacting the PLA. Next, I have Kristin Guinness, who is the chief executive officer of Vantage Point Asia, a consultancy that provides expertise on Chinese foreign policy and security issues. She also holds the position of an adjunct senior international policy analyst at Rand Corporation, and she formally served as the director of the Navy Asia Pacific Advisory Group at the Pentagon. And Kristin is going to be addressing domestic and societal factors and how they're impacting the quality and the nature of the Chinese military, as well as public perceptions of the PLA and their impact on Chinese external behavior. Lastly, I have Jackie Diehl, who is the president and CEO of the Long-Term Strategy Group, a Washington DC defense firm that provides research analysis on trends and asymmetries relevant to the emerging security environment. Jackie is going to be discussing primarily the PLA's viewpoints and its international role and what that international role should be. Also, whether there's elements in the PLA that want potentially to take China in a different direction to be a more active player in influencing peace and security dynamics in other countries overseas and potentially outside the region. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Phil to start us off with this panel. Thank you. Fantastic. And it's delightful to be here at USIP for an event co-sponsored by Georgetown. I'm going to draw on an edited book on PLA influence on China's national security policymaking that Andrew Scobell and I edited. And I'm going to talk three pieces. I'm going to talk a little bit about how to think about the issue of PLA influence on policymaking. What type of issues do they have influence on? And what are the tools that they use? I'll present some overall findings. And then I'll speak to that last issue of Xi Jinping's relationship with the PLA and the anti-corruption campaign. And also what we've learned in the course of PLA reforms. In thinking about this issue, I think it's helpful to think two ways. One is an issue-centric approach. What type of policy issue are we talking about? Different issues are handled in different parts of the Chinese system. And the nature of the issue has a lot to do with whether the PLA is an active participant in decision-making, an advisor, or merely an onlooker, and taking the results of the process. And then the other approach is to think about it in terms of a policy process from the broad assessment of the international security environment to defining what the problem is, a decision process, and then implementation. And the PLA has different tools for each of those phases. So we'll also talk about that. So the issue-centric approach, I think the big finding is that it used to be you had PLA officers who had political standing of their own, who had been close friends with top political leaders, and could have an opinion on any kind of policy issue. And with the professionalization of the PLA, what I think we've seen is a shift. So the PLA plays a lot less of a role on purely political issues. They play a lot more of a role on purely military issues. And there's a spectrum of issues in the middle that have mixed kind of civil military issues where the PLA has equities, it has opinions. But it's one of many actors on trying to influence Chinese policy. And so that's a pretty big, important finding. What kind of an issue is it? Is it purely military? Is it something with mixed dimensions? Or is it a political issue? And just to give examples, political issues are things like selecting the membership of the Politburo Standing Committee, what kind of ideological themes are going to be the focus of party propaganda. Used to be the military played a role in those things. Now, those get decided elsewhere, and the military is an implementer of them. Purely military things, military doctrine, military training, military operations, those are issues where, as part of the scientific approach, there's a body of knowledge that you have to master. And the military has mastered it. Others have not mastered it. So they have a lot of standing on those issues. And especially as you have civilian leaders who don't have that military experience that they once did, the PLA is able to use its control over information and its expertise to have a lot more influence on those things. All right, let me talk a little bit about the phases. And so we can think about this as a pre-decision phase, where you're really kind of defining what's the world look like, what is the policy problem. And part of that is assessing the international security environment, which is done in white papers. It's done in party work reports. And the PLA is an active participant in that process. This matters a lot more in China than in elsewhere, because there's a tendency to export a problem into the international environment. And the international security environment is competitive, and therefore China reluctantly needs to do these types of things. So if you can define the environment the way you want it, your policy prescriptions make a lot more sense. So that's one role that the PLA plays. More specifically, on intelligence collection and analysis, there's a big military intelligence system doing both collection and analysis. They often embed policy recommendations in that analytic report. And so if you can shape the flow of intelligence in a way that makes sense, that's a means of influencing policy. So a good example is the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. AMS got there first with the saying that it was deliberate, and the US did it on purpose. And getting there first with that kind of an assessment is a means of shaping what the leadership knows about a policy issue and what recommendations make sense. It's also worth thinking about building capabilities that expand the options available to Chinese leaders. And here the PLA has built a much more modern force with a lot more weapon systems than they had. If you think back to 95, 96, the Taiwan Strait crisis, the PLA was really limited in what it could do. Now there's a much broader range of coercive options available to Chinese leaders. That gives the PLA more of an influence. And then finally, framing the policy problem. How do you define what the problem is? That often makes sense, shapes what kind of recommendations make sense. So an example is Japan's nationalization of the Diaoyu Senkaku Islands. When you define that as the change in status quo to which China must respond, you bias the system toward having some kind of response. You can also think about a decision phase and a number of ways that the PLA can influence the decision-making. One is just to formulate alternative policy options. So for example, in the 1988 dispute with Vietnam over the Paracel Islands, where Vietnam occupied some of the islands, the PLA basically got together, consulted amongst itself, came up with a single point of option, a single option for the response, and briefed Prime Minister Jiaxiang and basically said, take it or leave it. That's the option. We all think this is the right thing to do. Are you going to man up and do something, or are you going to let Vietnam get away with it? So formulating the options can be a means of influencing policy. I think increasingly we've seen the PLA trying to shape public opinion through appearances in media, through writings, through the rise of a commentariat class, and so both active duty officers in their capacity as spokesmen or policy makers, and a retired group of military officers all actively trying to shape Chinese public opinion, and thus indirectly affect the environment in which policy is made. Something that's, I think, relatively new is the PLA role in building coalitions. So I mentioned there's a range of issues that have both civilian and military equities. The PLA has interest. It has equities, but it's not a dominant decision maker. If you want influence, you have to find allies. So I think we've seen more of an effort in the military to find allies. You can see examples of that, for example, on national technology development. PLA has technologies that are very important to the military. Well, you go out and you build coalitions with universities that are capable of doing that research, and you try to get support for it. I think you can also look at the efforts to raise consciousness of China as a maritime nation. PLA Navy officers have been intimately involved in that effort. And then finally, advocating very particular policy options within debates. So a good example of this is the Air Defense Identification Zone that China established in 2013. The Air Force Command College had been pushing that proposal since at least 2008. It came up in a different context where the leadership was looking to pressure Japan, and they were able to get approval to go ahead with it. And then the final phase is to think about implementation. If it is a military policy, the PLA often has a role in carrying that out. And how it carries that out can make a big difference. So for example, the role of naval aviation in intercepting US reconnaissance flights, if they do it professionally, maybe it's no big deal. If you are a cowboy and you fly and you hit a US plane, that can be a very big deal. So the implementation role. And then finally, they report back through military channels to the leadership about what they're doing. Sometimes those reports are accurate. Sometimes they're not accurate. And that can be a source of policy influence as well. So you have to think about the whole stages of the process to really make sense of it all. Really what we want to know though is how much influence on what types of issues. And so let me give some of the big findings from our research on this. And the most important is that the top civilian leaders do seem to still call the shots on political, economic, strategic, and foreign policy issues. If they tell the military to do something, the military does it. If they tell them not to do it, the military doesn't do it. So that's an important finding. Another is that military efforts to shape policy are more legitimate and probably more effective when they're cast in terms of advancing objectives that the civilian leaders have set, and specifically protecting China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. So the leadership said, this is something we need to do. Here is how we ought to do it. Here's the military role in doing that. And there again, I think the monopoly on information about the military capabilities and the limited civilian expertise gives the PLA something of a privileged role when it really is a military issue. I think another key finding is the role of the Central Military Commission as the key channel for PLA influence on military issues. They get to speak directly to the general secretary. And that's a very important connection for the military. They have other formal roles in leading small groups, which are also important. But the CMC seems to be the big one. Another kind of elaboration on the finding is that there's less military representation at the top. They don't have anybody on the Politburo Standing Committee. And that means they don't get a voice in some of those top political decisions. Another point is that the fact that modern military isn't just an army, that you need all kinds of things. You need resources. You need technology. You need things from the civilian sector. And that means the PLA has to be involved in a more diverse set of issues. So they're more active on those mixed issues where they have equities. And I think that is a shift from in the past. One of our analytic challenges is it's hard sometimes to tell if the military and civilian preferences differ. I mean, Xi Jinping seems to favor a hard line on maritime territorial issues. So does the PLA. How can you disentangle whether it's military advice that's influencing the policy or it's the civilian preference that really is the main thing? And that's a challenge for us analytically. I do want to point out these, even when there are differences in preferences and priorities, civilian leaders can and do rebuke military critics and impose discipline to close down debates. And so a good example of that was in 2009, Major General Luo Yan talked about Taiwan's policy as peaceful separation. That was not the party's message. He was told to sit down and shut up and he sat down and shut up. Can also say that about some people who have advocated overseas bases. They were told to be quiet about all of that and they promptly came out the next day and said I was misunderstood in my remarks. Again, the policy implementation role. One of the things that we find is, there still is limited information sharing and a lack of coordination within the foreign policy and national security policy making system. So that is a challenge to get all the parts working together to integrate all the tools of national power. And it's partly because the PLA doesn't like to play nice. If they share information about what's going on and about what their capabilities are, that gives other actors a greater chance to block what it is they want. So if the system doesn't seem coordinated and doesn't share information perfectly, sometimes that's because that's how the PLA likes it. And then a last finding is that some have really suggested that the relationship between the civilians and military is a bargaining one where the party provides concrete benefits like pay increases and defense budgets in order to ensure PLA loyalty. And I have to say, don't find much evidence of that. The budgets don't seem to be correlated with how well the party feels vis-a-vis the PLA. So I don't think that bargaining view is really the correct way to look at it. Let me come to the last point that I was asked to speak to which is Xi Jinping's relationship with the military and particularly the anti-corruption campaign. I think in the context of the military reforms, one of the things that surprised me a little bit is the sense that the PLA was not under as much civilian control as the party wanted. We've seen a lot of information come out that maybe Hu Jintao didn't really have full control in his capacity as the head of the Central Military Commission. Certainly the fact that there was widespread bribery for promotions, that the two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission have both been expelled from the party. That is not a system where the military is perfectly responsive to party dictates. And I think that's one of the big themes of the organizational reforms that are going on are to re-institutionalize party control. And they're doing it in a lot of ways. One is to make the Central Military Commission more important and to have all the key departments nestled under the Central Military Commission where they're much more responsive to the chairman's orders. Another means is to put some of these discipline mechanisms, whether it's the legal system, the discipline inspection commission, the auditors, to put all of them under the CMC and give them the authority to go anywhere within the PLA looking for wrongdoing. And then finally, I think increasing the role of the party at all levels within the PLA. There's an increased emphasis on political meetings, on the need for party committees to do their work. And I think we'll also see that within the promotion system a real emphasis on making sure that you're promoting the right people, that they are both expert and red. And I suspect we'll see Xi Jinping getting personally involved in that. And that'll give him more control and influence. It is a fact that the system seems to have been completely corrupted, with almost all top officers paying for their promotions. Now, many of them are still in their jobs. So you bought your promotion, you're corrupt. If we investigate you, we can find out that. And we can throw you in jail or expel you from the party. That's a significant source of influence for Xi Jinping. And I think that's one of the ways he is using it, is to overcome resistance to the reforms and to his centralization of power and use that anti-corruption campaign as a hammer. It's remarkable that none of the current, you know, the old members of the Central Military Commission might have been corrupt and got in trouble. But the ones that Xi Jinping put in place, those guys are all loyal and good. And if they get out of line, he's got a hammer to use against them. So I think what we see is Xi Jinping exercising a lot more authority over the PLA than Hu Jintao ever did. That's partly a function of his personality. That's partly a function that he's interested in this issue. And it's partly a function that he's building the tools to use to control the PLA and to exert his influence over them. Let me stop there. Hi. Thank you for those comments. We'll just move on and have Kristen tell us a little bit about the PLA and its relationship with society. All right. Thank you. Is the microphone working? It always takes a second to like... Is it working now? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. So I'd like to thank Dr. Mastro and the organizers of this conference for having me on this panel this afternoon. My remarks, actually Phil's remarks paved the way very well for my own, which will focus on how Chinese domestic and societal factors are impacting the quality and nature of the PLA. And in particular, how Chinese public opinion is impacting China's external security behavior. I'd like to start with a broader picture of where the PLA is now and how domestic politics plays into this. PLA modernization is not taking place in a vacuum, but is very much rooted in Chinese domestic politics. Xi Jinping's unprecedented effort, as we've spoken about today, to reorganize the PLA, which has so far involved a rigorous anti-corruption campaign that has brought down some of China's most senior military officials, paving the way for downsizing, disbanding, and streamlining of some of the PLA's most entrenched organizations and positions is meant to consolidate power and solidify Xi's absolute control over the military. For example, a key theme in the political campaign associated with the reorganization is that it will result in the enhancement of central committee control by reconcentrating power and authority in the Central Military Commission, and specifically placing ultimate command authority in the hands of the CMC chairman, Xi Jinping. In addition, the organizational dislocation associated with such a large effort is already affecting civil military relations. As the PLA moves to reduce its force by 300,000, reportedly, a significant number, local civilian officials and state-owned enterprises are being asked to shoulder the burden by providing employment and, in some cases, basic necessities such as housing to demobilize soldiers. As one Chinese interlocutor I was speaking with stated, imagine if the US military did away with just one or two of its bases. The PLA is facing a similar type of BRAC, or base realignment problem. Now, one could argue that these reforms are necessary, that the PLA has reached a point in its development where the ultimate goals of the reorganization to optimize leadership and command structure, streamline organizations, reform policies, enhance PLA mobility, facilitate joint operations, and allow the PLA to generally operate more flexibly are essential for the military to reach the next step in its modernization. However, clearly the impact of domestic politics, and in particular party PLA relations and civil military relations cannot be understated, and will certainly shape outcomes as the reorganization continues. Now, in terms of upgrading the quality of the force and the impact of societal factors, the PLA is still contending with some very large and very entrenched issues. One of Xi Jinping's imperatives for the reorganization is to make the force both more red and more expert. The expert part of this requires better trained and educated officers, and most importantly, better educated recruits. This is a big issue for the PLA, which has redoubled efforts to attract to retain college graduates, particularly those with degrees in engineering, computer sciences, and other technical subjects. To do this, the PLA has increased incentives, including lowering the physical standards to widen the pool of potential recruits, offering to pay for college tuition and return for service, and sometimes arranging difficult to obtain residence permits. There's also been an attempt to raise the standard of living for the PLA soldiers, including better food and a higher salary, though the PLA still pays much lower than the private sector. While the number of technical graduates with college degrees in the PLA is difficult to find, an article in Xinhua stated that more than 200,000 college graduates submitted application forms online to join the PLA during its latest recruitment cycle, and this number represents an increase of about 25% over the previous year. However, another recent article in the Global Times newspaper stated that college graduates only make up about 10 to 15% of the current force, which is much lower than the leadership would like. So this is definitely an uphill battle for the PLA. Many of the best qualified graduates still prefer to enter the private sector and look at the PLA as a second choice, only to be pursued if they can't find work elsewhere. At the same time, as much as corruption runs rampant in the higher levels, it runs rampant in the lower levels in the recruitment process as well, with the less qualified able to buy their way in as rural parents by military officials to provide a place for their sons, or less qualified soldiers pay to be promoted. As one PLA soldier stated in an online blog post, in China, joining the army will cost you. This said, China now has too many college graduates, a large number of whom can't find work, and so perhaps this will help the PLA to recruit those that would like to see in its ranks in the future. Finally, I was asked to make a few points about the Chinese public's perception of the PLA and how this might drive China's external security behavior in PLA actions. The public's perception of the PLA has been most recently shaped by Xi Jinping's broader concept of the Chinese dream, which envisions China's revitalization as a great power, part of which includes a strong Chinese military. This dream lays out policy objectives to ensure China's economic prosperity, social stability, and an overall higher quality of life for PRC citizens. It also contains policy objectives related to expanding the country's national power, including military modernization and international relations. Therefore, Xi Jinping has at least in part staked the legitimacy of his term on a strong and modernized PLA that can defend all of China's interests both at home and abroad, and I know Jackie's gonna talk about that part. Thus, despite the turmoil brought about by the PLA's reorganization and the anti-corruption campaign, the state-run military propaganda machine has been in full swing to convince the public of the need for China to have a strong military and for these reforms to take place, as well as touting the PLA's accomplishments in the region and abroad. Chinese public opinion is certainly becoming more of a factor in pushing China's and the PLA's involvement in various security issues. Examples include the need for the PLA to develop expeditionary capabilities to protect Chinese interests and citizens abroad, which the Chinese public increasingly expects it to do, or the public's expectation that the PLA and the Chinese leadership show strength in the face of the ongoing territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas. But Chinese public opinion is variable, and in some cases is more rational and less aggressive than we might think. On the territorial disputes, for example, a 2015 survey on Chinese public opinion on the East and South China Sea disputes conducted by an Australian think tank found that the public did not approve of the official shelve the dispute policy, but nor did it approve of the idea of sending in the troops. In fact, the majority supported compromise in arbitration. So public opinion is also mixed on the idea of China increasing its military presence abroad in a way that creates a larger military footprint, such as boots on the ground or building permanent bases. In conclusion, while the Chinese leadership certainly uses public opinion to justify some of its actions in the security realm and takes an active role in shaping public opinion to its advantage, I have yet to find an example, and maybe someone on the panel or someone in the audience has one, where the PRC leadership did something it did not already want to do because of public opinion. So I would say that public opinion has had some impact on Chinese external security behavior, but there are limits to how much the Chinese leadership will listen to the public when faced with being pushed into something that they don't want to do. And I think I'll conclude there, thank you. All right, thank you very much, Kristen. Jackie? Hello everyone, thank you to Georgetown and the Institute of Peace for hosting me on this panel, and I should say that our moderator Oriana has actually done very important work on the PLA's overseas roles and missions, so it's a special honor to speak on that topic on a panel with her, and I'm also honored to be here with Kristen and Phil, from whom I always learn as well. I was asked to speak about Chinese military perspectives on the overseas role, the international roles of the PLA, and I thought what I would do is divide my remarks into three buckets. The first topic would be the doctrinal sources of guidance, the central guidance on which the Chinese military is relying as it pursues overseas missions. The second topic will be the domestic or really the strategic interests that the Chinese military is pursuing or protecting in the course of preparing for these overseas roles and missions. And the third topic will be the roles for the different service branches and the indicators that they are preparing for these overseas roles and missions. So first on the doctrinal sources, I guess overall I would say in terms of what we witness as increasing interest by the PLA, by the Chinese military in protecting China's rights and interests abroad, protecting Chinese nationals, the other evidence for a more expeditionary and overseas involved PLA, I think that that's actually centrally driven. It's not a function of the Air Force or the ground forces or the Navy in particular, staking out new rules. I think we can trace it back to 2004, the release of the new historic missions or the formal title is the historic missions of the PLA in the new period of the new century, which mandated that the Chinese military guarantee security not just for the CCP, not just for the Communist Party's governing position within China, but also for China's national interests. And it mandated that the PLA protect the period of strategic opportunity. And that meant not just attending to the favorable or peaceful internal security environment, but also the favorable external security environment. So going back to 2004, you can see kind of a codification of important roles for the Chinese military in protecting Chinese interests, defending Chinese rights overseas. And there were other milestones that you can chart along the path from 2004 to today. Also in 2004, you saw the elevation of Air Force and Naval and Strategic Rocket Force commanders to the Central Military Commission. So these forces would be involved in an overseas PLA. So it wouldn't just be dominated by the ground forces. In 2007, you saw the revision of the Chinese constitution to exhort the party to earnestly ensure that the Chinese military accomplish its historic missions in the new era. Again, these missions include protecting China's overseas or international interests. And then you can kind of connect the dots all the way to this year when we saw the development of the first overseas Chinese base and naval station in Djibouti. So from these doctrinal sources, I think you can also trace important strategic drivers or domestic requirements that these overseas missions are fulfilling. According to last year's report on Chinese military power put out by the U.S. Defense Department, China imported about 60% of its oil supply in 2014. 85% of those imports were seaborn. So that is China imported about 51% of its oil supplies via the sea. And you can see Chinese sources, military sources from the Academy of Military Sciences talking about the importance of China's dependence on overseas sea lines of communication, not just for energy security, but also for the imports of other commodities, resources, minerals, food from uranium to corn, soybeans, dairy products. In general, the trend has been, as we've seen over decades of Chinese economic growth, an increase in Chinese investments abroad and an increase in Chinese dependence on investments abroad and overseas resources. So to the extent that the Chinese military is preparing to take on more roles and missions abroad, it's consistent with a pattern or a trend of increasing Chinese dependence on assets and imports from abroad. I think Kristen also mentioned the public Chinese expectation of the protection of Chinese nationals abroad. And we've also seen over the last few decades an increase in Chinese nationals all over the world. This was maybe most vivid, brought home to us in 2011 with the evacuation operation of Chinese nationals from Libya. When Gaddafi fell in 2011, more than 35,000 Chinese citizens were evacuated from Libya. And more recently, you can see open source reporting on attacks on the Chinese embassy in Damascus, Syria in 2013, speculation about what might happen to Chinese interests in Venezuela where there's also been a lot of investment Chinese nationals and the situation there, the domestic situation there has been deteriorating. So in a range of places around the world, you can imagine the demand signal for NIOs potentially going up. You can also see, as I mentioned, just a general increase in China's overseas investment. The reports were that last year, close to a trillion in private Chinese citizens money left China. But much more, approximately $6.4 trillion, according to the FT, left China as part of an orderly, centrally directed state investment program. And presumably those investments will need protecting. Finally, in Xi Jinping's One Belt One Road initiative, you can see plans for a continuation of infrastructure construction through Central Asia and the Middle East all the way to Europe. And presumably Chinese security forces may be called upon to protect those infrastructure and other investments on the New Silk Road. It's also sometimes overlooked, but Chinese military sources talk about the need for the protection of Chinese fishing boats. There are apparently annually, again, according to Chinese sources, more than 1,800 Chinese fishing boats that trawl in sea zones near 30 nations. And China doesn't control those sea zones, so it has to be worried, again, according to these Chinese military texts, about the situation of its fishermen and its access to protein sources from the sea. In general, then, Chinese doctrinal sources, textbooks for the PLA are saying things like, the time has come for China to consider military expansion towards the two ocean regions, meaning the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, and also the littoral regions of Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America, South America, and Antarctica. The idea is that eventually, quote, unquote, China will create the conditions to establish itself in the two oceans regions, and that will become an entry point for China's increased influence in the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Arctic Ocean region. So these are Chinese military sources centrally published in places like the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing talking about an increased overseas role for China in light of China's expanded overseas interests, investments, nationals, and reliance on sea lines of communication. So let me talk about the different service branches and the steps that they've been taking towards preparations for increased overseas roles, and I'll start with the Navy, because the Navy is the service branch which explicitly has, as part of its mission, transitioning to not just offshore roles, but also far seas defense, which we sometimes translate as blue water defense missions. In 2008, we saw China begin to send naval vessels to participate in counter-privacy operations off the Horn of Africa. In 2009, you saw the first open declarations from Chinese defense officials about China's aircraft carrier development, and since then we've seen increasing developments regarding China's aircraft carriers, plans for new carriers to be constructed indigenously, also SSBN, Chinese nuclear submarine deployments, port visits around the world, exercises also around the world and the Mediterranean, for instance. And in terms of the kind of overseas or joint exercises that the PLA has been conducting, the Navy accounts for roughly half of them. It's been the most frequent participant in China's overseas exercises. So, and the trend has been going up. In 2015, China conducted bilateral exercises with 18 foreign countries, and again, as I said, roughly half of those were maritime exercises involving the Navy. Turning to the Air Force. In 2004, the Air Force got its first service-specific strategic concept, which was the Air Force ought to be involved in integrating air and space operations, and if you consider space to be outside of Chinese territory or a new domain, if not overseas, it's abroad. The PLAF, you can see moving into roles and missions, integrating air and space, and operating further and further from the mainland. Again, in the Academy of Military Sciences, Science and Military Strategy textbook published in 2013, the guidance to the Air Force was to prepare for remote combat 3,000 kilometers beyond China's borders. And to consider that its platforms or its aircraft would need to have the range or the aircraft plus the weapon systems on the aircraft would need to have the range to cover the second island chain. And then, turning to the ground forces, this has obviously been the biggest component of the Chinese military, and potentially, you could say, the component with the biggest interest in staying home and not pursuing expeditionary overseas missions, but at the same time, the ground forces clearly have a role to play and have been told to conduct operations at greater ranges. They've been acquiring greater airlift capacity, helicopters, the capacity for strategic lifts, they've been told to prepare to operate beyond China's borders. They have a role to play, they've been playing roles in China's U.N. peacekeeping missions, and they've been told that they also have a increasingly prominent role to play in what are called non-war military activities. I guess what we in the U.S. call military operations other than war, and these include counter-terrorism, counter-drug, counter-transnational crime, anti-piracy, and social stability missions that can take place outside of China's borders or around the periphery of China. And then the second artillery, the strategic rocket force that was recently promoted into a co-equal service branch, it too, you may say, has its roots on the mainland, but the trend in terms of China's writing is that, sorry, the perception in terms of Chinese doctrinal writing is that the global trend is towards increasing long-range precision strike, and that means that the Chinese strategic rocket force also has to prepare to conform with this increasing trend towards long-range precision strike. So it too will be involved in missions having potentially intercontinental ranges, not just short ranges, and it will be involved in pushing out the PRC's defense umbrella towards the goal of accomplishing forward-edge defense. Apparently this is necessary in an era where more and more countries are acquiring the capacity to reach in and touch China with precise conventional devastating strike forces. That again creates the requirement for China to be able to push out abroad with its own conventional and strategic systems. So the strategic rocket force is involved in this push overseas as well. Let me just wrap up there. I guess one question I had in considering the reorganization that has been mentioned, the Xi Jinping's reorganization of the PLA that was announced at the end of last year, part of that apparently will involve the shrinking of the Chinese militia forces. So we've been talking about the PLA, the Chinese military, but that's only one branch of the armed forces. The armed forces also includes the People's Armed Police and the militia, and if the militia is going to shrink, it's interesting to think, is it the loser in the push to modernize, prepare for informatized wars? And I'm not really sure that the answer is yes, because if anything, we've seen an increased role for the maritime militia in China's territorial disputes in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, and there may be increasing roles for the militia if China's territory is implicated, even if China is also protecting China's rights overseas. So I had a question mark around the militia, and I thought we shouldn't ignore it, but I'll wrap up there, thank you. Well, thank you very much to our three panelists for those very insightful comments. Since we do have a little extra time, I'm gonna use the moderator's prerogative and ask each of our panelists a question, and I have to warn them that these questions largely require them to speculate which panelists usually hate to do, and which, at least in my classes, I always tell students you can't research the future, you can only research what's happened so far, but since we're here, and since I have your attention, I'm gonna go ahead and ask these questions anyway, because there's certain things I'm very interested in myself and I haven't been able to find good answers to, so the first one is for Phil, on intelligence. I found, I completely buy the argument, and I've read it before in this great volume that you've put out about how the PLA can influence decision-making because they are one of the sole sources of information and intelligence, and if they're the first ones to put forth information, this can shape the decision-making process, and I wanted to know if you have any insights on any sort of civilian intelligence pathways as well. In the United States, we have so many different agencies and ways that our leadership gets intelligence. I'm always curious if there's any interplay between outside agencies and that of the military, and then given the fact that they do seem to have a more simplistic intelligence promotion on a dissemination system than we do, do you think their system is more or less prone to intel failures? In the United States, we talk a lot about this specifically because of difficulties in coordinating across agencies. Are they fundamentally gonna have an easier time because there are less agencies to coordinate across, and that might become, you know, in a hypothetical situation, information, transmission during conflicts is very important to be able to adapt to real-time events, so I was hoping maybe you could speculate a bit on that for us. Well, at least some of the civilian intelligence services, notably the Ministry of State, the security, do seem to have good access to the civilian leadership and be able to get their analysis directly to top leaders. They, including the think tank, the China Institutes for Contemporary International Relations, also have a little bit more of an outreach function than our intelligence agencies do, so they are interacting with various foreign visitors and gathering information from that, but in a more interactive way where they can try out policy ideas and vet them. So I think they do seem to have access, they do seem to get their reports to top decision makers, and I think there are some specific examples where they've done reports and recommendations that have influenced policy, and I think one example of that might be on US-China-Milt-to-Mill relations where they were asked to do a study and make some recommendations, and the policy did seem to change as a result of that. So I think that's at least one example of a civilian intelligence think tank that is tasked to do things that writes reports and where we can point to at least some instances of policy change as a result of that. As I mentioned, they were also tasked to include policy recommendations in their analysis, and that's maybe one difference between the kinds of things they publish in their journal, which have the analysis of the situation, but not the recommendations as to what China ought to do about it, and presumably those are reserved for internal analysis. I think the question about intelligence dissemination and coordination, they don't have a ODNI, I don't know if that's good or bad, for their system, but they don't have a central mechanism to control and vet the flow of information to top leaders. In the past, there's been information that some of it from near real-time sources can go pretty quickly and pretty directly to the top leadership without additional analysis of it. We know in our system sometimes that causes problems, the Gulf of Tonkin incident being perhaps a good case where direct feeds of signals intelligence directly into the White House, some of which seems to have been wrong or fabricated, had a significant impact on our policy process in a way that wasn't so good. So the lack of that kind of central coordinating and vetting and analytic function I think is a problem. It produces a more competitive system where you have different agencies competing to provide information and analysis, but without the benefits of vetting and playing them off against each other. And I suspect that does probably increase the propensity for intelligence in some way, and we talked about some of them earlier. I think one of the big questions is how the military reforms might change this, that the establishment of a new strategic support force which seems to coordinate or to encompass the signals intelligence, various operation of various space systems, cyber, whether putting all of that under one unified force is gonna produce synergies and avoid some of these coordination problems. I think it's probably intended to do that. How well that's gonna work in practice, I think remains to be seen, but that's the big structural innovation that touches on intelligence in the reforms. I think what they hope is that that will be a flexible system that can respond directly to the needs of theater commanders and having it all under one integrated strategic support force if you're doing a career contingency, you not only draw upon the assets from within that theater, but can task the whole other parts of the system more effectively. Whether it worked that way in practice kind of remains to be seen. Thank you for that. Can I just follow up? Yes, please. Sorry, it's since we're both on the panel together. I was just wondering, because a big problem with Chinese assessments and analysis in the past has been the propensity to hide bad news or only send good news up. And I was wondering what you, if you think that still, I mean, I guess it still exists to some extent, but I think my sense is that it's matured enough that it doesn't always happen. And I just was wondering about your thoughts. No, that's a good, it's a good question that there is a tendency to tell the leadership what they wanna hear. I think it's maybe aggravated a little bit that the foreign ministry seems to be a weaker voice than it was in the past. That's the part that has the most contact with the foreigners and is gathering a lot of information on what foreigners are thinking, but doesn't seem to be as influential in policymaking as in the past. So that's not technically part of the intelligence system, but it is part of the information flow. And if what they are producing doesn't get the same hearing as it once did, that's potentially a problem. And one would tend to think that this would be more of a problem on politically sensitive issues. Taiwan or what people there are thinking and how much weight to give to that. That's a politically sensitive issue. Having just been over to China talking about Taiwan issues, it was evident that there's a range of views that some of them seem very well informed about what's going on in the island and what people are thinking there, but there was also the suggestion that at least some of that analysis wasn't there. So if I can continue the discussion and ask Kristin a question. I have sort of one question and then a second one, there are no way related analytically or connectively, but the first one, I also just want to offer a comment. I'm very curious, you talked a bit about college recruits and I myself have a fascination with a separate sort of category of potential recruits that we never talk about in the Chinese context was our female recruits. So, this is just anecdotal, but given my own background, I'm very interested in it and I once was at dinner as a part of a delegation with a bunch of Chinese military leaders in which they informed me that females couldn't fly airplanes. And I said actually. Don't tell the pat guys, Amanda. And I laughed and I said, actually physiologically, women are better designed to handle gene forces than men and in the United States we have plenty of female pilots to which their response for those of you who speak Chinese could probably have a sense of this was something to the polite lines of how Western women are more course and rough than Chinese women. So that's why we could do it. And then the back of my mind, I thought on one hand, if I were in a different environment, I would find it necessary to change these views of women in defense and security. But in this case, I thought, hey, you want to waste the human capital after the country, go ahead. So I was curious if in any of your studies, I've never seen anything about the female recruit. So I was wondering if you saw anything about that. And my second question, which has nothing to do with that is something that's discussed a lot in Washington about contingencies and the relationship of the PLA to society. There's always this question of when China makes certain decisions and contingencies, if things don't go well, that societal pressures will make it so they have no exit ramp. That they couldn't turn back and they would keep on doubling down or keep on escalating because of the perceptions of the military that might evolve from failures. So I wanted to see if you hold that kind of view. So on the first question, I have not seen a lot about female recruits, but I have recently seen some references in Chinese articles, the military region newspaper articles before the military region newspaper who were disbanded, but that referenced competitions that they're now having to try and get the most stellar soldiers kind of media attention. So they have these competitions in the grassroots units a lot, who can be the best, actually Ken Allen's in the audience and he probably knows more about this than I do, but anyway, so there have been some references within those competitions wanting to promote female soldiers. That's not female recruits though and so it's a slightly different, but I do think there's an awareness that the pool of recruits does not just include men. It also includes women and so there is an awareness to try and recruit women with engineering degrees as well as men. Actually I did see a reference recently to a woman, a computer expert in the PLA and she was being lauded for, they were doing a simulation and the computer got hacked, the system got hacked and she figured out the hack and figured out how to fix it and so this was being held up as an example of how women can positively contribute to the PLA and so I think it's, the theme is there as to whether it's necessarily changing anything, I don't know. Yeah, I mean your question about societal pressures enforcing escalation, if something doesn't go well, I think the PRC leadership is very aware of that danger which is why they are, I don't wanna say careful, but they are cautious about walking the line between not getting the PLA involved in something where they may not be able to win it because if they end up with egg on their face I think it is a big problem for legitimacy of the party. Sociable pressure would definitely be ratcheted up. I think this is one of the reasons why you see them developing a lot of civilian maritime resources for the South and East China Sea disputes because that represents a gray area so they can send out these Coast Guard ships which admittedly have some weaponry on them but for example our Coast Guard ships may not have but still they're considered, it's a gray area, it's not military and there's been an expansion of cooperation with civilian maritime agencies to try and provide the Chinese leadership with those kind of options that are not just sending a PLA surface combatant into the region. Thank you and right before we open up for questions, this is my last question to Jackie and then we can prepare to take questions from the audience. In the United States there's so much debate over the decades about how and when is the appropriate time to use the military and there's debates about whether there's divides between military and civilian leaders, you know we have the Powell doctrine of the situations under which it's a good idea. In China you talked a lot about current movements and types of missions they might take on. Do you have any indication about how the military feels about these missions like the military operations other than war, whether the military is super excited about doing neos or whether they're not and if there's any, if you could, there might not be any writings but just personal speculation about the situations under which you think that the Chinese might be more willing to use that military arm sort of beyond the obvious territorial disputes issues. Well one way I thought you were gonna go in the question also is the Chinese typology for the spectrum from peace to war is interesting. It's not necessarily the same as, we just have basically the idea that there's peace and there's crisis and there's war and I think in the Chinese literature I think that there's a much more fully developed kind of continuum of there's preparation for military struggle which is ongoing and there's the idea that right now the PLA has to prepare for and informatize local war probably in the oceanic direction but there's also the idea that there are kind of, there's crisis prevention and then there's crisis management and there's the idea of containing war and then there's the idea of war control and there's a broad spectrum of kind of deterrence activities that needs to be undertaken and some of those are peacetime or compatible with crises but some of those are much more operational and might happen during a war or would be a much more kind of kinetic kind of operation or use of force than what we might associate with deterrence. So I think, I don't know the answer about what the resolution of the debate would be about when to actually use force but I have the sense that there's a very rich menu of or understanding of the various phases or points on the continuum between peace and war that has maybe equivalents that were, for which we don't necessarily have equivalents in the United States and just from reading reports about Chinese exercises and Chinese newspapers and I was actually thinking about this when you were talking about reporting bad news up and you certainly see reports of mistakes happening in those accounts and then being rectified and you also just have the sense that the people who are being interviewed or described are high morale but that doesn't necessarily tell you whether they are confident that if they were asked to go to war, things would go well so I don't feel equipped to answer that question just from my reading but I think it's an interesting question and I think the fact that there is just a much richer menu of options between peace and war is worth our consideration. Well, thank you. Thank you for those answers. I'm gonna open it up to the audience. If you have a question, please just raise your hand and when it is your turn, please identify yourself, who you are and your affiliation so we can start with the gentleman back there. Hello, okay. Shane Billsboro, Dynamis, I'm a military analyst. Two questions, one broad, one more narrow. The broad question relates to a trend that we've been discussing here all day, namely the diminished rate of growth that we've started to see over time as China's economy matures. To what extent do you see that impacting trends in the growth rate of the PLA budget in the past? We haven't seen them having to make any difficult trade-offs in the event that the Chinese government doesn't make the mistake the Soviet Union made and continually invest more in their military capabilities vis-a-vis their domestic economy. What trade-offs do you see them having to make? And the more narrow question relates to the PLA Air Force. Does the creation of a space support force that is in theory supposed to centralize all space-relevant capabilities in one area, does that tend against the PLAF's desire to evolve into a narrow space force if it just lost all of its space missions? Thank you. Let me start, and others can come in. I mean, I think what we, the closest parallel for understanding PLA budgets is the overall central government spending. And that's the thing that tracks most closely with the overall PLA budgets. And that was down, the growth rate of it was down a little bit this year and the PLA budget was down this year. So it kind of tends to track with that. Will there be trade-offs in the future? I think there will be. One of the interesting things you see is the military kind of arguing that there isn't a guns versus butter trade-off. That you need to have a strong military to protect economic development. And so it's a necessary condition for development rather than a guns versus butter trade-off. So you see that argument in military discourse. You see it in the white paper. I'm not sure that's really very persuasive to civilians in the Ministry of Finance who are the ones sort of setting the budget. So my own view is as you see China's economic growth rate declining, you'll see a decline in overall central government spending and that will also affect the military. And it was interesting this year before the military budget was announced, you saw some calls in global times for a 20% budget increase and we didn't get anything like that. And then the narrower question about the Air Force and the space mission. Yes, the Air Force has been advocating for control of the space mission. One would think that a, it's a really good question. And you had Xu Qilong say, that's what Air Forces do. They, you know, every other country in the world gives that space mission to the Air Force and China shouldn't be an exception to that. And the reorg was an opportunity for the Air Force to try to grab that mission. And it doesn't seem to have worked out that way. They've gone with the strategic support force integrating all of those capabilities. So I think the first order approximation is the Air Force tried to fight that battle and probably was not successful. And then I think the question we'll see going forward is do we see efforts to try to train Air Force people to take on some of those missions and move them into that force? I think that's a question we don't know whether or not that'll happen. I think I would second what Phil said about the importance of the question about the PLA Air Force versus the strategic support force on space missions. And you can see that there's been a kind of continuing back and forth, maybe visible in Chinese doctrinal writings of jockeying for space missions between the Air Force and what was the Second Artillery Corps. Obviously the Second Artillery has the launch capabilities, the rockets. But if the Air Force is going to become an integrated air and space force, it will need to have some access to the information available from space systems. And so I think in some sense this is TBD and still being worked out. An important question to monitor going forward. I just wanted to add one comment to Phil's comments about the budget, which is that I do think we're going to see a bit of debate about military spending once, as China's overseas interests continue to expand, they have a lot to protect. Right now their expeditionary capabilities have, they've developed pockets of it, but it's not a truly global expeditionary force. It may never be, but they're going to have to expand the numbers and types of missions. They're going to have to do overseas. And at the same time, there are increasing challenges in their own region and they're having to spend more on that. So I think there is big spending ahead for the military if they really are going to be able to protect everything they want to protect. I think also additionally with economic slowdown, one potential side effect will be it might be easier to recruit the college level individuals that the military wants. They haven't been able to meet their recruitment levels I think ever in the history since they set them out about in 2006. So I've heard, and this again is just anecdotal on the ground that maybe once the private sector or other opportunities are less and less available then they might have an easier time convincing people that the military life is for them. Yes, this gentleman down here. Thank you for doing this. My name is Dong Huiyu with China the real news agency of Hong Kong. My question is for Mr. Saunders. I know you just came back from a visit to Taipei, Beijing and Shaman. And after this trip, are you getting more optimistic or pessimistic about the cross-strait relations after May? And how would you evaluate the possibility of the military conflict in the Taiwan Strait? How different is the PLA's position vis-a-vis Taiwan and the United States from 10 or 20 years ago? Thank you. Well, I should have said before that all of what you're getting are my personal views not those of the US government. So you can take it as one analyst view. I guess I came away from that trip a little bit more pessimistic about cross-strait relations and in particular that I don't think it's gonna be a war but that there's pressure from the mainland on President-elect Xi to try to say something about the 1992 consensus in one China that I don't think she's able to say politically and it was signaled pretty clearly that if she doesn't say what they want her to say that there will be some decline in cross-strait relations probably cutting off the official channels of dialogue, potentially cutting off the flow of tourists but a number of things to make Taiwan pay a price for that. So I think my assessment is as we look forward it's for a downturn in relations and some of the things we've had in the past will not continue but I didn't come away with the sense that this was headed toward conflict that these are it's a means of politically pressuring the DPP and China continues to put its policy hope in peaceful development and trying to broaden its appeal to people on Taiwan and I think that policy will continue with respect to military conflict. I mean clearly the PLA has improved its capabilities over the last 20 years and has significant capability to do damage on the island and the Taiwan military can't stop that from happening but what deters China from resolving this situation with force and it's not just the military situation it's the fact that if they choose to try to resolve the Taiwan situation we're using force we're in a different world, we're in a different Asia different US-China relationship and things will not cannot continue as they have been in the past and that is a big deterrent from trying to resolve the situation via force and I think that's something Chinese leaders are very cognizant of especially as they are dealing with a slowing growth rate and increasing domestic challenges. Picking a fight against Taiwan and trying to resolve it with force will make all of those domestic challenges worse and I think that's something that deters them from pursuing that option. Thank you, next question, the gentleman in the back. That one too, yeah, start there then we'll move our way back. Hi, thank you, my name is Patrick Lazada, I'm a student at Johns Hopkins SICE. There's been a lot of talk about I think the Chinese strategy in South China Sea, East China Sea, my question is actually about the Western theater in the West Military Region, formerly Lanzhou Military Region and historically, despite the terror threats and the problematic neighbors in Afghanistan, Pakistan, elsewhere, that region has received less attention and less support by Chinese military officials. So I guess my questions are, why has this region been historically under supported? Are there factors that might make the Chinese military pivot West? And how would a Western pivot align with US interests? I think, for example, in Afghanistan or in other sort of Western facing countries, thank you. Do you want to take that on? I can say a little bit, I mean, I think we have neglected the Western theater more than the Chinese military has in some sense because you can see there's been continuous exercises and even deployments of Chinese security forces in Kashmir that the Indians point to and a number of recent incursions across the border between China and India. And I think the pursuit of expeditionary capabilities by the Chinese ground forces that I mentioned, the acquisition of strategic lift, army aviation, the expansion of the special operations forces, all of those are relevant to the Western theater in addition to other theaters. But I think we as an Ameritim country, in Ameritim power with a number of allies across the East and South China Seas from China have tended to focus on the maritime developments, but it's maybe been our oversight more than a function of Beijing's prioritization. Although you could say also that historically, primary responsibility for managing stability in the Western part of China has fallen to the People's Armed Police and the Xinjiang special forces, security forces. So there is that. But I do see a trend towards increasing focus on what was formerly Lanzhou military region, the Western theater now. And as I mentioned, I think part of that is a function of the investments that China has announced and is pursuing as part of the One Belt, One Road initiative. And you could see that increasing and obviously you could point to a convergence of interest between the United States and China with regard to containment of ISIS or radical Islamic forces and counter drug missions in Afghanistan. But you could also see potential tensions, as I mentioned, between China and Pakistan on the one hand in India on the other, and another potential sources of tension between the United States and China as China pivots west or marches west or pursues the OBOR and the security arrangements in conjunction with that. So it's not totally clear to me that by expanding west or preparing for more military operations on the continent, China is going to totally avoid conflict or competition with the United States in that direction. And that's a great answer. I would also just add that I think, I don't know anyone who's ever been out there. It's kind of the wild, it really is kind of the wild west. I mean, it's very far from Beijing. Policies are not always implemented in the intention that the central leadership wants. And I think the central government and the Communist Party has been trying to settle Han Chinese out there. It hasn't been neglected per se. It's just sort of, it's very far away and it's not the economic center of gravity. And I think that that is, that might change as Jackie suggested. I think it probably will with the new initiatives, but that's partly why it has been the way, the policies have been the way they've been. If I can add to that, we recently published a book on PLA contingency planning by NDU Press, which is available on their website. And there's a pretty good chapter in there that looks at counterterrorism operations in Central Asia and the potential role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in carrying those out. I mean, I think the big piece is that it's not primarily a military problem, that it's an intelligence sharing and cooperation problem. It's a border security problem. It's a public security and PAP problem. And the PLA proper's role in that seems to be more limited, that those other parts of the Chinese government have primary responsibility. But I think also it's clear that the Chinese worried about what happens in Afghanistan as the US presence comes down. They share a border with that. Does that become a training site for Uyghur separatists who come across the border? But today they have, as I've talked with them about it, they describe the political situation in Afghanistan as so uncertain that they're not sure that getting more deeply involved would help. So again, I think the military is trying to have these potential threats and problems there, but it's not clear what military role would help with that. I would be remiss given the central theme of our conference today, not to mention a book by Taylor Fravel at MIT who's considered to be one of our foremost experts on territorial disputes and Chinese behavior, in which he points out that at least historically it's actually domestic instability that has led China to pursue cooperative arrangements with their neighbors. So that's one area in which the domestic dimensions have indeed impacted Chinese foreign policy. And I said next the gentleman back there. Hi, Tibia Scavige, Defense Department. And one thing that didn't get addressed directly, but I think my fit in with this discussion is military acquisition. And specifically for the strategic services, if you will, that is the Navy, Air Force and Rocket Forces. What I want to know is given that you have some various elements that go into that decision-making process, be it government, military, then even industry itself, all of whom may have conflicting or de-conflicting interests and priorities, what generally could you describe to be the process where they get to a certain end state and put it another way? How do they get to a certain amount of a certain class of a ship, missile, or aircraft? Now I realize that even in the US it could be hard to figure this out, how we build stuff and why we build even sometimes. But I was wondering if any of you could offer insight into that as well. Thank you. I can say a little bit about it. I think you go back to the reforms in 1998 that really restructured the Chinese defense industry and gave the services a lot more of a role in articulating what are the requirements for what types of equipment they want and gave them more control over the purse strings in actually buying or not buying systems. I've worked most closely on the Air Force, so I know that better than I know the other parts of it. But it does seem to have empowered the service to have a lot more role, a lot more say over what it buys or doesn't buy than was the past when the defense industries had a stronger voice in that process and were able to foist systems off on the services. And just to give concrete examples, in one of the Chinese aircraft manufacturers was touting a souped up F7 with better engines and better avionics that they were co-producing with Pakistan and they wanted the Air Force to buy that, to legitimate it to foreign customers and the Air Force said that's not part of our requirements, we don't need it, we don't wanna buy it and they were able to resist pressure whereas in the past they might have been forced to do it. So that's not a complete answer to your question but I think you see a much greater role for the services in articulating what are the forced requirements, what types of systems do they want, in some cases having competing prototypes and fly-offs and picking which system they like better. So I think that's the answer is to look a lot more to the service armament departments. And then one of the questions we have going forward is how will this reorganization change that? If you've taken out the armies, the army presumably will be setting up its own equipment, direct it as part of army headquarters but what will the role be of that CMC, Central Military Commission Department that does armaments? Will it be coordinating, de-conflicting the service requests? Will that work any better? Because if you have the service chiefs on the Central Military Commission, you gotta think they will be lobbying for the systems that matter most of their service. So a little murky. I have a gentleman up here in the front. I just wanna put in a plug for, I think this is an area where more work clearly needs to be done. I mean there's a certain amount of opacity in Chinese high politics as was mentioned on one of the previous panels but there's a lot of opacity around the acquisition process too and I know that there have been some good case studies done on particular systems like what was the genesis of the anti-ship ballistic missile system and there are paper trails I think you can chase. I mean they're trying to as a country with five year plans and there are design bureaus that put out statements and visions for 10 to 15 year projections for the force and so you can research that to the extent that there's competition going on between different entities and a paper trail to chase but I just don't think enough work has been done in this area. Yeah and just since you're talking about that the timing Cheng holds these defense innovation workshops and they publish reports and I think that can be very useful for talking about when you're looking at acquisition issues. Greg Rihou from Radio Cheng. My question is about one of the Chinese PLAs that you need characteristic is they have a heavy involvement into their economic activities. They have their own hospital and hotels, telecommunication companies and cultural affairs and or even much cultural research activities. These kinds of involvement has been banned by the Central Ministry Commission in 1998 so it's more than 18 years it's still working and now the Central Ministry government said well they want to ban all these activities within the next three years but my question is how these involvement into the economic activity would benefit their acquisition of high technology or intelligent gathering in terms of setting up night cops in the hotels and then function as intelligent gathering of those foreign diplomats in Shanghai or in Beijing. But in the meantime you know that these kinds of economic activity sometimes are losing a whole lot of money and then how much of the pipe they have drive from the military budget. So the question is two part how good of these economic involvement could benefit the PLA itself or these kinds of involve involvement harm them most in terms of they are losing revenues or distances not like all the services are making money like those hospitals that the elite hospital must be military hospitals. The Chinese elites they want to check the illnesses in military hospital instead of civilian hospitals so what do you see of these kinds of PLA elite involvement into the economic sphere. Thank you. You want to take that? Besides now apparently I have to be super careful when I'm in Beijing all summer going to nightclubs. I think the questioner laid out some of the alternative considerations very well on the one hand these kind of extracurricular investments real estate holdings may be used may be useful for intelligence on the other hand they can be a diversion from professionalism and I think a related issue is the kind of general Chinese defense intellectual perception that we're in an usual time where dual use capabilities are increasingly relevant for modern militaries and so this idea of civil military integration or fusion that we hear more and more about is maybe a more systematic or a way to alongside the informal intelligence gathering opportunities that come from PLA extracurriculars and money making opportunities there's also a systematic effort to try to collect information and know how technological know how from off the commercial off the shelf available systems that are not sanctioned that China can get legally and I think there's a recognition that that creates a special opportunity for militaries like the Chinese military that saw themselves as behind and needing to catch up they have this opportunity in the fact that we're in a kind of dual use era where things are more available than they would be if they were just strictly military usage and prohibited under existing sanctions regimes. In expanding civil military cooperation has been a big there's been a big push in the PLA for that there have been a I was doing a project on a different topic but I had to read a bunch of articles on that type of cooperation at the grassroots level and I mean they're bringing in people who can train soldiers in various technical issues surveillance type issues so it's I think they're expanding cooperation and these are civilian defense companies that maybe don't traditionally fall under the fold of what the PLA used to the types of companies the PLA used to cooperate with and yet it's okay it's sanctioned and so yeah I think it's a gray area but I think that as Jackie pointed out it's definitely expanding. You. So my question the young woman up there at the top so I'm just doing this on purpose to make you run up and down the stairs between every question. Hi I'm Natalie Herbert I'm a cadet from the United States Military Academy at West Point. My question is regarding PLA operations abroad specifically in Africa so China has been spending billions of dollars in Africa specifically with infrastructure projects as well as conducting businesses abroad in there and in order to gain access to their natural resources and in order to protect those interests they have been conducting military operations over there. Specifically we see that through the UN peacekeeping operations in Mali as well as the logistics facility in Djibouti and my question is as U.S. and China are trying to find common ground in order to establish trust and cooperation what is the military's role in that both the U.S. and Chinese side specifically with the Army U.S. Army and the PLA ground forces. With respect to Africa or just in general I'm sorry. If you talk about sign other than Africa she shall accept your answer. If I could just say one thing about that question because I've been working with Kristen on a paper this week as we have been racking our brains about a number of these issues and so I'm gonna put forth the hypothesis that is one of these things that I probably shouldn't it's not ready to be mentioned publicly but I'm gonna do it anyway about specifically Army. One of the big issues with U.S. China cooperation the military sphere is always operational security. Even when there's areas that we could cooperate towards a common goal there's always these potential negative side effects that the Chinese military could learn some operational lessons even in those peacetime or permissive types of operations that could be applied in other contingencies where we might find ourselves in a less than cooperative situation. When I was giving this some thought though I came to the conclusion that perhaps the area that we could cooperate with the least amount of risk of this would be in ground operations in counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency sort of the basic UMPKO stabilization missions given that the vast majority of areas of contention or flash points between the United States and China are naval and air based and so for the sake of military exchanges it might be the case that the linchpin, right now it seems to me the linchpin of U.S. China military cooperation lies in the relationships between the navies and the air forces given the need to build confidence and to reduce probabilities of incident but this seems to be one area that the Army could take advantage of and building up the ability to cooperate and also help train and professionalize the Chinese military force in a way that would be beneficial for the region and stabilization of the region and also beneficial to the United States as well but we'll see if that's actually true. That's just something I've been thinking about lately. Yeah and just to add to that I think you mentioned the logistics base in Djibouti. Many of the military folks here I've spoken with have said actually that's an opportunity for us. I mean there's no reason why they shouldn't have that necessarily and the fact that it's right next to ours over there might turn out to be a good thing. So I think in terms of looking forward from the US military standpoint it's prudent to find areas where we can cooperate or enhance dialogue because there are going to be increased tensions not just in the region in South China Sea but probably also as China expands its overseas presence and so the more we can use opportunities like maybe having two bases next to each other to facilitate dialogue I think is a good thing. All right we're getting close to our concluding time so I'm gonna go ahead and take a couple of remaining questions in succession and then I'll give the panelists an opportunity for closing statements or whatever they potentially want to say about the issue. Young man up here. And with the US China Commission staff. My question is a general one but I'm just curious how you would see domestic pressures constraining or influencing a leader's decision specifically in a time of crisis. So in other words I certainly understand that there's polling that shows majority supporting compromise maybe in your general time of peace of earlier panels today how maybe the level of grassroots nationalism could be overstated by the leadership and how it's difficult to untangle. But I just wonder in a time of crisis specifically maybe over one of these territorial disputes that have come up whether from the military or from the general public what do you see as constraining leadership's decision. Thanks. Thank you. Next we're gonna collect some questions. David in the back. My question ties in a bit with the earlier panels that the anti-corruption investigations at the PLA have been extensive and deep. The reforms similarly David Shamba posited in the broader sphere of the party that there was a lot of what he called I think some form of passive acceptance but by continuing strong disagreement. Do you think there is the same phenomenon in the military that he described if you accept his characterization of the broader party? Are there a lot of people who are resentful of these reforms and the anti-corruption and is there a body that would be a large group of supporters against Xi Jinping if they could express their truth use? Thank you. Did I have one last one over here? Are we good? Okay. How do we start with those? And of course if you have any concluding remarks feel free to make those as well. Let's start Chris. I'll answer the one about the leadership being constrained by nationalist opinion in times of crisis. That is a really good question and it's a really hard one to answer because I don't think anyone knows. I will say that in past incidents like Scarborough or Scholl's the PLA Navy stood its ground but the netizens at the time were very harsh on the leadership and saying if we back down it's really bad and I think some words I can't say here but anyway, so I think that pressure is there but I still maintain that I don't think the national leadership would allow itself to be pushed into something even in crisis that it didn't think it could win. Cause I think the outcome of the PLA losing something would be far worse for the leadership than it backing down but that's just my personal opinion. I guess I'll weigh in on that. I mean I think this is a new trend we've heard over the past decade with Chinese analysts and officials talking about public opinion as a constraining force and somehow it always happens to reinforce their negotiating position. We can't give you that because the people will go crazy. So I think to a certain degree you have to discount that a little bit because it's convenient to point to because it strengthens China's negotiating position and I think it's also worth remembering that the Chinese government does have a considerable ability to censor information and to shape what is reported on Chinese TV and when they don't want provocative things to be reported they send those people and they don't let them on TV. So I think it's possible to exaggerate how big a constraint it is. I agree with Kristen that it's hard to point to any instances where they've been forced to do something they didn't want to do by public opinion. Now if it's a major crisis I think what is maybe a more likely situation is you get a leadership that is worried about their vulnerability to other elites that if there's a split about how to respond and they are too soft on it that might produce internal pressure but from within the leadership rather than the public. Then with respect to David's question about anti-corruption you know that's a tough thing to know. One presumes that officers are not necessarily happy to be in a system where you have to pay for your promotion because that implies you have to do a lot of other things to raise that money. So I think there is some support for this. I also as I said think that the implementation of that campaign within the PLA has been very carefully measured. They've gone after some appointments from the previous regime who were senior people. They've gone after people in the logistics system who have a lot of money passed through their hands and a lot of opportunity for corruption. They've gone after people at the military districts for which the same is true. They haven't gone after the operators. They haven't gone after the top level within the CMC that was appointed by Xi Jinping and they haven't gone after the operational side of the PLA even though some of them surely are complicit in that. So I think there is a sense that it's a measured campaign that's trying hard to protect the operational capability of the PLA and I think that's kind of an important thing. What do PLA officers really think about this at the bottom? I mean it's not good but it's not good to have a corrupted promotion system either. What are their real views? I think that's hard to say. Yeah, another area to look would be what's going on with the treatment of veterans because you could add to the 300,000 people who are gonna be cut in the restructuring and those people who have been targeted in the anti-corruption campaign. That begins to, if you start adding up these numbers and then you add in the veterans who may be disgruntled because they haven't seen their pensions and they don't have job opportunities that they were promised. Maybe you get to start to see an impressive number of people who are disaffected but I don't know how far to go with that. I think you also see that in the reforms though that there is an office set up specifically to deal with the issue of retirees and those will be downsized in it. They can't use the solutions they've done in the past which is to make them a local government problem and you need to find jobs for these people because the state-owned enterprises don't work the same way that they once did to absorb that labor. So I think they're gonna have to find new mechanisms and new funding to take care of those people. It does seem to be an issue they are aware of and at least bureaucratically have an office to deal with it and probably will allocate some money against that. If I could just, I just wanna second all these points about the differences. We always talk about the Chinese military even the officer corps and the enlisted but just like everywhere else in the world there seems to be significant generational differences. When I talk to senior military leaders their position is what reforms? There's no need reform because everything is great and then I talk to junior officers and they seem to be much more supportive of the reforms. So I think it makes sense. I think for those at the lower levels besides not wanting to pay for promotions there's also an idea or a desire to have a professionalized force one in which you're motivated by the leaders above you and especially if you're talking about listening and obeying commands of leaders in times of conflict it becomes very important that those leaders command the respect and it looks like they earn those positions versus just grease and palms to get there. So I think there's definitely frustration I've heard on the higher levels but then quietly junior officers always tell me they're really happy that some of those changes are being implemented. So on that note I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up this panel thank the panelists for all their comments.