BEIJING, 2 September 2003 — China’s top military leader Jiang Zemin announced yesterday that the People’s Liberation Army will reduce its numbers by 200,000 troops before 2005 and put more focus on building a high-tech army, state press reported. Jiang told a meeting of the Central Military Commission that the troop reductions would follow an earlier 500,000-man cut to military personnel between 1996 and 2000, the Xinhua news agency said.
Jiang announced the cuts during a visit to Changsha, capital of the southern province of Hunan, to “accelerate modernization”, Xinhua said. “The form of war is changing from mechanized warfare to information warfare,” said Jiang, who was in Hunan to attend celebrations marking the 50th founding anniversary of the National Defense Science and Technology University.
“A further reduction of the size of the military would be conducive to focusing our limited strategic resources and accelerating the pace of our military information building.” Western military analysts said the PLA would still be designed and able to reclaim Taiwan, or at least be daunting enough to prevent the self-ruled island, which Beijing considers a renegade province, declaring independence.
According to the information office of the PLA, the demobilization would reduce China’s army to 2.3 million soldiers, while Western analysts said the cuts could bring China’s ground forces to as low as 1.8 million soldiers.
“The state of war is being transformed from mechanized warfare to information warfare with the information capabilities of the military increasingly playing a decisive role,” Jiang was quoted as telling the meeting. “Reducing the scale of our military is beneficial to the concentration of our limited strategic resources and will quicken the pace of constructing our military’s information technology.”
Jiang, who stepped down from his posts as China’s president and head of the ruling Communist Party over the last year, has remained politically influential as chairman of the CMC.
The ongoing troop reductions, he said, conformed with a worldwide “revolution in military affairs” and were necessary for China to compete in a world where new military technologies were rapidly replacing traditional concepts of war.
“At present, with the development and modernization of science and technology, especially information technology, competition in global military affairs has intensified,” Jiang said.
The 1991 Gulf War greatly convinced Chinese military leaders of the need to modernize the PLA, with subsequent US high-tech military operations in the Balkans and the second Iraqi war further revealing China’s military backwardness.
In his talks at the military meeting, Jiang stressed that troop cuts would remain a basic military policy. “This round of cuts will mainly be focused on noncombat units in the PLA, like cultural units, hospitals and research institutes,” said You Ji, an expert on the PLA at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney.
The move also aims to make the PLA more “externally oriented,” with its domestic duties, such as disaster relief and maintaining public order, being handed over to some 1.5 million reservists and the one million-strong People’s Armed Police, he said.