Military Parade in China Gives Xi Jinping a Platform to Show Grip on Power

Hong Kong: Thousands of troops stood arrayed at perfect, hushed attention around Tiananmen Square. Hundreds of Communist Party elders, foreign dignitaries and diplomats watched on. It was then, on live television, that President Xi Jinping stepped forward to announce that the Chinese military, on proud display to mark 70 years since the end of World War II, would lose more than a tenth of its personnel.

"War is the sword of Damocles that still hangs over mankind," Xi said from the viewing deck overlooking the square in a speech at the start of a vast military parade in central Beijing.

Xi indicated that he wanted to show other countries - many of them wary of China's growing military strength - that they had nothing to fear from the procession of tanks and missiles that rumbled down Chang'an Avenue while fighter jets roared overhead.

But the highly public manner of Xi's announcement that 300,000 military personnel would be demobilized, China's largest troop reduction in nearly two decades, carried another implicit message. He was demonstrating his grip on the military and on the party, amid economic squalls and a grinding anti-corruption campaign that have left some wondering whether he and his agenda of change - including in the People's Liberation Army - were faltering, several experts said.

"It's Xi in command," Andrew Scobell, a political scientist at RAND Corp. who studies the Chinese military, and who was in Beijing during the parade, said of the announcement of the cuts.

But he said Xi faced challenges in forcing through his broader program of change in the military, which would reshape the command structure and knock away the longstanding power of regional military commands across China.

"If it does happen, then this is confirmation that Xi Jinping is the most powerful commander in chief China has seen since Deng Xiaoping," he said. "This is about showing Xi as the strongman."

Xi on Thursday did not give any details of the troop reductions. But the cut appeared sizable and was aimed at making the People's Liberation Army more efficient and ready for combat, foreign experts said. And a retired Chinese major general, Xu Guangyu, said the announcement showed Xi's plans to upgrade the military remained on track.

"This decision was to be expected," Xu said by telephone from Beijing. "As the level of military modernization steadily rises, we can reduce personnel. The modernization of weapons and equipment is encouraging a reduction in personnel numbers."

The cut announced by Xi would shrink China's military personnel to 2 million, the biggest reduction since 500,000 were demobilized in 1997, said the China News Service, a state-run agency. Those forces would remain the world's largest, compared with the United States' active-duty force of 1.4 million. China's Ministry of Defense said the cuts would be completed by the end of 2017.

"It does seem incongruous that Xi would make the announcement at the parade," said Dennis J. Blasko, a former U.S. Army attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. "But it has been widely acknowledged that cuts of hundreds of thousands would improve combat effectiveness."

The shrinkage would mostly come from ground forces, with more resources going to the navy, the air force and the Second Artillery Corps, which holds China's conventional and nuclear missiles, said David Finkelstein, the vice president of CNA, an organization in Arlington, Virginia, that specializes in military analysis.

Xi's program to reorganize and reinvigorate the military was part of an array of changes announced in 2013, including an economic overhaul. Since then, the Chinese government has instituted changes, but many observers have said that the moves have often been hesitant and opaque, failing to match Xi's bold promises.

Additionally, the Chinese military has been distracted by anti-corruption inquiries that have toppled former and active high-ranking officers, including Gen. Guo Boxiong, the most senior serving officer for a decade until 2012, who was officially placed under investigation in late July.

The troop cuts were likely to be part of a broader agenda of change, which may include new joint command arrangements to better coordinate land, sea, air and other forces, M. Taylor Fravel, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the Chinese military, said in an email.

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

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the People's Liberation Army emerged from the Communist revolution as both a bulwark against external threats and a domestic guardian of the party's power. Its numbers have always been heavily weighted toward the land armies stationed across China to maintain domestic control.

But over recent decades, China's leaders have tried to shift more resources to air and naval forces intended to project influence abroad and assert the country's claims to disputed islands and waters. And Xi has indicated that he wants to accelerate that shift.

The Chinese government does not issue regular statistics on its military forces. But experts estimate that the army has about 1.6 million personnel, the navy 240,000 and the air force 400,000. Many of its recruits are youths from the countryside, or just out of high school, lacking the skills that are needed to work well in a modern military decked out with computers.

"The Chinese have come farther than any other military in the last decade," said Bonnie S. Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "But nobody recognizes the deficiencies of the PLA more than China."

Since becoming Communist Party leader in November 2012, Xi has often visited military units to rub shoulders with soldiers and publicize calls for the People's Liberation Army to embrace change while remaining a stronghold of party power. In tensions with Japan, Vietnam and other neighbors over rival maritime claims, Xi has also signaled that his government will back its demands with force.

"They know that if they have to win any war, it must be a high-tech war," said Che-Po Chan, an assistant professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. "It must be an advanced strategy now; it can't be a so-called people's war."

The government's efforts to attract more university graduates to the military through higher pay and better conditions have helped lift the educational levels of recruits in recent years, Chan said. But Xi faces the challenge of paying for further improvements while the economy slows, he said.

"To support their high-tech strategy, they need to have continuous economic development," he said. "The recent economic challenges might be a problem. But we need more time to judge."

Besides holding the presidency and the leadership of the Communist Party, Xi is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the People's Liberation Army. Xu said the decision to cut troop numbers had been approved by the commission.

"This announcement wasn't made suddenly," he said. "There's been a long period of preparation and deliberation."

Whether Xi can build on the new troop cuts to shape up the way the Chinese military operates will test his political mettle.

Even before his elevation to the top echelon of the party, Xi had some experience in the military, unlike his recent predecessors as president, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, who stood beside him during the parade. Xi started his rise through the party as an aide to the minister of defense for several years starting in 1979, when China was smarting from a brief but disastrous war with Vietnam.

Since he became head of the Communist Party, Xi has closely associated himself with the People's Liberation Army, while also pursuing a campaign against corruption that has reached into its topmost ranks.

At the start of the parade, he said that China's military was "loyally committed to its sacred duty of defending the security of the motherland and the peaceful life of the people, and loyally committed to the sacred duty of safeguarding world peace."

In March, the Chinese government announced that the defense budget for 2015 would be 10 percent higher than the previous year's outlay, consolidating China's position as the world's second-largest military spender, though still far behind the United States.

But at a time when China's economic growth has slowed, dismissing hundreds of thousands of soldiers could add pressure on the government. In the past, decommissioned officers and former soldiers unhappy with their job prospects and welfare have become a persistent source of protests outside government offices.

Instead of sending decommissioned officers and soldiers into the civil workforce, Xi could draw them into domestic security forces, especially the People's Armed Police, which was founded in the early 1980s from former units of the People's Liberation Army.

"What might happen is just a reshuffle," said Scobell, the expert at RAND. "The bulk of that may be transferred to another paramilitary force, whether as border guards or elements of the People's Armed Police."