Speaker: Joseph Passman, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program
This seminar offers a historical perspective, rooted in the 1920s, for understanding the origins of a key aspect of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) today: the pervasive role that Marxist-Leninist ideology and organization plays across all of its military functions.
Scholars and policymakers don’t normally think of the PLA, the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as a faith-based organization. And yet, they see the PLA espouse an omnipresent and deep-seated conviction, as given representative expression in the Central Military Commission’s 2022 Q&A booklet, that ideological indoctrination of its members through “political work,” has the power to “transform spiritual power into the material force that enables the troops to win battles and accomplish every assigned mission.” “As Chairman Xi profoundly points out,” it continues, “political work is our army’s unique capability, our greatest trait, our greatest edge: it is what most differentiates us from all other armies.”*
More than lofty rhetoric, analysts note that the PLA’s professions of faith in the “spiritual power” of ideology translate into an incredible investment of time and energy in the ideological indoctrination of its members, even at the expense of other technical training. Most tangibly, this translates into the PLA’s defining and unique organizational structure, known as the “dual command system” (shuangshouzhang zhi 双首长制), which places military units under the joint control of both an operational commander and a political commissar. Most analysts view the function of both its ideological indoctrination programs and the dual system of commanders and commissars primarily as mechanisms to ensure the Party center’s all-encompassing control over its armed forces and, thus, an inherent hindrance to the flexible, decentralized command and control that is so central to the tenets of maneuver warfare. According to this majority view, then, the PLA’s professed faith in the battlefield utility of political ideology either represents naiveté about the technical and professional imperatives of modern warfare or, more nefariously, serves as a rhetorical mask for the real reason the Party maintains the dual command system: its deep distrust in the loyalty of its own military.
But what can a historical perspective offer to better understand the long-standing role of political ideology in Chinese military organization and on the battlefield?
In this work-in-progress seminar, Dr. Passman explores how the dual system of commanders and commissars first came to China and the moment when the system first entered battlefield practice. Historians have long understood that this unique system entered China in 1924, when Nationalist Party (KMT) leaders Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, working in alliance with the CCP, invited Soviet instructors to teach at their new Whampoa Military Academy. Indeed, they know that the Whampoa Military Academy became ground zero for transferring modes of Marxist-Leninist ideology and organization to China, including the new military role of the political commissar. But the actual combat role of these early political commissars (then called “Party Representatives”) has remained quite opaque. Using archival sources and newly digitized materials, the seminar follows the journey of the first Chinese political commissar to die in combat, a young Whampoa student named Cai Guangju 蔡光舉. The speaker shows how this commissar's story provides insights for better understanding how this experimental system functioned on the battlefield, what contradictions it manifested, and how the system’s maturation process would eventually contribute to the CCP’s military victories over the KMT two and a half decades later.
Admittance is on a first come–first served basis. Tea and Coffee Provided
