While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite to fight and defeat the U.S. military in a conventional conflict.

Instead, two new reports from the federally funded RAND Corporation describe a PLA incapable of delegating authority to leaders who can adapt to complex, uncertain situations.

Part of the problem is how the Chinese public perceives the PLA. In their Jan. 30 report “Factors Shaping the Future of China’s Military,” senior international defense researcher Mark Cozad and senior economist Jennie W. Wenger wrote that the PLA “has struggled to attract top-tier talent, particularly from China’s best universities.”

Another part of the problem is structure. In his Jan. 27 paper, “The Chinese Military’s Doubtful Combat Readiness,” senior defense researcher Timothy R. Heath argued that the PLA’s primary purpose is not to fight a war, but instead to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power, resulting in a military that prioritizes loyalty over merit.

“The core of the PLA’s system of political controls includes political commissars, party committees, and the political organization system,” Heath wrote. “These controls are designed to ensure the military’s subordination to CCP authority, and all come at the cost of reduced potential combat effectiveness.”

People Power?

Like many other countries around the world, China’s population is rapidly aging and its economy has declined from the explosive growth of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, wrote Cozad and Wenger. 

Still, China’s overall population, both young and old, is predicted to be 3.95 times bigger than the U.S. population by 2030. Chinese children suffer obesity and asthma at lower rates than American children; and the vast majority of young Chinese people have enough education to complete military training. 

Despite those advantages, it is unclear the PLA can attract the kind of workforce it needs to adopt the “Western or quasi-Western operational model” to which it has aspired since the 1990s, Cozad and Wenger argued.

“The PLA’s efforts to develop an informatized, joint force capable of executing systems warfare will require officers and noncommissioned officers capable of making decisions in uncertain situations and willing to exercise innovation and creativity in highly complex operational environments,” they explained.

Achieving that has proven difficult for the PLA. While recruitment efforts focus on young college graduates with science and engineering backgrounds, recent clarifications of the military’s conscription regulations “strongly suggest a host of problems with the PLA’s recruitment efforts, including corruption, forced conscription, evading conscription, and refusing to serve once recruited,” researchers wrote.

Life in the PLA is widely perceived as harsh, particularly for new recruits, and having few economic and social benefits. Many of its remote base locations are unattractive. Like the U.S. military, the PLA is investing in higher living standards, post-service employment, student loan repayment, and other incentives to try to draw recruits. Also like the U.S. military, the PLA is emphasizing psychological resilience and physical fitness to help recruits adjust to military life.

Unlike in the U.S. military, these changes “represent a radical change from an extremely harsh, authoritarian environment with rudimentary, spartan conditions for recruits,” researchers wrote. But even if these carrots help improve recruitment, it remains unclear if a capable, information-age force can thrive in an authoritarian state, they said.

The PLA’s goal “is a model that is suited to the general cultural, political, and social attributes of Western societies (which tend to be individualistic, democratic, and less hierarchical), not to the authoritarianism that is deeply rooted in China’s society,” Cozad and Wenger wrote. “Thus, China’s economic and social environment will likely limit the PLA’s ability to get the ‘right’ people in its ranks.”

Party On

Heath raised similar questions in his paper. Despite vast modernization plans and growing numbers of warships and combat aircraft, the PLA’s main purpose remains upholding CCP rule rather than fighting wars, he argued. Such militaries prioritize political reliability over the capacity to fight foreign adversaries.

“Coup-proofing measures, such as promotions according to loyalty instead of merit, the fragmentation of command structures, and highly centralized command and control networks, reduce the military’s effectiveness on the battlefield,” Heath wrote.

The PLA has not fought a war since 1979, but its exercises so far are underwhelming; Chinese media “is replete with withering criticisms of the military’s inability to execute integrated joint operations and its lack of combat readiness,” Heath wrote. 

Political commissars—military officers who specialize in politics and ideology—share coequal authority with commanders, which impairs decision-making, especially since anecdotal Chinese media reports show commissars lack basic military knowledge and are often not physically fit for frontline duty. 

Commander authority is further diluted by party committees, whose approval has been sought by commanders before surfacing a submarine or rescuing stranded fishermen, Heath wrote. 

“The necessity of seeking party committee approval for most decisions and the imperative of strictly implementing all higher-level CCP policies and directives raises questions as to how rapidly and timely decision-making can be during combat,” he said. “This system of approvals and top-down control also provides little incentive for commanders to act with initiative.”

Politics is also a significant factor in recruiting, where candidates are screened for their compliance with party values and directives. Corruption touches everything from defective weaponry to false training records and seems to be tolerated as the price of political loyalty. 

“The perpetually half-hearted and incomplete nature of structural reforms designed to improve combat readiness suggests that this goal remains a secondary priority at best,” Heath wrote.

Political Appetite

But even if the PLA were a more fearsome, battle-tested force, Heath sees no evidence that Chinese leaders want to risk a conventional fight against the U.S. over Taiwan. Amid a declining economy, senior leaders “scarcely ever” list Taiwan as one of the top threats to CCP rule in their speeches, focusing instead on corruption, unemployment, crime, and subversion.

Xi’s language about unification with Taiwan is “relatively formulaic” and consistent with his predecessors, and CCP officials have done little to rouse public support the way leaders typically do before a conventional conflict, he said. The PLA also seems uninterested in such an option.

“No study on how China’s military could defeat U.S. forces has surfaced in any academy affiliated with the Chinese military,” Heath said. “China’s military has not even published a study on how it might occupy and control Taiwan.”

There is likely a classified plan to fight the U.S. military, but the lack of any unclassified supporting research raises doubts over how robust that plan might be, Heath said. The researcher made similar points at a June 13 hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

“There is ample evidence that China’s military is enhancing its preparedness, but little evidence that the national leadership intends to fight a war anytime soon,” he said at the time. Military preparedness is the routine modernization all militaries pursue, while national war preparation involves mobilizing an entire economy for war, he said.

Instead, Beijing seems to prefer using its “ample economic, policial, and military means” relative to Taiwan to deter Taiwanese independence while waiting for a better time to resolve the island’s status.

Tensions could still worsen and lead to war, Heath warned, but if China’s economy continues to decline, the PLA will further prioritize regime survival. Governments around the world, including that of China and the U.S., are struggling to preserve their legitimacy, which means U.S. defense officials “should consider a threat framework that elevates a broader array of threats alongside the remote possibility of conventional war with China,” he added.