How China's Xi Jinping is taming the People's Liberation Army
If Mao Zedong understood that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun", some of his successors have found that enforcing the maxim hasn't always been straightforward. In China's recent history, or at least for the past two decades under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) unique among the world's militaries in serving a political party, not a state resisted tight civilian oversight, functioning largely as a state within a state. The PLA outwardly paid obeisance to the party. In return, its generals were left to run their fiefdoms.
Not any more. Since taking over in November 2012, Xi Jinping has waged a relentless war to tame the PLA. Over the past five years, he has pushed through sweeping reforms the army long resisted. First, the Chinese president disbanded the four vast autonomous departments that oversaw the army's personnel, logistics, armaments and political affairs, cutting them down to size and bringing them under the direct control of the party's Central Military Commission (CMC), which Xi heads. He then went after corrupt officers and their
