The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s 125-page report, “China Military Power – Modernizing a Force to Fight and Win,” details China’s military modernization efforts with an emphasis that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is not a “national army” but a military arm of the Chinese Communist Party that exists to guarantee the CCP’s survival.To improve the military’s ability to protect the Party from losing power, the CCP has been generous in providing the PLA with an increased budget of 10 percent per year from 2000 to 2016.
In late 2015, President Xi Jinping unveiled the most substantial PLA reforms in thirty years, making the military “a leaner, more lethal force capable of conducting the types of joint operations that it believes it must master to compete with the US military.”
