[1945] Last month, a Chinese entrepreneur making medical equipment for consumers told me that local officials had demanded he convert his production lines in China so that they could turn out items for the military. Communist Party cadres, he said, were issuing similar orders to other manufacturers.Moreover, Chinese academics privately say the ongoing expulsion of foreign colleagues from China’s universities appears to be a preparation for hostilities.
The People’s Republic of China is preparing to go to war, and it is not trying to hide its efforts. Amendments to the National Defense Law, effective the first day of last year, transfer powers from civilian to military officials.
In general, the amendments reduce the role of the central government’s State Council by shifting power to the CMC, the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. Specifically, the State Council will no longer supervise the mobilization of the People’s Liberation Army.
As Zeng Zhiping of Soochow University told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post,
"The CMC is now formally in charge of making national defense policy and principles, while the State Council becomes a mere implementing agency to provide support for the military."
In one sense, these amendments were window dressing. "Recent changes to China’s National Defense Law that diminish the power of the State Council are largely political posturing," Richard Fisher of the Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center told me soon after the amendments went into effect. "The Chinese Communist Party and particularly its subordinate CMC have always held supreme power over decisions regarding war and peace."
Why then do we care about the National Defense Law amendments?
The amendments, Fisher tells us, "point to China’s ambition to achieve ’whole nation’ levels of military mobilization to fight wars and give the CMC formal power to control the future Chinese capabilities for global military intervention."