BEIJING, July 31 (Reuters) – China’s President Xi Jinping urged senior leaders of the ruling Communist Party on Friday to deepen the fight against corruption in the military and to advance the modernisation of national defence, state news agency Xinhua reported.
“The barrel of the gun must always obey the party’s command,” Xi said at a group session of the Politburo, China’s top decision-making body.
He also called for the establishment of an intelligent military system, including greater use of unmanned technologies and deeper use of cyber-information systems, Xinhua said.
Xi “pointed out that in advancing the modernisation of national defence and the armed forces with high quality, the fundamental orientation and standard of evaluation is always combat effectiveness,” Xinhua reported.
Xi’s remarks and the Politburo session come ahead of Saturday’s 99th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
While some defence analysts and military attaches say the anniversary is expected to be relatively low-key, it will effectively serve to highlight the looming centenary – a year in which the Communist Party has urged further progress in China’s military modernisation and combat readiness.
The anniversary comes amid ongoing military corruption purges that a report by a leading defence research centre, the London-based Independent Institute of Strategic Studies, said in February had hampered fighting readiness and left serious deficiencies in the PLA’s command structure.
“More than anything else, the foremost priority for the Communist Party leader and China’s politico-military leadership (is) who ought to be appointed into the Central Military Commission to lead the party-army into its next century,” said James Char, a China security scholar at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Char also noted the priority given to high tech modernisation in the study session, and said he believed “substantial resources” would be devoted to boosting military capabilities.
The Pentagon said last year that the U.S. military believed China’s leaders wanted its military ready to be able to win a conflict over Taiwan by 2027.
More recent assessments from the U.S. intelligence community say Beijing does not currently plan to invade Taiwan in 2027, and would prefer to achieve control of the island without the use of force.
China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced using force to take it, deploying military ships and planes around the island on a daily basis.
At a reception held Friday to celebrate the PLA anniversary, Chinese Defence Minister Dong Jun told the gathering that the military must “serve as a solid trump card” for national reunification and thwart any form of “Taiwan independence” separatist plots and foreign military intervention.
(Reporting by Beijing newsroom and Greg Torode in Hong Kong; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Louise Heavens)
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