China Cancels The Revolution
March 23, 2010: Without any fanfare, China has changed the names of its armed forces. Gone are the PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) prefix for the navy (PLAN) and air force (PLAAF). It's now just the Chinese Army, Chinese Navy and Chinese Air Force. Since there was no official announcement, there was no explanation for why the old PLA prefix was dropped. The PLA was the original armed forces, founded in 1927, of the Chinese Communist Party. This force was initially known as the Chinese Red Army. After World War II, the PLA name was formally adopted for all the communist armed forces.
For the last two decades, China has been working to modernize its armed forces, and this name change appears to be a minor part of that.
That would be interesting because it might be preamble to a series of reforms in the military as part of the result of the discussion about "nationalizing" armed forces as my politics professor said.
Another professor at our school, an Asian international relations and security experts, said that his source told him that there is nothing to this story. "The story appears to have started with a recent blog on Chinese military affairs that showed an arm patch that only said "中国陆军"... This change is at least 5 years old."
A visiting senior Chinese military official said that "perhaps some very specific units have patches without the "Peoples Liberation" part, (e.g. Army Air corp, for instance), but that there is no truth to this whole-sale dropping of the terminology."
Case closed.
Case closed.
1 comments:
Doesn't make any sense to me. No one with any real power would benefit from the nationalization of Chinese army.
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