At PLA's 90th anniversary, China shows off its war machine in grand military parade
All eyes in China these past few days have been on the sprawling army base of Zhurihe, in northern Inner Mongolia. On July 30, President Xi Jinping presided over the largest military parade in years, to celebrate the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) 90th anniversary on August 1.
For Xi, the parade was also an opportunity to showcase his reforms of the military. Since last year, he introduced sweeping changes to make the PLA more nimble and introducing joint commands. In keeping with that ethos, the Zhurihe parade eschewed all the usual trappings of grand parades in China. Instead of the usual limousine, Xi appeared in a PLA jeep. All the 12,000 assembled troops were from elite combat brigades.
The parade "was the nearest thing to a real battle that Xi could have to check the army's battle readiness", former PLA Major General Xu Guangyu put it to the South China Morning Post. "You can't create a war to test their abilities on the battleground," he said.
"But you need to look at how pilots are flying their jets, how soldiers are controlling their tanks." In his speech, Xi called on the PLA to stand up to all "enemies who offend" China and to be ready to fight "invading enemies", a common reference in PLA speeches to China's past invasions, notably at the hands of the Japanese.
Then there was the hardware. Around half of what was on display was shown for the first time in a parade. Top of the list was the J-20 fighter, China's stealth fifth generation fighter that was inducted in March and seen as Beijing's answer to the US F-22.
The J-20 has been tested recently even on the Tibetan plateau, where it was spotted in China's highest-altitude airport in Sichuan province. The DF-31 intercontinental missile, capable of an 11,000km and reaching the US, was also shown, as was the Y-20 transport plane, crucial for China's logistics in transporting men and tanks to border regions.
In the days leading up to the anniversary, some of the PLA's outspoken serving and former officers came out with strong statements aimed at India over the Doklam standoff. First, the PLA spokesper son told India to "not harbour any illusions" in a press conference ahead of the anniversary.
Then, PLA Navy Senior Captain Zhang Ye, who is a research fellow of the PLA Naval Research Institute, wrote in a commentary that India was opening itself to "third party" interventions in Jammu & Kashmir, a comment made before by media but for the first time by a PLA officer.
"A third party of the Sino-Bhutan border dispute, does the Indian military have the right to trespass across the Sino-Indian established border to stop China's road construction?" he wrote. "If yes, it would be very dangerous, for under India's logic, if Pakistan requests, a third country's army can enter the area disputed by India and Pakistan, including India-controlled Kashmir," he said, using the term China uses to refer to Jammu & Kashmir. The PLA, incidentally, has already begun joint patrols with Pakistan in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir near the Xinjiang border.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)