China’s military has an Achilles’ heel: Low troop morale - this is a piece on an important topic that offers a deceptively sensible explanation. The reality might be very different, but there’s little evidence here to know for sure. A 🧵: asia.nikkei.com/Politics/China…
1. The context of East Asia ‘fighting spirit’. Since the days of Nitobe’s work on the impact of samurai culture in Meiji Japan, the debate over ‘morale’ in leading Asian armed forces has the tendency to be an either/or type of question. The truth is a little more complex.
1a. How different is China? Taken in context, what’s described in this article is not that different to problems of morale in the Japanese, Taiwanese, and indeed Korean societies. In these modern societies, security matters but youth seems to consider that’s not their problem.
1b. One reason to explain them all? In this piece the one child policy is set forth as a key variable. Not so fast. Confucianism and how it might affects youth strategies has really little bearing over performance. It might have on joining, but performance is related to pay, etc;
1c. Morale or scale? There’s one example of a submarine been forced to surface in 2018 as a way to indicate the notion of ‘giving up’. There is also another - & more reasonable - answer: scale. The Chinese navy has been growing at unmatched pace: standards cannot match the speed.
2. Technology as the response to human shortcomings. This is understandable, and not that uncommon, in fact not even a Chinese thing. From Israel to Japan, different countries have always considered tech as a way to complement a specific set of issues.
2a. A human-machine tension? The idea that one uses tech to partly replace lack of committed humans, doesn’t address the simple fact that tech still needs capable people to man it. Thus, one space to watch is really how well pays, training, and career paths are being adapted.
2c. Confucianism vs Leninism? Another important feature which is untouched is the question of patriotic education. How does PE affect young members joining the PLA as opposed to their filial piety commitments?
In all, this is a piece that raises an important topic, but one that should require much more examination for it to be empirically and operationally useful. Thank you for reading!