MODERNIZATION: China cuts down army troops by about 50%; increases size of navy, air force.

The 2 million-strong Chinese military has significantly boosted its navy, air force and new strategic units and downsized its land-based army, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported quoting a state-run Xinhua report.

In a feature report highlighting the “transformational changes” made by the PLA, Xinhua on Sunday said “this new data is unprecedented in the history of the PLA the army now accounts for less than 50 per cent of the total number of PLA troops; almost half of our non-combatant units have been made redundant, and the number of officers in the PLA has been reduced by 30 per cent.”

In the last few years, the PLA has downsized its military by retrenching three lakh troops under the military reforms initiated by President Xi Jinping. But it still remained the world’s largest military with two million personnel in the ranks.

The statement indicated that the four other branches of the PLA the navy, air force, rocket force and strategic support force, which is responsible for areas such as cyberwarfare – now together make up more than half of the Chinese military, overtaking the army, which has traditionally been the dominant unit of the PLA.

It wasn’t that long ago that the entire Chinese military numbered around four million personnel. Beijing is serious moving from a Soviet-style mass conscript army of questionably trained soldiers, to a smaller, professional, and much more lethal force more like the American model.

But an important question remains. Authoritarian regimes can’t tolerate the kind of bottom-up, individual initiative which makes a Western-style military so deadly. Can Beijing maintain a top-down regime and a bottom-up PLA?

We’ll see.