The PLAAF’s Unique Political Culture

Over the years, the PLAAF developed a unique political culture that has not only influenced its development, but is crucial to understanding the Chinese air force. The PLAAF is accustomed to use the Chinese leadership’s instructions and speeches as guidance to define its doctrine, mission, and force structure in order to maintain political support. This PLAAF tradition continues to influ­ence thinking and efforts to pursue development of a modern air force. Despite their long revolutionary experience, Chinese leaders, particularly Mao Zedong, the founder and strategist of the PLA, had no knowledge of air and naval war­fare. Even so, the PLAAF codifies their sporadic instructions as profound mil­itary thought guiding the development of Chinese airpower.14 This approach is attributed partly to traditional Chinese filial piety and partly to the Chinese Communist Party’s highly doctrinaire and centralized institutional system.

At the onset of its establishment, the PLAAF used the chairman’s mes­sage of encouragement to the air force, “creating a powerful air force to elim­inate the remnant enemy [the KMT legacy forces that had evacuated the mainland for Taiwan] and consolidate national defense,” to characterize the air force’s contemporary and future task.15 While recognizing the importance of airpower in national consolidation and development, none of the Chinese leaders offered any systematic thinking on the air force and airpower employ­ment. One common view shared by these political and military leaders was the use of air force to ensure command of China’s airspace through air defense. Although a few of them occasionally talked about the use of bombers to strike deeply into the enemy’s rear positions, they never seemed to imply any offen­sive action beyond China’s own territory.16

Studies of the military thoughts of Chinese leaders on the air force and its employment dominated the PLAAF’s theoretical inquiry. As a result, for most of its existence until recently, no serious efforts were made to explore the differ­ing means of employing airpower within the framework of China’s defense strat­egy. Even now, PLAAF studies still incorporate the military thoughts of these past political leaders in their current pursuit of modern airpower theory. Thus, PLAAF thinking and doctrine are still imbued with the PLAs traditional politi­cal jargon. This at-best pseudoscientific approach accounts for the PLAAF’s fail­ure to ascribe the military thoughts of the earlier leaders to the PLAAF’s long­time perception of itself as a homeland defense force, whose task was, first and foremost, to defend China’s airspace and thus maintain only a limited role and modest capability to support the army and navy.17 The legacy of the Chinese leadership’s minimalist understanding of the actual role that airpower can play is evident in the PLAAF’s self-perpetuating view of itself in an unbroken string of memories about victories and heroism in the past, including a claim that it is the only air force in the world to have ever defeated the USAF. The PLAAF’s self-aggrandizing depiction, however intellectually dishonest it may be, has nev­ertheless become an important component of its service tradition.18