ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the extent, nature, and political implications of professionalization in the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). It seeks to provide a more rigorous definition of military professionalism and to apply it to the Chinese case. Soviet influence has been a significant factor in PLA history, and the Soviet experience provides useful insights into the interplay of advanced military modernization with authoritarian politics. For a variety of historical reasons, military professionalism first appeared, and became highly developed, in the nineteenth-century Prussian general staff system, which first applied to the waging of war the now-familiar bureaucratic principles of hierarchy, specialization, education, and promotion based on merit. The penetration of officers into civilian hierarchies will increase the authority of the officer corps in society, but will tend to result in decreased military professionalism. The institutions of military professionalism "were neither aristocratic nor democratic; they were military.
