ABSTRACT
The official Chinese media projects an image of the soldiery selflessly serving the people whenever not actively engaged in military training; millions of words have been devoted to the subject of soldiers assisting sowing, harvesting, capital construction, and industrial production. The most promising young soldiers are sent to training schools run by the military regions in conjunction with the provincial Party committees. In the regional forces, the military region headquarters selects its own regimental and divisional leadership, and then presumably reports its decisions to the Central Military Commission. While the field army theory as a whole should be discarded, some of its parts are salvageable. In particular, military leaders have tended to favor their former subordinates as proteges. Western military men regard the idea of a commissariat with undisguised loathing, but, as it works in China, the system does not appear to engender much conflict.
