ABSTRACT
Political commissar is a unique phenomenon found only in communist societies. This uniqueness has attracted worldwide attention of researchers of civil-military relations. The significance of the topic is that political commissar has served as a defining feature to analyze the interaction between the armed forces and the ruling communist parties.1 Political commissars have been the instrument of party control over the military. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the political commissar system is one of the three systems on which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) relies to command the gun (the other two being the party committee system and the political departments system in the military).2 Jiang Zemin once said that these three systems are the distinctive indicators that render the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) different from all other armed forces in the world, including those in socialist countries.3 This institutionalized party control over the PLA has enabled the CCP to monopoly all key powers in the country. Therefore, political commissars constitute the foundation of the communist system.
