May Be Preparing to Fight Itself : China Military Divided by Regional, Ethnic Rivalries

The deep divisions that have torn the Chinese military in the wake of the student democracy movement stem from personal, regional and ethnic rivalries, some dating to the early days of the Chinese revolution, according to American analysts.

Exactly what is transpiring in China remains uncertain. But it is the consensus of U.S. government and private experts that the People’s Liberation Army, which has long considered itself the vanguard of the revolution, is split by conflicting loyalties and may be preparing to do battle with itself. Already, there have been reports of clashes in the capital’s outskirts.

U.S. intelligence sources estimate that as many as 350,000 Chinese troops from half a dozen military units have converged on Beijing with unknown intentions. More continue to arrive hourly, the sources said.

Government analysts here believe that China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, ordered the crackdown but has been unable to oversee its execution. American intelligence officials believe the 84-year-old Deng is incapacitated and hospitalized with prostate cancer, and some accounts have even reported his death.

Some older military commanders and senior political leaders remain fiercely loyal to Deng, most U.S. experts agree, and those loyalists wholeheartedly agreed with his reported decision to crack down hard on the pro-democracy student demonstrators.

However, in a stunning collapse of military discipline, younger mid-level military officers and thousands of conscripts from China’s major cities sympathize with the students and have refused to carry out orders to move against student demonstrators. Analysts said these more liberal elements in the People’s Liberation Army have supporters in the military high command, who publicly pleaded with Deng to refrain from using troops against civilians.

The two camps reflect current political tensions between hard-liners and reformers, in the view of Western analysts. And they mirror conflicts between city and countryside and between powerful families that wield power even in the supposedly egalitarian Chinese Communist system.

Echoes of Warlord Era

“It has the flavor of the old warlord era of the ‘20s and ‘30s,” one senior Pentagon official said. “It’s a matrix of relationships, with no clear winners or losers. Into this mix falls the army, and it is the army that is ultimately going to decide the issue.”

In fact, China has many armies, not one. Symbolizing their divisions, the 27th Army was brought in from the Mongolian border to crush the largely peaceful student rebellion in Tian An Men Square last weekend after the locally based 38th Army apparently disobeyed orders to suppress the demonstrations.

The 38th, a conscript force from the Beijing area, identifies with the aspirations of the students, according to U.S. authorities, and it is commanded by a friend and ally of the apparently ousted party general secretary and reformist Zhao Ziyang. Its troops train in the summer alongside young reservists from Beijing’s universities, and many of its members have personal and family ties to the demonstrators.

The 27th, by contrast, is based northwest of the capital and is largely staffed with less-sophisticated draftees from outlying farms and villages. It is commanded by Yang She, the nephew of President Yang Shangkun. The president also serves as permanent vice chairman of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission and is in effect the day-to-day commander of China’s 3.2-million-member armed forces.

The senior Yang is, like Deng, a veteran of the Chinese revolutionaries’ Long March of the mid-1930s, in which Chinese Communists retreated about 6,000 miles before Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces and harassing local warlords.

A U.S. intelligence source, describing the 27th Army as “the villain of the piece,” said that half of the peasant conscripts are illiterate and that the unit has a reputation for ruthlessness.

“These kids came from the Mongolian border area and have been in a position of relative isolation from what’s happening elsewhere in the country,” said another expert, Larry A. Niksch, an Asian affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service.

“Obviously, the command and control is much tighter among these units than among city-based troops. I have no doubt that members of these units were told things as to why they were going into Beijing that were false.”

He said the soldiers were probably told that the students were foreign-inspired counterrevolutionaries who had been killing and looting throughout the capital. The troops had never been trained in riot control or crowd control and were given orders to fire at will, Niksch said.

A Chinese army, equivalent to a corps in a Western army, is made up of three divisions, about 40,000 troops.

Elements of several other PLA units have recently arrived by road and air in the Beijing area, U.S. officials said. The elite 15th Airborne Division from Wuhan aided in the bloody weekend assault on Tian An Men Square, as did the 65th Army and the 6th Tank Division, U.S. sources reported.

Also sighted in and around the capital were units of the Tianjin-based 66th Army, the 39th Army from Shenyang and the 16th Army, which is based north of the capital.

Loyalties Undetermined

The loyalties of the 66th, the 39th and the 16th could not be established, but there were unconfirmed reports of sporadic gunfire in the western part of Beijing between platoon-sized units of the 16th and 27th armies.

Despite the persistent reports of internecine PLA warfare, U.S. analysts are not now predicting an armed insurrection.

“At this point we don’t see units rebelling against authority to the point there would be a full-scale civil war,” said a U.S. government source who asked not to be identified. “The hard-liners have the edge all the way. The moderates simply don’t have the support of the military, and they have no levers on power.”

Although China’s military has undergone a massive 10-year reorganization designed to sweep away old loyalties and personal animosities, ancient rivalries remain, according to June Teufel Dreyer, a University of Miami expert on China’s military.

“A couple of years ago they decided that the field armies were too much the focus of personal loyalties,” Dreyer said. “They abandoned them and put in place group armies, which they said were more suited to a professional military. All this was a code word for destroying personal networks, but you don’t do that by changing names. It takes time.”

The hard-line 27th Army is descended from the Third Field Army, which was based in Nanjing and was called into Beijing in 1971 to put down an attempted coup against Mao Tse-tung by Lin Piao and his 4th Field Army. Today’s rebellious 38th Army is a direct descendant of Lin’s 4th Field Army, Dreyer said.

“We may be seeing a replay of a historic antagonism,” she said. “The Chinese are good at bearing grudges.”

The relationship between Yang Shangkun, China’s second-ranking military leader, and his nephew, Yang She, commander of the 27th Army, is only part of the family network that some Chinese ironically refer to as the “Yang Family Village.”

Yang Shangkun’s brother, Yang Baibing, is director of the army’s political department, and his son-in-law, Chi Haotian, is chief of the general staff. All are intensely loyal to Deng, Western analysts say, but may be preparing to take over the government when Deng falls from power or dies.

“That’s why all the guns are now trained outward” from Beijing, theorized Thomas W. Robinson, director of the China Studies Program at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

“They’re sending a signal to other military commanders: ‘This place is secured; don’t mess. We military commanders are going to pull the situation together. We’re not going to have warlordism, we’re not going to have a Cultural Revolution, we’re going to put the country back together and put in place essentially a military government.’ ”

But even if the brutal repression achieves its end, it comes at a very high price for the Chinese military, which prides itself on its recent progress toward professionalism as well as its faithfulness to its revolutionary past.

Paul H. B. Godwin, professor of national security policy at the National War College in Washington, said the excessive violence that quelled the demonstrations only served to aggravate existing divisions within the army.

“By attacking its own citizens, you have forced the army to violate the core of its military ethic,” Godwin said. “You’ve eroded one of the principal objectives of a decade of military reform.”

TROOPS CONVERGE ON BEIJING

1--Troops occupying central Beijing after crushing demonstrations: 27th Army, and units of 15th Airborne Division (from Wuhan), 85th Army (from northwest of Beijing), and 6th Tank Division.

2--Armies reported moving toward Beijing, or with some units already in capital area: 38th Army (from Baoding), 28th Army (from Datong), 16th Army (from Inner Mongolia), 39th Army and 64th Army (from Shenyang), 66th Army (from Tianjin).

Times staff writer Robin Wright also contributed to this story.