BEIJING -- In late 1997, President Jiang Zemin announced that China would cut the People's Liberation Army, then 3 million strong, by half a million troops as part of China's drive for a leaner, more advanced military that could both defend the homeland and reinforce China's image as a power in Asia.
What the president did not say was that as the army shrank, another, more secretive branch of the military, dedicated to internal stability, was already expanding. At the very time of Jiang's speech, it was absorbing 14 army divisions, or more than 100,000 troops.The expansion of the People's Armed Police, a national force trained in riot control, reflects the leaders' growing preoccupation with domestic unrest. It also reflects their wish to avoid having to resort to army combat troops to quell popular demonstrations, as occurred in 1989 around Tiananmen Square with disastrously bloody results.
Over the last year, according to witnesses and other accounts, armed police units were called out to help the ordinary police contain many of the hundreds of demonstrations and protests reported around China. The armed police have also battled ethnic separatists in the heavily Muslim province of Xinjiang and have long been used to help control Tibet.
The protests bubbling up around China, almost always centered on economic complaints, have generally been small and dispersed peacefully. But with urban unemployment soaring and farmers restive over high taxes and corruption, Jiang has proclaimed domestic stability as this year's No. 1 priority. And he apparently looks to the force he has built up -- now 1 million strong, Western analysts say -- to keep any unrest from getting out of hand.
"By increasing the size of the People's Armed Police, the leadership in Beijing implicitly acknowledges that internal unrest is a greater threat to the regime's survival and Chinese economic modernization than is foreign invasion," said John F. Corbett Jr. and Dennis J. Blasko, writing in China Strategic Review, a journal published in Washington.