Contentious Veterans (original) (raw)
Related papers
Contentious Veterans: China's Retired Officers Speak Out
What drives retired military officers in China toward contention? Decades of research on protest has produced little on veterans' collection action, and even less on that by ex-officers. Newspaper reports, police journals, and veterans' blogs show that contention by Chinese former officers (ranging from occupying government compounds to marches, mass petitioning, open letters, and class action lawsuits) is the result of bad luck in post-military job assignments, a fragmented political system that makes it difficult to ensure that pensions and other benefits reach retirees, and pervasive corruption that leads ex-officers to feel that local officials have embezzled funds meant for them. Contention by former officers typically uses military rhetoric and builds on military experiences, even for former officers who were employed in civilian jobs for many years. Although contention by ex-officers is not likely to rock the state, it says much about how ''sticky'' military identities are, where veterans fit in the political landscape, Leninist civil-military relations, and the treatment that old soldiers receive in a fast changing socioeconomic order.
Veterans' Political Activism in China
This article examines protest, petitioning, lawsuits, open letters, blogging, and other forms of activism by Chinese veterans. Moving beyond images of heroic soldiers in the official media, and the near absence of reporting on veterans' problems, we draw mainly on blog posts and military websites where veterans share their experiences of post-army life. We find that, overall, veterans have had difficulty adjusting to the economic, social, cultural, and political changes of the reform era, with many of them finding themselves left behind as other groups have leapt ahead. Veterans complain about poverty, unresolved medical problems, and lack of respect for their contributions to the nation. Not a few have experienced terrible indignities at the hands of security officials and a leadership that is bent on preventing any interest group formation that might ameliorate veterans' problems.
Journal of Contemporary China, 2020
Based on in-depth interviews of Chinese veterans and specifically focusing on the cadets in Shanghai, this article explores the mechanism of emotional mobilization of this highly organized contentious group vis-à-vis other disorganized and dispersive one such as labors and homeowners. It reveals that strong emotional ties with comrades in troops and the despondency brought about by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ineffective redress to their demands have rendered Chinese veterans, who see themselves rhetorically glorified and embodying heroic status in the country, protesting for their military identity and military rank recovery for decades. In order to defuse veterans' grievances, flexible governance, which stresses emotional care and affection by petition social workers, is deployed by the Party-state to settle disputes that beyond law and policy.
Based on in-depth interviews of Chinese veterans and specifically focusing on the cadets in Shanghai, this article explores the mechanism of emotional mobilization of this highly organized contentious group vis-à-vis other disorganized and dispersive one such as labors and homeowners. It reveals that strong emotional ties with comrades in troops and the despondency brought about by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ineffective redress to their demands have rendered Chinese veterans, who see themselves rhetorically glorified and embodying heroic status in the country, protesting for their military identity and military rank recovery for decades. In order to defuse veterans' grievances, flexible governance, which stresses emotional care and affection by petition social workers, is deployed by the Party-state to settle disputes that beyond law and policy.
The long-term biographical consequences of political activism raises two questions: What remains of the political passions after social movements subside and why does this occur? Scholars have pointed to the transformative power of participation in social movements. Some participants may experience a transformation in values and beliefs, while others have formed enduring social networks and sustained social activism
Recent research on collective memory and war commemoration highlights the “conspicuous silence” of war veterans in Chinese history. Studies of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945) typically reflect either a state-centred approach, which emphasises the official history constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the alternative narratives constructed by intellectual elites in post-socialist China. In response to these top-down narratives, this essay focuses instead on a historical redress movement led by ex-servicemen of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The former PLA members, the participant volunteers of this movement, devote themselves into seeking and supporting a group of forgotten Kuomintang (KMT) veterans who fought against the Japanese invaders in the Second World War but now struggle with impoverished living conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, I will show how the daily interactions between these two groups of veterans embody a more private and internalized sense of commemorative yearning for a lost past, highlighting in the process the value of ethnographic research in breaking through the wall of silence constructed by hegemonic histories around veteran communities and their role in making war history.
Why Veterans Lose: The Decline of Retired Military Officers in Myanmar's Post-Junta Elections (2021)
Third World Quarterly 42(11): 2611-2628, 2021
Retired military officers often continue to wield significant influence in regimes built after the end of junta rule, sometimes helping to bridge enduring civil-military divides. Myanmar's recent legislative elections offers a counterintuitive case. There has been a rapidly decreasing influence of military retirees in the electoral landscape shaped in the 2010s. I reveal this decline using data on the sociological background of candidates for the 2015 and 2020 elections. Then, building on field interviews with retired officers who ran for office, I offer five explanatory propositions: (1) the depletion of moral capital held by soldiers; (2) military socialisation and the difficulties for veterans to transition to political life, with rivals from other sectors emerging as better equipped; (3) the existence of worthier avenues for power, influence and wealth acquisition; (4) the failure of the authoritarian successor party to manipulate votes and be voted back into office; and (5) the lingering authority and political sway of serving officers. The findings illuminate the persistent insulation from Myanmar society of its active military-even before the 2021 coup-and challenge the claim that veterans can help close the widening gap in Myanmar's civil-military relations.
Politicalization or Professionalism? A Case-Study of the Military's Discourse in China
Armed Forces & Society, 2020
After decades of military reform, how does the Chinese military justify its persistent role in politics and social life? This mixed-methods study examines the discursive strategies used by military deputies to understand how a semi-professional military speak to its relations to the Party, its own organizational missions and goals, and potential conflicts between them. Computer-assisted text analysis is combined with targeted deep reading to identify and examine latent topics in comments made by military deputies between 2001 and 2017. The findings show that the military deputies simultaneously mobilize a political discourse and a discourse of professionalism. This duality of discourse constitutes a source of legitimacy for the military's pursuit of corporate interests.
2. Commentary on Civil-Military Relations in China: The Search for New Paradigms
2001
With the exception of Chinese military expenditure, there is probably no area of PLA studies more enigmatic and less transparent than civil-military relations. Insufficient data has, however, not deterred scholars and other analysts from producing dozens of articles and book chapters and a handful of books on civilmilitary or Party-army relations in the PRC.134 Presented with a lack of hard data, analysts are forced into time-tested tea leaf reading, biographical analysis, and a large dose of conjecture. Hong Kong and Taiwanese newspapers provide fodder for such conjecture, but more often than not prove to be faulty guides to empirical understanding.
Journal of Strategic Studies, 2016
Since emerging as China's top leader following the 18th Party Congress, Xi Jinping has moved swiftly to consolidate his formal authority as Central Military Commission chairman over the Chinese People's Liberation Army. In redressing the civil-military imbalance wrought by Dengist economic reforms, the commander-in-chief has combined institutional mechanisms with the use of fear to impose authoritative civilian control over the military. This paper proposes that a combination of changes to the Chinese strategic environment has contributed to Xi's utility of the anti-corruption campaign to purge the regime's coercive forces of its previous underpinnings, and advances that the war on military malfeasance has given rise to a new set of dynamics in civil-military relations in post-Reform China.