This article examines Chinese civil-military relations using a bottom-up analytical approach and hitherto untapped sources, including interviews with military personnel in active service. It argues that traditional approaches to political control, which generally interpret the changing political-military relationship through military professionalism and institutional autonomy, miss out on important aspects and may generate erroneous conclusions. Here, focus is instead on the professional autonomy of the Chinese officer corps. Through an empirical study of the organization of military work at two of China’s top military education institutes, the article illustrates how professional autonomy and direct political control varies, both between hierarchical levels and issue areas. This highlights the multidimensionality of both control and professional manoeuvrability and underlines the fruitfulness of including an intra-organizational perspective in order to reach better informed conclusions about political control and civil-military relations in today’s China.
摘要:
本文利用自下而上的分析方法和至今尚未开发的来源，包括对现役军事人员的采访，探讨中国的军民关系。文章认为，传统的关于政治控制的研究方法，其一般通过军事职业化和院校自治来解释不断变化的政治与军事关系，忽视了许多重要方面，可能会产生错误的结论。因此，文章转而聚焦于中国军官阶层的专业自主权。通过对中国两个最高军事教育院校的军事工作的组织所进行的实证研究，本文阐述了专业自主权和直接政治控制之间，在等级和问题领域方面的差异。这突出了政治控制和专业灵活性的多维度，并强调了将组织内部透视包容进来的成果，以便获得关于今日中国的政治控制和军民关系的更为明智的结论。