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China has established a new information warfare department under the direct command of its top military body as it begins its largest restructuring of the armed forces in more than eight years.
The shift of information warfare to the direct command of the Central Military Commission — the top Communist party and state organ that controls the People’s Liberation Army — would hand Chinese leader Xi Jinping even more direct control over the military, analysts said.
The Information Support Force will aim to “speed up military modernisation and effectively implement the mission of the people’s armed forces in the new era”, Xi said at a ceremony in Beijing on Friday.
It will be removed from the Strategic Support Force, which was set up eight years ago as a new PLA branch combining information, cyber and space warfare departments under Xi’s previous military restructuring, according to a statement from the PLA Daily military news service.
The space and cyber forces would also be brought under a new command structure, it said, de facto abolishing the Strategic Support Force. Under the SSF, the information forces had been in charge of collecting technical intelligence and providing intelligence support to regional military chiefs.
“When the SSF was created, they rearranged existing capabilities under a new command structure. We guessed at the time that might be transitional, and that has now come to pass,” said Joe McReynolds, China security fellow at the Jamestown Foundation.
Beijing’s efforts to further strengthen the PLA are closely watched as China challenges US dominance in the Indo-Pacific region and wields its growing military power to intimidate various neighbours in territorial disputes.
Xi’s last major PLA restructuring in 2015 moved key functions such as logistics, training and mobilisation directly under the command of the CMC, which he chairs.
Combining cyber, information and space forces under the SSF was viewed as an attempt to create similar direct control.
But experts on the Chinese military said that leaders had unwound that structure as a result of an incident last year in which a Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down by the US, as well as corruption investigations into generals and a failure to achieve synergies across the different divisions within the SSF.
The military leadership has been experimenting with smaller reorganisations in recent years, suggesting that the 2015 reforms were not complete.
“The relative success of the functions they moved under the CMC has convinced them that they will have the control they want,” McReynolds said.
He added that Beijing was focused on cutting out layers of command and enabling top leaders to speak directly to tactical forces in wartime if needed.
Bi Yi, a veteran army general, was appointed commander of the new Information Support Force, and Li Wei named as its political commissar. The latter position wields power equal with the commander as the Communist party seeks to enforce absolute loyalty and ideological correctness in the force, which belongs to the party rather than the state.
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