The People’s Liberation Army (PLA)

The field of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) studies has evolved with the PLA’s own development, and China studies more broadly, increasing tremendously in scale, scope, discipline, and diversity. The field has similarly evolved as the availability and variety of Chinese source material increased, particularly in the last few decades with the advent of the Internet. While all works usually include some historical background, many tend to focus on the PLA’s development largely around the same time as the works themselves were written. Early works trace the organization’s initial history following its founding in 1927, and subsequent participation in irregular warfare in the 1930s and conventional warfare in the 1940s that ultimately brought the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its Army to power in 1949. The next several decades of PLA studies focused on organizational development and the PLA’s involvement in politics and policy as it transitioned from being a nonstate revolutionary military to one functioning within the role of a military force both of a political party and vis-à-vis the country that party ruled. These earlier phases of PLA studies were marked by limited access to Chinese sources, as well as archival material from countries that interacted with China, especially during the Cold War. Such seminal figures in the field as Ellis Joffe warned their readers that the insufficient source material available to them limited analysis. With the end of the Cold War, the opening up of more Chinese and foreign archives, and the proliferation of personal Chinese accounts and Internet resources, a new era in the field of PLA studies began in the 1990s. The increased accessibility and multiplicity of sources gave the field a breadth and depth of perspective long obscured by PRC censorship. The burst of activity that came from the PLA during this time to strengthen its capabilities similarly gave the field more data with which to work. The development of China’s media and information market, as well as the efforts from the central leadership and increasingly competitive services and branches of the PLA to showcase their capabilities to their fellow citizens and the world, have similarly resulted in an expansion of sources and data in the years since. However, despite their age, many older works retain great value. Not only do they show the different strands of thought that existed within the field at different periods of time, but they also contain some older sources otherwise unavailable, such as interviews and personal interactions with important actors who have since passed away, or even quotes from documents that have not yet been digitized. The laborious linguistic demands and other analytical challenges associated with this field incentivize collaboration. Many leading works are edited volumes based on conference proceedings. The views expressed here are the authors’ alone. They are grateful for inputs from several dozen leading scholars and analysts in the field. They dedicate this bibliography to the memory of Ezra Vogel (1930–2020) in appreciation of his generous mentoring and support. Since this is a bibliography of the field of PLA studies, we do not include official PRC documents because they are not in the field itself but rather its subject. Space constraints likewise prevent us from including most reports from other nations’ governments.