January 28, 2026: When Chinese leader Xi Jinping assumed power in 2012, he was determined to turn the Chinese armed forces into an organization that could fight and win. His first obstacle was corrupt officers. Many Communist commanders and staff officers saw military service as a way to get rich. Xi is still finding and prosecuting corrupt officers, including generals and admirals. While trying to get rich, these officers were not doing much to ensure that their troops were trained to fight and win a war. China has spent over a trillion dollars on the military since 2012, and at least ten percent of that was lost to corruption.

Despite the corruption, the Chinese military has made many efforts to create capable combat forces. For example, China sees no point in Russia continuing to fight the Ukrainians, who have superior troops, weapons and leadership. In Taiwan, the reaction to Ukraine increased popular support for resisting a Chinese invasion as stubbornly as the Ukrainians did in their homeland. China is not just worried about Taiwanese resistance but also about the capabilities of Chinese forces.

China has spent several hundred billion dollars over the last decade to upgrade its military to the point that it was superior to Russia’s. While studying China’ military modernization, the U.S. intelligence community came to believe that actual Chinese annual defense spending was about $700 billion. Current U.S. spending is $950 billion. The Chinese spent a lot on organizational efforts, special training and new equipment.

Over the last decade the Chinese army has been converting its divisions to brigades, many of them independent brigades. There are three types of combat brigades. The most potent is the heavy brigade, each with about a hundred tanks and dozens of tracked IFVs/Infantry Fighting Vehicles plus detachments of engineers and other specialists.

Then there are the medium brigades that are mainly infantry in wheeled IFVs. These are similar to American Stryker brigades. The heavy and medium brigades often have up to 5,000 troops, including all the smaller specialist detachments that make these brigades the equivalent of a small division.

Finally, there are dozens of light infantry brigades. Many of these are simply infantry who are transported by truck but the light brigades include some mountain brigades and several air assault, via helicopter, brigades. The Chinese Air force has seven airborne infantry brigades with 4,000 troops each and the navy has three marine brigades with 6,000 troops each.

There are also about 12,000 special operations commando troops, most of them in the army. Each of the 13 Group Armies has a special forces brigade and these brigades have fewer than a thousand troops. The paramilitary police have about a thousand of these commandos while the air force has a smaller number.

The major problem with the army is that all the elite special operations and airborne units as well as key units stationed in the capital and a few other places have few conscripts. Nearly all the conscripts are assigned to the combat brigades and the support brigades assigned to each of the 13 Group Armies. Units with conscripts spend about half the year training the new ones and, if there is a war these units would half the time, have a large portion of their troops poorly trained and not fully integrated into the unit. This is a major problem for combat units that depend on well-trained troops who have been with their units long enough for commanders to know what they can get out of them. China’s use of conscripts makes its non-elite units and service/supply troops very uncertain in capability in a real war.

The Chinese army currently has about 975,000 troops and about 15 percent are conscripts. This is a problem because the conscripts only serve for two years and then most leave. The army encourages conscript soldiers who performed well during their two years to become career soldiers. If accepted the soldier accepts a multi-year service contract and is soon promoted to corporal and some are offered a chance to be an officer and attend officer candidate school. Soldiers who perform well are allowed to keep reenlisting until they are 55, at which point they retire on a pension and get preferential consideration for government jobs. The percentage who are accepted as career professionals and offered officer candidate school varies from year-to-year depending on need and the quality of the conscripts finishing their service.

There are seven NCO ranks, from corporal to Master Sergeant 1st class which is the Chinese equivalent of Sergeant Major. Many of these career soldiers don’t stay in long enough to retire, and some are not allowed to reenlist. NCOs are relatively new for China because, until the 1980s, China followed the Russian practice of having officers handle many jobs NCOs take care of in Western forces. China has greatly increased the pay and responsibilities of NCOs in the past two decades. Now some more experienced or highly trained NCOs do technical and staff jobs that were previously performed by officers. To become an NCO, you must have a high school education, which not all Chinese teenagers are able to obtain.

While China wants an army that can perform as well as Western forces, they won’t get it until they convert to an all-volunteer force and upgrade initial combat training to Western standards. China is switching to Western training methods but is not yet willing to spend what it takes to pay all the troops what they are worth. Currently the two-year conscripts are paid $150-300 a month. The lowest ranking NCO makes more than twice that and the top NCO Sergeant Majors make ten times what a conscript makes. For an all-volunteer force, pay for everyone would have to go up to maintain differences between rank. That would begin at the very bottom, where new recruits would make two or three times what they get now. Living conditions, housing and food have been improving rapidly during the last decade, but career troops need to make enough to support a family. The need to dramatically increase pay for an all-volunteer and higher quality army is a significant reason for China’s retention of conscription.

While Chinese troops have not seen combat since 1979, they have engaged in some stressful relief operations. In the wake of the relief efforts for the 2008 earthquakes, army doctors found themselves faced with thousands of soldiers exhibiting strange symptoms. These include severe fatigue, shortness of breath, palpitations, headaches, excessive sweating, dizziness, disturbed sleep, fainting and flashbacks to traumatic situations encountered during the weeks of working in the earthquake zone where nearly 100,000 people died. A few of the army doctors recognized the symptoms as PTSD/Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's been three decades since Chinese soldiers experienced combat, and there are only stories left of its after-effects. Some of the oldest NCOs and officers vaguely remember, when they first entered military service, hearing about veterans of the 1979 battles on the Vietnamese border, suffering from combat fatigue.

PTSD is not unusual for relief workers at the site of particularly horrendous disasters. The earthquakes in central China were the kind of disaster that only occurs every generation or two. This was the first one in which so many troops were mobilized, so quickly, to help out. Thus many of these soldiers saw the aftereffects when they were still fresh, and at their most horrific. Chinese doctors studied the growing body of medical knowledge and research on PTSD, particularly work done in the U.S. to treat the many soldiers exposed to the stress of working in wartime Iraq. Chinese military doctors estimate that up to 20 percent of the soldiers who performed relief duty in the earthquake zone now have PTSD. Many civilian workers are similarly affected and also need treatment.

Xi Jinping proclaims his military is ready for combat. Chinese military publications feature many articles that cast doubt on the combat readiness of Chinese forces.