Full Text: China´s National Defense in 2006

Military Institutional Education

Under the unified leadership of the CMC, the PLA institutional education is managed at two levels: by the general headquarters/departments and by the military area commands (Navy, Air Force or Second Artillery Force). The four general headquarters/departments provide overall guidance for all PLA educational institutions, and the General Staff Headquarters administers military education. The development goal of military educational institutions is to establish and improve a new school system with distinct military features to shift priority from education of officer candidates for academic credentials to pre-assignment education. The new system takes pre-assignment educational institutions as the main form, and makes a distinction between these two types of education. The PLA has 67 military educational institutions, which are divided into two types: those for academic credentials and those for pre-assignment education. The former offers undergraduate education for pre-commission officers and graduate education for officers. The latter consists of elementary, intermediate and advanced level institutions and NCO schools, and offers pre-assignment training and rotational training for active-duty officers and NCOs. Some pre-assignment educational institutions also offer graduate courses in military science. At the same time, 112 regular institutions of higher learning in China undertake the task of training defense students, thus gradually increasing the number of military officers trained in civilian educational institutions.

The PLA endeavors to improve the overall performance of military educational institutions through focused and coordinated development. It has launched a project for establishing key military colleges and schools in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period. It continues to focus efforts on building a number of institutions and research centers for disciplines and specialties that are important in building informationized military and winning informationized wars. A new round of reform in teaching is underway to improve the training target models for officers in different fields and at different levels, and to develop new programs and curricula for the training of military personnel. The PLA is also improving the information network for military training, and has built more virtual laboratories, digital libraries and digital campuses to provide distance learning and online teaching and training. In graduate education, the focus is shifted from academic-oriented to practice-oriented, from emphasis on quantity to emphasis on quality, and from a relatively closed-door approach to a more open and diversified approach. The PLA now has 41 educational institutions authorized to award doctor's degrees and 60 to award master's degrees.