PLA Daily 2005-07-05

　　"The Regulations on Nonmilitary Personnel in the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA)", promulgated jointly by the State Council and the Central Military Commission, is an important measure taken by the PLA to readjust and reform the composition of its military strength and its personnel placement system in order to get along with the trend of the new military changes in the world and the development trend of the socialist market economy. It marks the establishment of the PLA's nonmilitary personnel system with Chinese characteristics, and has opened up a broad prospect for the PLA to make full use of the human resources in society to serve its modernization drive.

　　With the nonmilitary personnel system in place, some supporting posts would be filled by non-active service personnel while the limited number of active service cadres would be used to take up operational command posts. In this way, the relationships of various types of personnel can be brought into better balance, thus it can not only satisfy the needs of service and support work, but can also strengthen the command functions of operational command system, thereby improving the PLA's ability to adapt itself to informationalization warfare. The adoption of nonmilitary personnel system can further remove the systemic barriers in personnel placement and build a bridge between the army's employing units and local recruitment center, which means that it has helped open up a new approach for the army to attract more outstanding people to join the army to serve its modernization drive. We must also see that the adoption of the nonmilitary personnel system is a fundamental reform of PLA's personnel placement system, which will be conducive for the army to form an open and flexible mechanism by which the talents can join or leave the army freely, to form a mechanism of recruitment on the basis of competitive selection, to form a mechanism of fixing remuneration according to posts, and to form a mechanism dovetailing army's support system with that of civilian's, thereby bringing about optimum efficiency in utilization of human resources.

　　(July 5, PLA Daily)