China’s President tightens grip on military with new information warfare unit

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.

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.