When Yang Baibing took the podium before a committee of the National People's Congress, China's highest legislative body, the simple insignia on his olive- drab uniform gave no hint of his position as the army's top political commissar. But that will soon change. For Yang proposed restoring to the People's Liberation Army a system of military ranks once denounced by Maoists as "feudal, capitalist and revisionist."
Yang's eleven-grade hierarchy is the latest in a series of military reforms designed to transform the once poorly equipped and highly politicized revolutionary army into a modern, professional force. The ranking system will be accompanied...
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