Abstract
In early 1975, in a speech to the cadres of the headquarters of the General Staff Department of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), Deng Xiaoping delivered his blueprint for the military of the future. The radical restructuring of the military and its officer corps that it entailed was purportedly proposed by Mao Zedong himself. However, the fact that the speech was not made public until 1983, allegedly because it had been suppressed by the Gang of Four, makes it more likely that the architect of the reorganization, with its far-reaching implications for the PLA's officer corps, was Deng himself. Two decades later, at the close of the Deng era, it is important to examine the thrust of this document in assessing trends for the officer corps of the future.
