TheNanjing Military Region (MR), or Nanjing Military Area Command (MAC), is headquartered in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province. Its area of responsibility (AOR) includes the Shanghai Municipality, the five eastern provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian.
The heart of the region is China’s most important industrial and economic zone, the Yangtze River Delta, home to an economy that encompasses a GDP of some US$2 Trillion, or 21% of the national economy. There are some 90 million people living in the so-called Yangtze Delta Metropolitan Area, which includes one of the world’s largest cities Shanghai, and some twenty relatively developed municipalities in three provinces.
The Nanjing MR faces the East China Sea to the east, and its southern part directly faces Taiwan. Therefore, the MAC plays key role in defending China’s most populated and economically developed region, and the PLA’s preparation for its “military struggle against Taiwan”.
Historically, the Nanjing MR was generally regarded as one of the less important military regions. The military region was established in the 1940s as the Eastern China MR, which was renamed Nanjing MR in the mid-1950s. The main responsibilities of the military region up until the mid-1980s was to defend China’s east coast region. In 1985, the PLA reorganised its 11 military regions into 7, with the Nanjing MR absorbing the Fuzhou MR. As a result of the growing tension between China mainland and Taiwan since the mid-1990s, the status of the Nanjing MR has increased.
During the PLA exercise to intimidate the Taiwanese presidential election in 1996, the term of “Nanjing War Zone” (Zhanqu) was first used by the Chinese official media. The distinction between the traditional MR (MAC) and the war zone reflects the PLA’s psychological and practical preparation for future wars. While the MR (MAC) is more of a concept of military geography and administration, the war zone is more of a concept of military operations, in particular, joint-service operations that consist of ground, air, naval, strategic missile, and space forces.
In time of war, a temporary joint-service operational headquarters would be formed to be responsible for the command and control of all ground, air, naval, and armed police forces located in the region. The headquarters is likely to be based on the headquarters of the Nanjing MR, with staffs from the Nanjing Military Region Air Force (MRAF), the Navy East Sea Fleet, and the People’s Armed Police (PAP) forces. Should a major military conflict with Taiwan breaks out, the Nanjing MR may also become part of a larger theatre of operations, which would include units from other military regions.
The Nanjing MR controls three group armies (1st, 12th, and 31st), the Shanghai Garrison District, as well as five provincial military districts (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian). The Nanjing MRAF is one of the strongest regional air forces of the PLA, with four fighter divisions, a bomber division, and an attacker division. The East Sea Fleet headquartered in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province has two destroyer/frigate flotillas, two submarine flotillas, three fast attack craft flotillas, an amphibious ship flotilla and two naval aviation divisions.
Units in the Nanjing MR have been given high priority in resource allocation and training opportunities. A dedicated amphibious mechanised infantry division was formed in the 1st Group Army (GA) in the late 1990s. Units of both 1st and 31st GA are also receiving regular training on amphibious assault operations.
Since the late 1990s, the PLA has been building a theatre-level command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, target-acquisition, reconnaissance (C4ISTAR) network in the Nanjing Command. This network, known as Regional Integrated Electronic System, or “Qu Dian”, is an automated battle management system that can support joint operations with combined ground, naval, air, and strategic missile forces. Based on land-, sea-, air-, and space-based platforms, the system allows aircraft, ships, submarines and ground units to communicate and share intelligence in wartime.
