President Xi Jinping of China is conducting a far-reaching military reform. Yet, like the proverbial cyclical nature of dynastic changes in China's long imperial past, the Chinese communist armed forces, collectively known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA), has gone through five cycles of similar military reforms since the founding of the communist state in 1949. This cyclical nature can tell us a lot about the current reshuffle.

The interval between these five military reforms is roughly fifteen years.

The first major structural change for the PLA took place in the mid-1950s when China introduced the Soviet military system wholesale to the PLA under the supervision of Mao Zedong's able defense minister, Marshal Peng Dehuai, with the objective of transforming Mao's semi-rag-tag peasant army to a Soviet-style professional defense force.