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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31933 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Another factor here is that Chinese army is famously corrupt and inept.

It's believed by military analysts Xi clamped down on that and mostly fixed it. And they also appear to now hold adversarial military exercises.

Xi did not clamp on anything. China runs on corruption - there is 100 million members of CCP who suck the blood out of Chinese people. Corruption is how things are done. The whole thing has analogy of Medvedev´s anti-corruption campaign in 2009, the only purpose for it was to eliminate political enemies like it was done with Khodorkovsky in 2003.

I am not saying that corrupt officials should not be arrested. But it would be as if gang leader turned political leader did a campaign to eliminate murderers, thieves and drug dealers. The only thing that would result is domination of his gang and corrupt and ineffective police force under his thumb.

I am reminded of the story of that Russian military minister(?) who did manage to legit reform Russia's military (allowing them to win in Georgia), only to be eventually sacked because, of course, he was rocking the boat too much for Putin's friends.

Which is indeed the ambiguity: has Xi, as the big cheese of China, managed to genuinely clean the rot out from the CCP and orient the PRC into a worthy competitor to the US in all matters political, economic, and military, or is this more like Saudi Arabia where "anti-corruption" efforts were just a fig-leaf for getting his political opponents out of the way? Even if the former is true, can he remain in power, or has he shaken things up too much and painted a target on his back? If the latter is true, should we even worry about the Thucydides Trap?

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