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China’s Top General Accused of Giving Nuclear Secrets to U.S.
What are we to make of the latest major Chinese purge?
I am no seasoned China expert, but broadly Xi’s purges have fallen into three primary categories. The first is purges of those directly tied to his political rivals, most notably the Bo Xilai faction he defeated to achieve and solidify his grip on power. These have mostly been over for a while. The second is a combination of provincial and national anti-corruption initiatives that have targeted some of the most brazen graft; this is not to say no innocents have been targeted, only that there is a solid case that a lot of these purges have been at least semi-legitimate (friends of Xi and allies may not have been targeted, but many of those targeted were corrupt). The third involves more short-term and medium-term political and economic objectives, including temporary purges where the person or people in question are disappeared for a time, then brought back with renewed loyalty. We can presume they have been taught a lesson.
There are three major angles to looking at this purge, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Mild to Moderately Bearish: The current purge is wholly legitimate. That is to say one of the PLA’s leading figures and an erstwhile close Xi ally really was selling nuclear secrets to the US, which objectively means that the PLA was compromised at the most senior level. This isn’t unreasonable - the Western press in the last few days has discussed Zhang as a ‘key contact’ for Western military officials in China, which is surely code for ‘nobody’s surprised he was doing it’.
Yes, there’s a way of construing this as the removal of a tired old corrupt general and his replacement by younger, more loyal, more patriotic cadres (more on that below), but one has to squint pretty far for it if this is accurate; if the charges were known for a while but not acted upon, it suggests that Xi was fine with this going on at least for a while. The man was also 75 and could have been retired.
Moderately Bullish: The general was not corrupt, but represented a generation of dim or mid-witted PLA sinecures unfit for any actual major conflict with a top-tier peer power (you know the one). A legacy of a poorer, more dysfunctional, more third-world, less capable, less advanced China, he has been replaced - even if he wasn’t corrupt - by smart younger men from the new China, the Deepseek China, the hypersonic missile China, men capable of actually defeating the USA in battle or at least of taking Taiwan without embarrassment. His removal serves as a warning - if you’re not ready, if you’re here because your uncle in the CCP got you a job in the military in 1974, get out quietly, don’t hang on, don’t challenge progress.
Mildly (if at all) Bearish: The purge represents nothing more than another step toward Xi taking absolute power in China. Already the most powerful Chinese political figure since Mao, Xi wants full, absolute control of the military in the event of a crisis or conflict of any kind. Bearish why? Because he is getting older, and taking absolute power always comes with risks, even as a great man, especially at that age.
Knowing nothing of what is going on, your "moderately bullish" seems the most plausible. Old guy in high-ranking military position gets made an example of, pour encourager les autres. Perhaps secondarily he was seen as being a bit too chummy with his American counterparts? But who knows. Xi purges a former ally, so he can't be accused of favouritism, and the message is clear: shape up or be shipped out. And since there needs to be a fig leaf reason for such purges (other than "I'm in charge, this is where I want things to go, even the PLA is not beyond reshaping"), "he was a dirty lowdown spy for the Americans" will do.
Mandatory Han Feizi on the techniques of the ruler:
Han Feizi was a disciple of Xunzi, another major Confucian scholar. The guy is completely blackpilled on human nature, and part of that comes from how Confucius himself was treated like trash in the state of Lu. Excerpt:
You can see his frustration from this wordcelry. How dare these inferior rulers treat the beloved greatest sage of all under heaven like that?
So he concluded:
Guess "the teachers" (ie the moralizing Confucians of Han Fei’s time) is not only wrong but also dangerous. Time to get rid of these vermin!
There's a historical irony that the most pretigious legalist scholars, Han Feizi, Shang Yang, Li Si, all died unnatural deaths. Han Feizi was killed because of Li Si, his fellow disciple under Xunzi, was jealous of his talent, threw him in prison, and had him executed. Shang Yang and Li Si, who actually seized power, ended up killed by the state (at least in part) because the very policies they designed were enforced on themselves. Their last words are basically some variation of “I should’ve touched grass and not gone full blackpiller”. The empire of Qin which treats their thoughts as state ideology, fell in only 15 years after the first emperor defeated all warring states, and the normies in the warring states hated their policy so much that the legalists were disgraced until the end of Imperial China. Truly the definition of bearing the fruits of your own labor. But at least they are true believers of their own ideology (and also truly great statesmen), not LARPers.
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I find this theory the most plausible so far.
Some notes.
It's very funny when people frame the Bo Xilai affair as «defeated to solidify his grip». Bo self-immolated. He was a populist, a comically venal character and deeply hated by the party elders (partially due to vigorous participation in the Cutural Revolution, denouncing and beating his father), his wife very likely slept with their British middleman to help send their son (at least, her son) to Harrow UK, and then flat out murdered the guy, with Bo's second-in-command defecting to the US in panic. What future could he have after that? How could Xi not «purge» him?
Likewise, another political enemy of Xi, Ling Jihua, got wrecked by his playboy son crashing to death in a Ferrari while fooling around with two girls; and the third enemy, Zhou Yongkang, took part in a coverup attempt. These cartoonish folks are the corruption that Xi has been fighting his entire career, their existence had forged his mandate to solidify power, and the reason they had power and could aspire to get more in the first place is that they were corrupt. I think many people miss this detail, but in the 00's China, there has been little distinction between «corruption» and «political advancement»; and therefore there's little difference between Xi «legitimately crushing corruption» and «solidifying his grip». His grip amounts to being the top guy in a system with meritocratic advancement biased by loyalty, he doesn't need bribery to keep it working, nor does he personally need money. But anyone who starts to siphon money out of the system, buy higher offices, sell positions downstream, and form a nontrivial personal patronage network, be that a representative of an established clique or an ambitious upstart, is a threat to Xi. And when that happens in the PLA (and it had been happening on a vast scale), it very quickly becomes an existential threat to Xi. I've been told there had been at least one semi-successful assassination attempt soon after he became Chairman; make of that what you will.
This is a bit unfalsifiable. If they have been targeted, had they ever been his friends? Does Xi even have friends, is he the kind of person who can have friends? For what it's worth, he was the one who promoted Zhang Youxia all the way to first-ranked CMC vice chairman, and their fathers Zhang Zongxun and Xi Zhongxun (Xi respects his own father a lot) had been friends forever, as in theory were current-gen Zhang and Xi. According to Brookings, Youxia was part of Xi's inner circle! He also has already purged Qin Gang (Wolf Warrior alpha male), He Weidong and Miao Hua (Fujian clique, so theoretically Xi loyalists he had personally been promoting and relying on) and a host of other personal associates.
It's not clear to me that Xi had ever turned a blind eye to a friend's corruption or underperformance, at least I haven't seen such evidence. When people try to tie Xi personally to some corruption, they often cite his sister's riches (which he started pressing her to sell starting in 2012, apparently, and succeeded by 2014) but it seems that those were accumulated without his help and even before he became Chairman – remember, Xi is a son of a former Vice Premier, a man who had a real shot at Chairman position himself, his family is one of the most prestigious CPC bloodlines to begin with, and his siblings can capitalize on that. After looking through his family's biography and other sources, I think it's safe to say that Xi is a very severe, ideologically driven actor who just Does Not Like Corruption. There's no parallel to Putin or Maduro or whatever. I don't know why this is so hard for people to accept, we've known such autocrats in the 20th century.
I strongly doubt this part of the story. It's «Some anonymous sources cited in Western media» and «said people familiar with a high-level briefing on the allegations» type report. Journalists make it sound like they're protecting the confidentiality of their sources, but they face no punihment for straight up inventing narratives. Just because all the journalists are repeating the same news doesn't mean they have corroborating evidence, they can be (and often are) just repeating each other. I've previously investigated similar turns of phrase (with regards to tech reporting) and it turned out that the journalist had been half misinformed and half confabulating. It often means just «some Chinese person has told me that». The closest thing to a corroboration we have is that supposedly «Gu Jun, the former general manager of China National Nuclear Corp., the state-owned company that runs China’s nuclear programs, provided some of the evidence against the top general», but that can as well do with, say, falsifying reports on warhead condition as with any CIA dealings.
My reasons for doubt have little to do with this prior or with Zhang Youxia's reputation, it's just… can you imagine the risk of leaking that to Western press, in Xi's China? For what benefit, just gloating? If you're not 100% sure the MSS won't trace it back to you, it's insanity. Though, I do doubt it on the object level too. Why would a high-ranking General sell nuclear secrets to the US? Was he expecting to get out of China and enjoy the profits in Miami? The way I look at it, better appropriate $100M in the PLA and risk a humiliating expulsion and retirement than get whatever money the CIA can offer but risk being killed. This is something a disgruntled engineer can do, one who's not so thouroughly watched.
I think Zhang probably got pulled down by his protege Li Yuchao, who got purged for corruption somewhat earlier. And the official Chinese accusaton, far as we can tell, is «They have severely fueled political and corruption problems that threaten the Party's absolute leadership over the armed forces and undermine the Party's governance foundation… gravely tarnished the image and authority of the CMC leadership and severely damaged the political and ideological foundation of unity and progress among all military personnel… inflicted grave harm on efforts to strengthen political loyalty in the military, the military's political environment, and overall combat readiness, posing a serious adverse impact on the Party, the country and the military». This is largely duckspeak but I think it can be interpreted as «created a personal fief and might have been planning a coup». The coup preparation, in turn, could have been fueled by anxiety about previous misdeeds (or Li Yuchao's own corruption) catching up to him, as Xi tightens the screws. We'll probably never know what really happened; all of that may be just Xi's paranoia. Authoritarian regimes are prone to prioritize defanging the army to reduce the risk of a coup even at the cost of combat readiness.
Whether this is the intent or not, this will be the consequence. People often concern troll about Xi's purges by pointing out how these are the last «battle-tested» officers China («hasn't fought a war since 1979») has. But what use is 1979 experience in Vietnam against the US in 2020s-2030s? They didn't even do that well in Vietnam. Generally speaking, it's better to lose wars (so long as you don't suffer major consequences) than win and promote decorated officers who have internalized lessons inapplicable to your actual existential challenges. A victory freezes the doctrine evolution. The US has been winning every battle, and what's the result now? A force that's perfect for dunking on Taliban, Iraq and Venezuela while maintainig divine K/D ratio, I guess. A force that would probably not do great in a war of attrition against an industrial superpower. Russia dunked on Ukraine in 2014, and how has that served Russia in 2022, when said Ukraine had learned the lessons of its defeat? The Chinese aren't winning or losing wars, they study American triumphs and try to adapt, so that their measures are a superset of what Americans can plausibly react to. They've invented Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare after meditating on the Gulf War, Kosovo War, Iraq war. How well can we expect an elderly veteran of the Sino-Vietnamese War to execute on such paradigms? It's probably better to start from scratch. (In fairness, there's also little reason to assume Xi is well equipped to understand and govern the modern China.)
In any case, I do not believe this substantially affects the Taiwan timeline. They are not ready by the standard implicit in their activities. They're only testing prototypes of a whole range of systems (ostensible sixth generation fighter jets, newer domestic engines on 5th gen, drone carriers etc.), the fleet is still building (years left to their first nuclear-powered carrier, it's under construction), they're seemingly not sure how to utilize robots in combat, very many things are clearly experimental and not in volume production or incorporated into standard training. Politically, they also hope the KMT administration (likely to win the next elections) will be more friendly and cooperate without the need for violence. Peaceful – if coerced – reunification is still the preferred outcome, and it is unwise to assume they have given up on that (or even that it is wholly impossible, especially given Trump).
That said, the popular theory that Zhang was the cool head against Xi's mad desire to flood Taiwan with meat waves of recruits reads like cope. Where do you all get this idea of different actors' personal dispositions with regard to Taiwan? More «anonymous sources»? Where does the idea about Xi's «hare-brained» schemes come from? If it happens, it will be a high-tech, highly automated, materiel-heavy war quite unlike historical amphibious invasions. Why would China not play to its strenghs and instead LARP as Americans on D-Day? They seem intent to solve as much as possible with pure industrial capacity, because that's what they have in spades. For example, let me present you: medium cargo ship outfitted with containerized AESA radar, CIWS, VLS cells and EMALS. How does their naval doctrine look like at this point? I don't think even they are sure.
In short it is plausible that Xi is just consolidating power or acting on paranoia, but I think these purges are not a big deal, despite the apparent high profile of victims.
To add to this, you can't really damage the combat readiness of an army by leadership purges if it's not combat-ready to begin with. And the PLA, like you correctly mentioned, has close to zero military experience. They aren't even sending expeditionary forces to Ukraine or one of the ongoing African conflicts to build up a cadre of officers that have at least some relevant military experiences. At most, they are sending advisors to take notes.
I don't think this approach is a good one. Maybe the Chinese are smarter than me and know how to learn through pure thought. Or maybe they think no amount of practical experience they can get from conflicts like these will prepare them for a big war and they simply need lots of strategic depth to inevitably learn on the job. Anyhow, this means they are reasonably free to purge the army without hurting it military competence.
You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'
One of the classic failure modes of officer purges is when the people doing the purging believe that issue with readiness is the officer corps, as opposed to the army as a whole. It typically comes with the underlying premise that the current issue is that the purged officers were being given everything they needed to make the force combat capable, and that by replacing the bad officers with good ones the previous malign factors will go away in relatively short order. Think of a strategy game where unit commanders provide modifiers to the units they are in- if you change the commander, the modifiers change as well, because the modifiers are tied to the commander, not the army.
If this seems silly due to the example, there is more historical precedent than one might remember. Leader personality do matter. Strong personalities can distort entire organizations around themselves, toxic leaders can poison a climate, and a transition from incompetent leaders to good leaders can see the same forces change in readiness without expensive campaigns abroad.
But it is also reflective of a sort of top-down control paradigm, the sort of mentality that leans into technnocratic or personal-control impulses on the underlying belief that everything would be better if people just listened to you/people like you/the people you 'know' are better. This sort of mental paradigm, in turn, is prone to its own forms of confirmation bias, particularly if your
totally not yes-menmore professional and competent officer corps begins reporting improvements that coincided with their assumption of the job.Where are we getting the idea that this is what is happening?
Relevant fresh Chinatalk:
Where are you getting the idea that I am claiming that is what is happening?
Particularly when, just further down in the exchange, I helpfully clarify for any confused Russians in the audience who might have confused a general argument for a specific claim-
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This works if the new officers have, to use your analogy, negative modifiers.
Sure. It can also work if the new officers have positive modifiers. And thus we get into the implications of highly personalist autocratic systems that result in information flows for evaluation getting systemically distorted.
To continue the analogy, most strategy games work on an assumption that the numbers presented to the player are actually correct. When the game tells you the character has positive or negative modifiers, you can believe it because the game systems don't lie to you.
It would be a completely different dynamic if the character with negative modifiers was presenting as a character with positive modifiers, and that the only way for you to know it was different was to use that officer in combat first. And it would be an even greater deviation from that if using in combat didn't actually reveal objective stats. Say their negative modifier only comes into view if they lose- so if you actually win with them in an easy conflict, you think you have a good officer and that the costs were other issues.
But of course, between the paradigm of 'the game system doesn't lie to you' and 'the game system does lie to you,' reality is a bit closer to the later. The systems often lie, because the systems are made out of people with their own interests to distort the truth. China is no stranger to that, hence the economic statistic reliability for decades.
But that in turns is what helps drive the top-down paradigm that can over-emphasize a leadership solution. If you can't trust/rely on the reporting system, you trust/rely on what you can trust/rely on instead. Yourself first of all, but then intermediaries you trust, and then subordinates they trust. Less trust per degrees of separation, but a personalist system tends to run on personalities for a reason. And if a personality disagrees and isn't performing...
To step away from the analogy and make a clarification, I'm not saying that this is what is happening. But it is a failure mode that can happen, and would explain a bad decision- such as going forward into a war after an officer purge. No one rationally chooses a failure mode, but then no one would have rationally chosen China's Zero Covid policies either, and it still happened under- and because of- Xi.
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Do you think Xi tolerates corruption in his allies as long as it does not attract attention?
I think he might tolerate it for a time but he'll get rid of corrupt or inept allies when he no longer tactically needs them. Frankly he seems willing to get rid of pretty much anyone except Wang Huning.
A snarky, but I think mostly fair on the object level, Chinatalk episode. For extra fun: the comparison of Xi's latest purge and the US purge under Trump 2.0. Both this far have have had no effect on apparent combat readiness.
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The way I heard it, the CMC had a conspiracy to arrest Xi at his hotel, but failed and got consequently purged - that it was a response to a direct personal threat, rather than stamping out corruption. Sort of an "if you come for the king, don't miss" situation.
I really doubt that «Xi has no permanent residence in Beijing, stays in a hotel and gets ambushed» makes a lot of sense. He owns the damn place and they're obsessed with security.
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Great post.
I very much agree with this. Frankly, it’s a big part of what scares me about Xi’s China. By all appearances he is a cruel and ambitious dictator, but is also a competent administrator and a genuine statesman who cares about the future of his country. It is true that his many rounds of purges have included his personal political enemies, and in part this is because everyone is at least a little corrupt in the CCP and so you can get anyone on “corruption” if you want to, but it is also because being (too) corrupt makes you into one of Xi’s personal political enemies. Americans (and the general West) don’t like to engage in this kind of thought because the idea of a dictator sincerely motivated by rooting out corruption is aesthetically icky, and this willful blind spot leads to a lot of overconfidence relative to China.
Unlike many (most?) other dictators, his personal ambitions seem to be wrapped up in national ambitions in a harmonious way. The likes of Maduro (or Saddam Hussein, etc) are motivated primarily by personal wealth and the security of their own family; the success of the nation is good only secondarily and in as much as it further entrenches their personal wealth and power. Even Putin, who clearly does have some degree of grand national ambition to recreate a Russian Empire for the 21st century, clearly puts the personal wealth of himself and his allies first. In practice he rules more like a mafia don than a king (in some ways literally, as the government still has close connections with various criminal and quasi-legal enterprises) and has built his power explicitly on personal and transactional relationships with the country’s various powerful oligarchs. The idea of even partially earnest corruption purges in Putin’s Russia is laughable in a way which is not true for Xi’s China. The case in point is the state of the Russian army, which was allowed to degrade enormously (or, at least, not seriously pressured to improve) under his rule, as we saw in the catastrophic failure of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Xi also, at least so far, does not seem to show signs of the over-ambitious ideological derangement that characterized the likes of Hitler and would get in the way of successful leadership, or lead to delusional overreach. China surely does suffer from all the classic informational problems of dictatorships and (relatively) closed societies but they appear to be at least trying to mitigate that weakness.
This is not to say that Xi is some mystical paragon of leadership, or that China does not have problems with corrupt and incompetent leaders. In particular their managed economy is showing some weaknesses that could become much worse in the near future if not addressed (for example, the infamous real estate bubble). But he is a qualitative step up from the average dictator and should be taken seriously. In particular he appears to value long-term planning and a long-term legacy, and if nothing else does seem to view corruption as a problem which must be mitigated rather than a natural fact of life.
The emphasis on forward-looking strategy (his big legacy looks to be “Xi Jinping thought”, the anti-corruption campaigns, and the modernization of the army and navy) is relatively unique to China in the modern world (notably, another country I can think of in this frame is Kim Jong-Un’s DPRK, provided you grade on a North Korean curve), and is certainly better than the long-term planning of Russia, America, or Europe these days — and that is dangerous. The Chinese emphasis on industrial dominance in critical sectors is unique and presents a massive and still-growing threat to American dominance of world affairs. In some ways the best hope for America to “win” against China, given current trajectories, is for Xi to become impatient as he ages and to kick off a war before the PLA is ready. That’s pretty cold comfort.
I very much agree with this and I think the words "dictator" and dictatorship" do a lot to flatten the differences. China's internal structure is pretty different from a place like Venezuela or Russia. It's notably not a fake democracy, and the CCP is a real institution in the way a party like United Russia just isn't. Xi's rise to power was totally different then someone like Putin who subverted a democracy or someone who came to power in a bloody coup.
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This does seem the crux to me as well. The guy's already in position for unfathomable amount of power, influence and cash (without even having to particularly push the corruption). I can't really see/imagine what leverage the USA would have on him for selling secrets or what they'd be able to pay him that'd really justify the literally mortal risk.
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Do you remember who told you this? Also, do you know specifically what semi-successful means?
Yes, I remember.
I mean there were shots fired in his general direction.
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I think this is a little charitable to Xi. By obvious comparison, I don't think many would deny that Mao really was a true believer in communism and in rooting out the bourgeoisie and rightists. At the same time, he grew increasingly comfortable in wielding purges against internal enemies and critics and the more he purged the more his circle of enemies and critics grew in his mind. There were a great many long time comrades and allies that ended up targets of Mao's paranoia.
In fairness to Xi, there's no evidence that he is inflicted with the madness that Mao most likely had in his later years, but I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that as he becomes more comfortable wielding purges as a weapon, he would be increasingly inclined to use them for even minor slights and disagreements. He can be both a true believer in anti-corruption and still use that as an excuse to get rid of people that were once close to him. I'd be stunned if most of his inner circle weren't already guilty of corruption in some small ways, given how endemic it was to the CCP for so many years. Especially an elder like Zhang.
I think late Mao was driven primarily not by [greater than usual] paranoia, but by a fairly reasonable belief that after his profoundly disastrous Great Leap Forward his throne grew shaky and he could only stay in power until death by getting everyone bogged down in bloody chaos, riding the tiger, so to speak. It is also likely that he genuinely believed that another round of social engineering is in order, thus «continuous revolution».
We do not see Xi acting weirdly or doing anything extravagant in any other domain. There's no tightening of censorship, no incomprehensible economic stratagems, the diplomacy is predictable and reactive, what we hear of the 15th 5-year plan is business as usual, Jack Ma is forgiven, most campaigns (against sissy men, tutoring, quantitative trading, whatever) are toned down, the recent exercises around Taiwan were roughly identical in scope and nature to the exercises in 2022, 2023, 2024. He's specifically purging the military brass, for whatever reason.
Even before the cultural revolution Mao had strategies to weed out any opposition like his 100 flowers campaign. I'd have to check my books but I'm fairly certain there were quite a few close allies caught in some of his early purges as well.
That being said, you're right that comparisons between Mao and Xi end at both being heads of the CCP. Despite my earlier statement, Xi is not a top down dictator the way Mao was. The current CCP is too large, too complex for it ever to be controlled by the whim of one man. Mao's CCP was large, but it really could be said that everything came down from the top; hence many of the more idiotic decisions. The innumerable technocrats can keep the engine of China running even if Xi was suddenly inflicted with the madness of Nero.
If there is a comparison for Xi, it's the Chinese emperors. Perhaps a one of the Qing, who wielded great empires but we're at a loss for the minutiae of the far reaches. In the first opium war, China was pretty easily beaten by a relatively tiny expeditionary force from Britain simply because the emperor never had a handle on what was happening and his delegated generals ended up in petty squabbles. So this example might reinforce the notion that Xi is trying to purge 'incompetence' rather than 'corruption' or 'opposition'.
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Various interpretations, all positive for the US.
Either:
Xi's soft power in China is limited. From the looks of it, Xi wants to invade Taiwan, and faced real push back. If the generals were just old, they would have been forced to retire with awards and honorary titles. The corruption allegations are punishment for pushing back against Xi. An overt purge is only needed when gentle methods fail.
China's inner circle is compromise-able and the CIA is pulling off Eli Cohen-Mossad style Hollywood operations on the regular. As Reddit tier-list subs would say: 'CIA upscale'.
Xi is moving to a hard dictatorship, the canonical imperial Chinese failure mode. This story can only end with the XiongNu buring Xian, and Xi being taken as a sex-slave.
Purges have long been the norm in CCP China, often done silently. The high profile and overt nature of it signals weakness by Xi. Jack Ma's (the the Chinese software startup industry's) purge was along similar lines. But, in that case, Xi could frame the narrative as communism vs capitalism, infrastructure vs consumption. Treason and corruption charges towards long-believed patriots of the highest level never sell the same.
IDK, it really depends on how well Xi can spin these allegations for consumption by the general public (which, in turn, is easier to pull off if the allegations are in fact true, but not impossible even otherwise, especially when the state already has a vice-grip on the media). If he plays his cards right, Xi could bolster his domestic legitimacy as a “good czar (formerly) surrounded by bad boyars”
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I think this is a good reminder of one of the strongest arguments against abuse of power and censorship.
The official stance is apparently that Zhang disagreed too much on PLA and military timelines.
Often we see arguments against censorship or abuse of power that go like "imagine what happens if the other side did this to us?" with the idea that the only/main issue of censorship is an external threat. Rather I think the main threat is internal, the abuse of power that makes people think "well maybe that one is ok, I didnt like the victims anyway" that normalizes, and more importantly, empowers the abuse.
Because often we see in authoritarian regimes that the threat is "from within". The purge heavy censorship people within "your group" have the selection effect of being purge heavy censorship people, and that means they support purging and censoring. What we see in the dictatorships and authoritarian governments isn't a crackdown on just "the enemy" with freedom for everyone else, it's a crackdown on all. Putin's top officials and allies aren't free to voice much opposition to the Ukraine war, and seemingly Xi's top officials aren't free to disagree too much on military timelines (or whatever actually upset him if the official stance is a lie). I doubt most top officials in North Korea, no matter how loyal, can publicly disagree with Kim Jung Un on a major issue and live to tell the tale. Even historically one of the biggest communist cucks in history Deng Xiaoping (now a beloved former leader of China for opening up the markets and making them actually function economically) was purged twice by Mao.
A lot of this I think lies in the flaw of tribalist thought to begin with. The idea of "my side" and the "other side" is overly simplistic to begin with, the major differences between factions are only put up with to face the Greater Evil. "Infighting" is just fighting, differences in beliefs trying to establish dominance. But tribalism pushes people to gloss over that, ignore the sins of "their own" and then they end up surprised when the pro purge people are fine with purging them too over their own disagreements. First They Came is a pretty good showcase of how this happens. The Enemy List of the authoritarian power abusers grows alongside their growth in power, until everyone is sitting around scared of being declared an enemy. You'll slowly lose your own freedom as your "enemies" get purged and you'll cheer it on smug and certain it could never come for you.
I don't know this for sure, but there's a high chance that Zhang was complicit in, or at least accomodating of, previous purges done to rivals or competition. I wonder if he feels any regrets over that now.
I was just going to link that in reply to your post. Happy 27th January.
Of course, Niemoeller is hardly the closest friend of the regime the Nazis murdered, that dubious honor likely falls to the SA leadership around Ernst Roehm, whose loyalty to the cause only bought them a quick death.
Nor is it uniquely the Nazis, power accumulated through violence has a tendency to not stay contained. The median victim of Robespierre was not an aristocrat or royalist, but (I think) a proponent of the revolution who simply was a bit more moderate, or a commoner who just got picked up by his goons when they were looking for an enemy to behead.
I would say that Strasser was a closer friend to the Nazis than Rohm, who left the party in 1925 because he objected to Hitler's strategy of legality and worked as a mercenary in South America for a few years before it became clear that the legality strategy was working after the 1930 election.
Niemoeller was a curious character. His background would make him a natural DNVP voter, he publicly opposed the Nazis almost immediately after they came to power (initially because they extended their anti-Semitic policies to ethnic Jewish converts to Lutheranism), and he would go on to cofound the explicitly anti-Nazi Confessing Lutheran Church with Dietrich Boenhoffer. So not exactly your typical Nazi. But he was an enthusiastic NSDAP supporter, even when they were in the wilderness in the 1920's, and the Volkischer Beobachter promoted his book. I understand why he spent most of his life after getting out of the concentration camp on an apology tour.
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(Disclaimer: despite my passable Mandarin and KTV skills, I’m far from a China Hand, so take all the following with a hefty splash of light soy sauce)
Most of this analysis seems plausible, except for:
I’d be more inclined to believe this if the sole remaining military officer on the CMC—indeed, the only CMC member at all, apart from Xi himself—were anyone other than Zhang Shengmin (no relation to Youxia, AFAIK).
Whatever else you may say about him, at least Zhang Youxia (along with fellow now-ex-CMC member Liu Zhenli, who is similarly “under investigation”/possibly purged) has actual combat experience, specifically in the mostly-failed 1979 Vietnam adventure. By contrast, Zhang Shengmin is, by all accounts, a purely political creature. If the goal were to clear out the old deadweight from their cushy sinecures and make room for smart, young upstarts, why keep Shengmin around?
Not a China hand at all, but, bouncing off of your point, a genuine question: does Xi really need to trump up corruption charges if you just want to bring in fresh talent? Seems like it would be much easier and less embarrassing to just say "why don't you retire." I realize that might not work on people who are trying to cling onto power, but you'd think you'd only need to purge one or two of them successfully to make the point. Purging people after that suggests (at least to me) concerns about either their power or trustworthiness.
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The extension would be: if nuclear secrets were really being passed to the US, would the CCP want to embarrass themselves by admitting it domestically?
My reaction was "who knows what's really going on there." Followed by "I suppose they just want an excuse to drop him out of a helicopter."
Western media releases are often panicked, middle of the night, written from the back of a car on a phone type jobs to get ahead of the Washington Post expose release at 5.30am. CCP ones are usually much more deliberate, attempting to portray the situation as they want it to appear. Chinese media does question weird disappearances, but there's a lot more top down control over narrative and publishing timeframes.
If a new boyfriend coyly admits that he likes a particular kind of porn ("big tits, MILFs") in response to your playful question on the third date, you should probably assume this is like 25-50% of the kinkiness he really goes for (anal, gangbangs).
"He released nuclear secrets" does sound better than "he's been on the CIA payroll for 15 years" for example.
Zhang Youxia was in custody for three months. Initially the CCP pushed that this was about corruption, bribes, and forming political cliques. The nuclear secrets thing came out later. Maybe this is to absolve Xi from the very real criticism of unfairly cleaning house/purging. It's hard to argue with a dismissal if a guy is giving nuclear secrets away and can be portrayed as an unfortunate necessity amid a national betrayal. Liu Zhenli was chief of staff of the CMC and removed at the same time though, and as far as I can see they haven't claimed he's a CIA source.
The CMC has been cut down from 7 to 2 members, and I just can't be sure what's going on. Like @stuckinthebathroom says, the sole survivor is a political appointee, Zhang Shengmin. And he's new to the job, only 12 months in or so. His background seems to be hunting down corrupt officers... or giving Xi the pretence to remove political/military rivals?
The main takeaway is that Xi is definitely personally in control of more of the party and military than ever before. I doubt this shifts the Taiwan needle to dangerous new levels, but it does seem like Xi is getting older and instead of doing succession planning he could be doing legacy planning (the Putin special?)
Dunno. I'm just hoping more of these chinese missiles are filled with water instead of fuel than we know about.
I’m curious, why do you say this? Regardless of the veracity of the charges against Zhang Youxia, I’ve read that he was one of the few people (perhaps even the only one) to tell Xi that his designs on Taiwan are hare-brained and likely to fail. With him out of the picture, how could an attempted invasion of Taiwan not be dangerously more likely?
If Xi surrounds himself only with yes men, chances of successful invasion go down dramatically. Putin did the same - and it took three years of war for Russia to get their shit semi together.
We don't want to avoid successful invasion, we want to avoid "invasion that's enough to cause serious problems" which is a much lower bar. And I can see how out-of-touch rulers might have a higher chance at that even if they have a lower chance at successful invasions.
There is no invasion that will cause problems. I don't know why everybody has drunk the Kool aid that somehow lack of Taiwan semiconductors is a death blow. Even if we get a couple of nodes back we will be at what - 2016 production nodes. The horror.
If I had to guess, it's because "let the Taiwanese have the best superconductors" was a deliberate maneuver by the US to contain the CCP, and this narrative is part of that maneuver and will be used to get buy-in for actions taken to prevent China retaking Taiwan.
If things so really out of hand we could be looking at the destruction of vast parts of the world industrial system, not just in Taiwan, but also in China, plus the global disruption of sea trade. They're called World Wars for a reason!
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It shifts it up, for sure, but like 5% to 7.5% or something. Not insignificant at all, but not like 20% is what I meant.
There's a lot of institutional pressure to not invade Taiwan in China.
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I think the only conclusive (and boring) point here is that Xi has consolidated power to an extent that his predecessors could not. And he does appear to have firm support from the Chinese ruling class considering how he purged all but one on the standing committee of the CMC without much troubles. When he started his term, people were talking about how he was a compromise candidate between Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao’s factions, and how he was going to reign with a Taishang Huang pulling strings behind him, but those predictions aged poorly.
It does not inspire confidence, for sure, to see such a high ranking general purged for being a traitor to the country. It certainly makes one wonder whether they are all compromised in some way. That being said, “leaking nuclear secrets” in this case could be serious, but it could also refer to something more benign, like “informing the Americans that we have significantly built up nuclear capabilities, so think thrice before you move”. A decade or two ago, the Americans or even the Taiwanese could induce defections by offering better material conditions, supporting opposition factions, or providing opportunities to immigrate, or simply by attracting naïve party members through ideological pull. I seriously doubt that this is still the case, given the cost benefit analysis. They can be compromised by inside forces but hardly by outside.
I’m fairly convinced that close to no one on the internet has a knowledgeable take on this. Chinese or non-Chinese spectators alike are like a lonely man living next door to a couple having sex. It’s possible for the man to guess at their relationship and catch glimpses of the truth, and if something goes transparently wrong he’d notice that too, but most of their dirty talk in bed amounts to nothing, except attracting his attention. When Lin Biao killed himself in a plane crash in Mongolia, no one was expecting it, except maybe the politburo and his direct underlings. And even now, no one outside of the Chinese decision making circle knows whether Lin was actually, seriously disloyal, or whether it was all Mao’s paranoia. Chinese history books are filled with such incidents, where a ruling emperor lives too long to pass the baton to the crown prince, until simmering distrust forces the crown prince either to usurp the throne or to idle until being killed by the emperor/father. This is literally the most common trope in Chinese history besides barbarians knocking on our door. Future historians will debate whether the killing of Zhang San was the single gravest mistake of the emperor that led to the downfall of the dynasty, or whether it was completely justified and with the crown prince a traitor, the dynasty was doomed regardless. I’m not convinced they are making informative guesses either way. Historians, not unlike me, will judge based on outcomes and on how well the narrative fits the prevailing zeitgeist, but I’m not deluded enough to think those takes are entirely truthful.
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The coverage I've been seeing (admittedly from scattershot sources) has a fourth take, which is that regardless of the corruption allegations, the real reason Zhang was tossed was that he disagreed with Xi's alleged insistence that the PLA, PLAAF, and PLAAN prioritize having (or appearing to) have the capability to successfully invade and (re)conquer Taiwan by the end of 2027. Zhang allegedly believed that this was functionally impossible, and that the only way to even appear to comply with the political directive would be through a lot of boondoggles and diversion of effort away from other, more fundamental aspects of military training and readiness.
Again, I want to stress that I don't understand chinese and so can't read most of the coverage, and personally don't have much of a stake in this. However, I wanted to at least highlight that there's an alternative view out there, FWIW (which, again, may be nothing).
This is the closest subject that the Motte will ever get to my wheelhouse. Pre-Ukraine I did a major workup on this question about Taiwan vs China. There's a lot to it, but ultimately the only thing that prevents the underprepared and inadequate Taiwanese military from being crushed in three days is the underprepared and inadequate Chinese military that has been tasked to do it.
You just never get the scale of the problem until you compare the resources China has to commit to the invasion against the Taiwanese ground forces.
You have China's eastern theatre command which has three group armies (corps sized). The 72nd and 73rd group army have four amphibious combined arms brigades between them. The 71st is the heavy group army clearly designed for breakout operations once a beachhead has been established.
The Southern Theatre Command is postured to cover the Eastern Theatre Command's flank, and probably deal with the SCS and defeat incoming American marines. They have two amphib brigades.
At any one time, due to training schedules and the integration of recruits/conscripts, one third to two thirds of any amphibious brigade will not be qualified for amphibious operations. The PLAAN marines are in an even more dire situation. Like US counterparts, they don't get the good gear and are expected to make do with what they have: rifles and a fighting spirit (these units are rightly rated as far below the quality of US Marines).
If you want a reference class, Stormin' Norman in the first gulf war had 8 full western divisions of armoured, mechanised and airborne infantry attacking across terrain that is unambiguously perfect for mechanised warfare. That's something like 25 brigades worth of troops. 2003 Iraq had 5 divisions and aboit 15 brigades.
So China wants four amphibious brigades to secure the most hotly contested amphibious landing zone on the planet. Then break out with extremely heavy armoured brigades that will be contesting a hyper compressed battlefield which is limited in the east by unpassable mountains and the west by the ocean. And there are only two possible landing zones, which leaves zero room for Normandy-Calais style mind games.
Post-Ukraine we can establish two things for sure. The battlefield will be completely transparent to both sides. There won't be information asymmetry. Everybody will know where everybody else's tanks and trucks are.
Secondly, poorly trained troops and conscripts are not capable of exploiting their armoured advantages in this environment.
China makes great tanks and armoured vehciles. But they still mostly rely on passive defensive technology: front end armour. These tanks are going to be expensive targets for Taiwanese conscripts sitting off the side of the road, just like Russia's have been.
I'm pretty confident Chinese generals could say "we will wipe Taiwan's memory off the face of the earth". But to ask them to complete the most complex military manoeuvre possible, while staffing their units with inexperienced, poorly trained recruits, and not having enough of them is asking the impossible.
Chinese defeat on the beach, or on the breakout, or in the city streets looks like the most likely outcome. I'm positive at least that the operation would be a total disaster even if some massive aerial campaign clinches a victory. A million Taiwanese conscripts are a planning problem that Chinese generals aren't going to be able to deal with easily.
If Xi is firing people until he gets the answer he wants he's in for a big situation in the war room come D Day. And these structural issues aren't going to be overcome by swapping chairs.
I've always thought that their strategy wouldn't be to do an outright invasion, but just to do a massive show of force and hope Taiwan surrenders.
To start, they could take some of the small Taiwan-controlled island like Kinmen which would be very easy. Make a big show of sending overwhelming force, but also being peaceful and gentle in the occupation.
Then, make the sea around Taiwan dangerous. Declare it a "no-go" zone, and attack all commercial ships that go there. Even if they can't do a full blockade, they just have to make it dangerous enough that normal commercial ships don't want to go there.
Make regular, obvious flyers of Taiwan. Don't actually attack anything, just show off the air force. Make a few vague threats about nuclear weapons without any specific details.
Would this make Taiwan surrender? I have no idea. My impression is that they really don't want to be a part of the PRC, but they're also not a very militaristic country. They've got a lot of old people, and a lot of computer engineers, but not too many bloodthirsty military types. A few years of this might be enough to convince them to just give in, especially if they were promised special treatment.
On the other hand, there's an argument that the CCP and PLA secretly like the situation as it is. Taiwan gives them a great excuse to make bold nationalistic claims and pump up military spending, but without the necessity of actually fighting a war. Losing that war would be disastrous, and it's not even clear that winning would really give them anything. It's not the 90s anymore when Taiwan was 100x richer than the mainland, the mainland economy is actually quite decent now and continuing to grow. So I suspect that this is just meaningless rhetoric, like how North Korea periodically threatens to destroy Seoul and Washington.
Taking Kinmen and the coastal islands is generally described as the end of a feasible ground conflict. Feasible meaning, the commanders can say "We can do it" with a straight face. Even then, there's no guarantee they don't do a VDV style "what would the Americans do?" and fuck it up with sheer incompetence.
Maybe, but the history of conscription means that you do have a core population that have trained to go to war, visualised what it would be like, and have been given the confidence that only military service can give re: doing your part. I don't think the ROC politicians would roll over without a legitimate blockade, or buildings being blown up.
The Taiwanese military is definitely a basket case, and they know it. So maybe they take the out before their kids all die in the mountains and rice paddies. I doubt it though.
Couldn't agree more. I think the chances of an invasion are small. But when you get old men who read too many history books clamping down on political and military dissent... it does give you reason to question these things.
This cartoon is what made me worry that Taiwan's conscription is... not really all it should be. (translation: "what i thought it would be, what it was") Like, it's basically just an excuse for their local government to get cheap labor to do stuff like cutting grass. Maybe I'm getting influenced too much by a stupid internet meme, but I certainly get the impression that Taiwan really doesn't have a strong military culture.
/images/17696657887718937.webp
Eh, every single military has stupid busywork unrelated to actual military operations. This "raking dirt" meme from someone in the US Army was made back in 2013: https://i.redd.it/a83lodbdko3d1.jpeg
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That meme is classic military culture. Fits right in with the classic 'What I actually do' meme format.
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Good points, and I'll raise another aspect for audience consideration.
The ground aspect of a Taiwan invasion is definitely a massive challenge. The other side of the issue is if it will be necessary if Taiwan can be blockaded and starved into submission. China could absolutely bungle an invasion, a D-Day failed, and still end up with the win if it just successfully blocks ships from coming in and landing to unload long enough. Taiwan has something like a third of food self-sufficiency in peace time.
This is where the question of the naval war, and war length, comes. While it's typically framed in terms of whether China can keep the US Navy out, and that does matter for letting China try that very difficult landing scenario, the actual needs in the war regarding Taiwan ports change depending on if the war is a short conflict or a long conflict.
In a 'short' war, China just needs to keep the US out long enough to make the naval invasion, which- even if it can't sweep the island- might have the political shock effect of a political capitulation by the Taiwanese. I generally take a dim view of 'and then the enemy loses the will to fight' scenarios, but they aren't impossible. From the Taiwan coalition situation, the key interest is maintaining enough naval / air power in the area to deter / undercut / critically weakening the landing threat so that it trips and drowns, until the PRC accepts a status quo ante end to hostilities. However, the shortness of this war makes Taiwanese ports relatively unimportant beyond a defense objective. They don't have to work, just not be captured to facilitate PRC logistics.
In a 'long' war, China and the US are now involved in a global-scale power struggle with global economy cracking implications even as dynamics prevent a status quo ante resolution. One of the reasons this might endure is because the PRC get enough of a bridge head that they have a toe hold on the island that can neither advance nor be driven into the sea, but it's not the only one. In this format, the Taiwan ports- especially those on east of the northeast of the island become a critical facilitator for supplies, both military and, well, food. Except ports can be shut down via missiles or cyberattacks or other things. So now it's the Taiwanese coalition that has to overcome the 'how do I get men and material onto the island,' where instead of hostile terrain and a defender they are facing hostile terrain and a major regional airbase trying to enforce a naval blockade.
Yeah it's definitely worth breaking up the scenarios into e.g. most likely, most feasible, most acceptable, most dangerous, etc. An amphibious invasion is the most dangerous (most dangerous that is acceptable to the CCP at least) scenario, but far from the most likely.
I think a war on a 1-3 year time horizon favours the US. I think a war on a 5+ year time frame favours China. I don't think a toehold on Taiwan shifts things too much, I'm very much of the opinion that an occupation of Taipei is the only physical occupation that achieves a defacto peace with Taiwan. But a blockade is much more complex and it's much much harder to determine what would happen there.
Mild tangent...
I'm pretty confident Chinese naval skill and technology remains super overmatched by US and Western navies. Putting hulls in the water is really cool but it means that you're naturally promoting officers who face less of a bottleneck than those before them. We don't know, but the PLAN could be scrounging officers into command positions that would, if the navy wasn't expanding so rapidly, be middle of the ladder candidates.
The PLAN carrier fleet is a good example. A US admiral generally needs to start his career flying planes off the deck of a carrier. From there he commands a squadron, becomes an EX of a carrier, then a CO of a ship, and a carrier after that. He'll be promoted into a flag position, maybe as a director or deputy for a shore based position where he rounds off his military understanding. He gets a couple more commands, of a carrier strike group or something, then gets the US 7th Fleet.
This guy knows what it is to take off from the carrier, has trained a squadron himself, commanded ships, departments and has competed every step of the way to take command of the fleet. A Chinese admiral today has never flown a plane off a deck of a carrier, will be asking his guys to do things he couldn't do himself, doesn't understand the impact of the conditions, etc etc. Their carriers are only just coming into service, which means there has been no incremental improvements of technology with lessons learned from previous deployments or mid-life upgrades. We know the Chinese aviation arm isn't as good as the US Navy's, because their sortie rate is not that good. It is getting better with practice, but it'll take a full generation to peak.
The Chinese have a lot of advantages re: manufacturing but a lot of limitations re: institutional military knowledge. The Chinese have at least air parity with the Taiwanese coalition across the SCS, maybe air superiority if their fighters perform as promised (definitely not a given). But I'm pretty sure they hemorrhage materiel rapidly when they start coming up against Western/coalition soldiers, sailors and airmen.
My totally unjustified, out of pocket assessment, is that I think counting VLS cells or ship hulls is something that's going to be looked back on like we look back on all of Sadam's tanks. Yes, it's not a fair comparison as Chinese ships are actually modern. But I think commentators greatly underappreciate the likelihood that the Chinese military isn't actually the professionalised force it claims to be. I think it could rapidly devolve into a Russian-style calamity, where US ships are picking off Chinese ships at will, and this terrifying armada is actually constricted to a coast guard type role after they lose 50 frigates in a week.
I’m not a military expert, and I don’t know whether your assessment of either the US or Chinese military is accurate, so I won’t comment on the military side. But aren’t the perennial questions 1) whether the Taiwanese are willing to fight a prolonged war, given that they’re an advanced economy unlike the Ukrainians who arguably had little left to lose, and 2) the US’s (and to a lesser extent Japan’s) willingness to engage in an unlimited shooting war with China?
I’m not pretending to know everything about the Taiwanese military, but the infighting between the DPP and KMT, and how closely tied the KMT is to the Taiwanese military sounds pretty dire to me. The state of their military reserves also seems less than ideal. It would be ridiculous to expect them to fold as soon as shots are fired, but there doesn’t seem to be much confidence at least based on the narrow and admittedly biased sample of Taiwanese people I’ve met with.
Yes. But I don't think Taiwan is low hanging fruit by itself anyway.
Yeah they're terrible. But it's easier to get conscripts to destroy bridges and sit in trenches than it is to conduct amphib ops, or manoeuvre their tanks through complex terrain. Like I said, PLAAF jets and bombers would be a major problem for Taiwanese ground forces, but PLA brigades still need to capture ground. And I'm just not sure they're up to it.
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If true, this is the scariest possible take, IMO. The last (military) man standing on the CMC is now Zhang Shengmin, a career political hack with no actual combat experience, who survived this round of “investigations”/purges the same way he always has: by toeing the Party line and sycophantically telling Xi whatever he wants to hear. Now, worryingly, Xi has 2 more factors nudging him to go all-in on Taiwan 2027: no one’s around to tell him it’s a bad idea, and if he somehow does pull it off, he gets the PR win of making Zhang Youxia look like a treasonous coward.
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This guy has been showing up in my feed a lot lately, and I think he has a good perspective on the situation. Notably there's some history I didn't know: Xi Jinping's father was once "purged," but he wasn't executed, just removed from power for a while. He was eventually allowed to come back. So being "purged" is maybe not as severe a punishment as westerners might think.
The other thing is that there's always a certain amount of petty corruption going on there. For the most part they allow it and tolerate it. It's only used as an excuse to purge someone when they want to remove someone for other reasons. (That said... giving away nuclear secrets seems a lot more severe than petty corruption? but who knows)
So his conclusion is that this is essentially a move by Xi Jinping to consolidate power for himself and the CCP, taking power away from the top military leaders. You might ask why he'd want to do that, since he's already got plenty of power and you'd think he has enough on his plate trying to run a country of 1.4 billion people. But this would give him more power to do something dangerous and unpopular... like, say, start an invasion of Taiwan.
I really, really, really hope that doesn't happen. I've been to Taiwan and it's a nice place. I also think the US and its allies are in a bad state right now, not ready for this kind of major full-scale war.
...
He definitely is a blowhard, and it sounds like you know more than him about that specific issue or missile ranges in Ukraine. I don't expect anyone to be right all the time, I just thought it was a good point about what "purges" mean in the PRC.
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Also, Xi's half-sister was studying at a military academy (I wasn't aware that those were accepting women back then in China) and was driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution, at least according to Wikipedia.
You clearly haven’t been studying your Little Red Book enough. To the re-education camps with you!
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Mate, wait until he tells you what happened to Xi Jinping at the same time. And to Deng Xiaoping too.
[The more interesting part of Xi Zhongxun's purge timeline is that he's been Governor of Guangdong for two years and only then got formally exonerated.
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Many, maybe even most senior figures survived the cultural revolution - even people you ‘wouldn’t expect’ (some prominent former Shanghai capitalists who defected to the communists, the former Emperor, various ‘right wing’ (for the party) figures). A lot of the most extreme cannibalism type violence was local, centuries of ground-level hatred for the local kulaks incited by the red book and cadres into ultra violence type behavior. Senior figures often got humiliated and were stripped of rank and privilege, professors sent to dig ditches for 5 years, but they lived. Surviving a purge in Stalin’s Soviet Union was arguably much harder.
In general, Chinese Communism seems to be more willing to tolerate ‘genuine conversion’ than Soviet Communism was. It might something to with the history of face and deference in China, I’m not sure. You see it even with the Uighurs.
I think it's more about the idea of «education». They think that people can be bent into shape so long as enough pressure is provided. This is the more humane Confucian side of the Chinese philosophy, balancing the liberal use of capital punishment. I'd like to say that Confucius would protest reeducation camps in particular, but… maybe not.
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I remember reading years ago that Puyi’s survival seemed strange to Western observers at the time but the Chinese justification was something along the lines of “It is not surprising that capitalists and monarchists act like capitalists and monarchists, it’s just in their nature. No point executing them for being true to their class any more than you would execute a dog for licking its balls”.
With this logic of class-essentialism it is unsurprising that the grand-bourgeoise and literal royalty get ‘let off’ with re-education, while misbehaving peasants get the rope. The upper class were ‘inevitably’ acting in accordance with their class interests. But proletarian class traitors should have known better.
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Even in the Great Terror, most of those who were "purged" survived - though that could entail a wide range of possible punishments, from simple demotion to extreme torture and long prison sentences.
IIRC within the group of Red Army officers who were purged during the 1930s about 20% of them got death sentences.
And what was the survival rate in the gulags they were sent to?
Those of them who survived to 1941 were mostly released and conscripted back to frontline service, as far as I know.
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I know China has been watching the Ukraine War very carefully for teachable moments. And Russia had to spend two solid years unfucking their general staff and getting rid of the incompetent political hacks, while in the middle of a war. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this was some spring cleaning. That said, I don’t know too much about CPC kremlinology in detail, unfortunately.
I prefer Pekingology myself. Quite a great name and a great podcast. I am certainly waiting for the analysis coming out of these guys and also from the Hoover Institution.
"Sinology" mostly covers it, I think.
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>NPR-style intro and voiceover
>Generic slop NGO name parent company
I'm suspicious. Can you or anybody else vouch that this is good?
Normally I hate outsourcing epistemology like this, but I don't have a good sense for when someone is bullshitting on China like I do for domestic politics.
I listened to part of one episode long ago, I forget the topic, but it was bog-standard Western media narratives, nothing insightful.
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