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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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