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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.
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).
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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