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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?
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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