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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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