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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.
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!
Only if USA goes to war over Taiwan, for which the case is weak. Look - the whole of indochina with india to boot didn't cost the US blood spilled in Vietnam. And 60 k casualties is optimistic in a war near the shores of China.
If the United States doesn't, it likely kicks off a regional nuclear arms race. The US is relatively keen to avoid this for numerous reasons. I am not predicting that the US will go to war, but it has reasons to do so.
Setting aside for a moment the fact that the US could plausibly fight such a war a surprisingly long way from Chinese shores, the weird thing about sea wars is that they can be very low casualty compared to land wars. The Chinese could sink every destroyer in the US arsenal with 100% casualties and they'd only kill about 24k Americans. Sinking ten aircraft carriers instead would get them to about 33k; they might achieve similar numbers by killing every single servicemember on Guam during a conflict. If we look at a case where the US takes severe, possibly war-losing losses (say 50% of crew are killed aboard 2 carriers, 8 destroyers, 6 submarines, plus four-digit losses on the ground and 300 aircraft in the air) the final tally could still end up with fewer than 10,000 American deaths. I'm not making a predictive argument here, and I could certainly see the numbers going much higher, just pointing out how very low the personnel density is in an air-sea war compared to ground conflict. (If you look at World War Two as a comparison, on a quick Google it looks like around 60K Naval personnel were killed, about 20% of the losses in the Army/Army Air Force.)
Now, losing even a single carrier with all hands would be extremely high casualty relative to the War on Terror but I would not be surprised at all if the US could fight and win a war against China and take fewer casualties than in Vietnam.
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