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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).
This is the closest subject that the Motte will ever get to my wheelhouse. Pre-Ukraine I did a major workup on this question about Taiwan vs China. There's a lot to it, but ultimately the only thing that prevents the underprepared and inadequate Taiwanese military from being crushed in three days is the underprepared and inadequate Chinese military that has been tasked to do it.
You just never get the scale of the problem until you compare the resources China has to commit to the invasion against the Taiwanese ground forces.
You have China's eastern theatre command which has three group armies (corps sized). The 72nd and 73rd group army have four amphibious combined arms brigades between them. The 71st is the heavy group army clearly designed for breakout operations once a beachhead has been established.
The Southern Theatre Command is postured to cover the Eastern Theatre Command's flank, and probably deal with the SCS and defeat incoming American marines. They have two amphib brigades.
At any one time, due to training schedules and the integration of recruits/conscripts, one third to two thirds of any amphibious brigade will not be qualified for amphibious operations. The PLAAN marines are in an even more dire situation. Like US counterparts, they don't get the good gear and are expected to make do with what they have: rifles and a fighting spirit (these units are rightly rated as far below the quality of US Marines).
If you want a reference class, Stormin' Norman in the first gulf war had 8 full western divisions of armoured, mechanised and airborne infantry attacking across terrain that is unambiguously perfect for mechanised warfare. That's something like 25 brigades worth of troops. 2003 Iraq had 5 divisions and aboit 15 brigades.
So China wants four amphibious brigades to secure the most hotly contested amphibious landing zone on the planet. Then break out with extremely heavy armoured brigades that will be contesting a hyper compressed battlefield which is limited in the east by unpassable mountains and the west by the ocean. And there are only two possible landing zones, which leaves zero room for Normandy-Calais style mind games.
Post-Ukraine we can establish two things for sure. The battlefield will be completely transparent to both sides. There won't be information asymmetry. Everybody will know where everybody else's tanks and trucks are.
Secondly, poorly trained troops and conscripts are not capable of exploiting their armoured advantages in this environment.
China makes great tanks and armoured vehciles. But they still mostly rely on passive defensive technology: front end armour. These tanks are going to be expensive targets for Taiwanese conscripts sitting off the side of the road, just like Russia's have been.
I'm pretty confident Chinese generals could say "we will wipe Taiwan's memory off the face of the earth". But to ask them to complete the most complex military manoeuvre possible, while staffing their units with inexperienced, poorly trained recruits, and not having enough of them is asking the impossible.
Chinese defeat on the beach, or on the breakout, or in the city streets looks like the most likely outcome. I'm positive at least that the operation would be a total disaster even if some massive aerial campaign clinches a victory. A million Taiwanese conscripts are a planning problem that Chinese generals aren't going to be able to deal with easily.
If Xi is firing people until he gets the answer he wants he's in for a big situation in the war room come D Day. And these structural issues aren't going to be overcome by swapping chairs.
Good points, and I'll raise another aspect for audience consideration.
The ground aspect of a Taiwan invasion is definitely a massive challenge. The other side of the issue is if it will be necessary if Taiwan can be blockaded and starved into submission. China could absolutely bungle an invasion, a D-Day failed, and still end up with the win if it just successfully blocks ships from coming in and landing to unload long enough. Taiwan has something like a third of food self-sufficiency in peace time.
This is where the question of the naval war, and war length, comes. While it's typically framed in terms of whether China can keep the US Navy out, and that does matter for letting China try that very difficult landing scenario, the actual needs in the war regarding Taiwan ports change depending on if the war is a short conflict or a long conflict.
In a 'short' war, China just needs to keep the US out long enough to make the naval invasion, which- even if it can't sweep the island- might have the political shock effect of a political capitulation by the Taiwanese. I generally take a dim view of 'and then the enemy loses the will to fight' scenarios, but they aren't impossible. From the Taiwan coalition situation, the key interest is maintaining enough naval / air power in the area to deter / undercut / critically weakening the landing threat so that it trips and drowns, until the PRC accepts a status quo ante end to hostilities. However, the shortness of this war makes Taiwanese ports relatively unimportant beyond a defense objective. They don't have to work, just not be captured to facilitate PRC logistics.
In a 'long' war, China and the US are now involved in a global-scale power struggle with global economy cracking implications even as dynamics prevent a status quo ante resolution. One of the reasons this might endure is because the PRC get enough of a bridge head that they have a toe hold on the island that can neither advance nor be driven into the sea, but it's not the only one. In this format, the Taiwan ports- especially those on east of the northeast of the island become a critical facilitator for supplies, both military and, well, food. Except ports can be shut down via missiles or cyberattacks or other things. So now it's the Taiwanese coalition that has to overcome the 'how do I get men and material onto the island,' where instead of hostile terrain and a defender they are facing hostile terrain and a major regional airbase trying to enforce a naval blockade.
Yeah it's definitely worth breaking up the scenarios into e.g. most likely, most feasible, most acceptable, most dangerous, etc. An amphibious invasion is the most dangerous (most dangerous that is acceptable to the CCP at least) scenario, but far from the most likely.
I think a war on a 1-3 year time horizon favours the US. I think a war on a 5+ year time frame favours China. I don't think a toehold on Taiwan shifts things too much, I'm very much of the opinion that an occupation of Taipei is the only physical occupation that achieves a defacto peace with Taiwan. But a blockade is much more complex and it's much much harder to determine what would happen there.
Mild tangent...
I'm pretty confident Chinese naval skill and technology remains super overmatched by US and Western navies. Putting hulls in the water is really cool but it means that you're naturally promoting officers who face less of a bottleneck than those before them. We don't know, but the PLAN could be scrounging officers into command positions that would, if the navy wasn't expanding so rapidly, be middle of the ladder candidates.
The PLAN carrier fleet is a good example. A US admiral generally needs to start his career flying planes off the deck of a carrier. From there he commands a squadron, becomes an EX of a carrier, then a CO of a ship, and a carrier after that. He'll be promoted into a flag position, maybe as a director or deputy for a shore based position where he rounds off his military understanding. He gets a couple more commands, of a carrier strike group or something, then gets the US 7th Fleet.
This guy knows what it is to take off from the carrier, has trained a squadron himself, commanded ships, departments and has competed every step of the way to take command of the fleet. A Chinese admiral today has never flown a plane off a deck of a carrier, will be asking his guys to do things he couldn't do himself, doesn't understand the impact of the conditions, etc etc. Their carriers are only just coming into service, which means there has been no incremental improvements of technology with lessons learned from previous deployments or mid-life upgrades. We know the Chinese aviation arm isn't as good as the US Navy's, because their sortie rate is not that good. It is getting better with practice, but it'll take a full generation to peak.
The Chinese have a lot of advantages re: manufacturing but a lot of limitations re: institutional military knowledge. The Chinese have at least air parity with the Taiwanese coalition across the SCS, maybe air superiority if their fighters perform as promised (definitely not a given). But I'm pretty sure they hemorrhage materiel rapidly when they start coming up against Western/coalition soldiers, sailors and airmen.
My totally unjustified, out of pocket assessment, is that I think counting VLS cells or ship hulls is something that's going to be looked back on like we look back on all of Sadam's tanks. Yes, it's not a fair comparison as Chinese ships are actually modern. But I think commentators greatly underappreciate the likelihood that the Chinese military isn't actually the professionalised force it claims to be. I think it could rapidly devolve into a Russian-style calamity, where US ships are picking off Chinese ships at will, and this terrifying armada is actually constricted to a coast guard type role after they lose 50 frigates in a week.
I’m not a military expert, and I don’t know whether your assessment of either the US or Chinese military is accurate, so I won’t comment on the military side. But aren’t the perennial questions 1) whether the Taiwanese are willing to fight a prolonged war, given that they’re an advanced economy unlike the Ukrainians who arguably had little left to lose, and 2) the US’s (and to a lesser extent Japan’s) willingness to engage in an unlimited shooting war with China?
I’m not pretending to know everything about the Taiwanese military, but the infighting between the DPP and KMT, and how closely tied the KMT is to the Taiwanese military sounds pretty dire to me. The state of their military reserves also seems less than ideal. It would be ridiculous to expect them to fold as soon as shots are fired, but there doesn’t seem to be much confidence at least based on the narrow and admittedly biased sample of Taiwanese people I’ve met with.
Yes. But I don't think Taiwan is low hanging fruit by itself anyway.
Yeah they're terrible. But it's easier to get conscripts to destroy bridges and sit in trenches than it is to conduct amphib ops, or manoeuvre their tanks through complex terrain. Like I said, PLAAF jets and bombers would be a major problem for Taiwanese ground forces, but PLA brigades still need to capture ground. And I'm just not sure they're up to it.
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