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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.
I've always thought that their strategy wouldn't be to do an outright invasion, but just to do a massive show of force and hope Taiwan surrenders.
To start, they could take some of the small Taiwan-controlled island like Kinmen which would be very easy. Make a big show of sending overwhelming force, but also being peaceful and gentle in the occupation.
Then, make the sea around Taiwan dangerous. Declare it a "no-go" zone, and attack all commercial ships that go there. Even if they can't do a full blockade, they just have to make it dangerous enough that normal commercial ships don't want to go there.
Make regular, obvious flyers of Taiwan. Don't actually attack anything, just show off the air force. Make a few vague threats about nuclear weapons without any specific details.
Would this make Taiwan surrender? I have no idea. My impression is that they really don't want to be a part of the PRC, but they're also not a very militaristic country. They've got a lot of old people, and a lot of computer engineers, but not too many bloodthirsty military types. A few years of this might be enough to convince them to just give in, especially if they were promised special treatment.
On the other hand, there's an argument that the CCP and PLA secretly like the situation as it is. Taiwan gives them a great excuse to make bold nationalistic claims and pump up military spending, but without the necessity of actually fighting a war. Losing that war would be disastrous, and it's not even clear that winning would really give them anything. It's not the 90s anymore when Taiwan was 100x richer than the mainland, the mainland economy is actually quite decent now and continuing to grow. So I suspect that this is just meaningless rhetoric, like how North Korea periodically threatens to destroy Seoul and Washington.
Taking Kinmen and the coastal islands is generally described as the end of a feasible ground conflict. Feasible meaning, the commanders can say "We can do it" with a straight face. Even then, there's no guarantee they don't do a VDV style "what would the Americans do?" and fuck it up with sheer incompetence.
Maybe, but the history of conscription means that you do have a core population that have trained to go to war, visualised what it would be like, and have been given the confidence that only military service can give re: doing your part. I don't think the ROC politicians would roll over without a legitimate blockade, or buildings being blown up.
The Taiwanese military is definitely a basket case, and they know it. So maybe they take the out before their kids all die in the mountains and rice paddies. I doubt it though.
Couldn't agree more. I think the chances of an invasion are small. But when you get old men who read too many history books clamping down on political and military dissent... it does give you reason to question these things.
This cartoon is what made me worry that Taiwan's conscription is... not really all it should be. (translation: "what i thought it would be, what it was") Like, it's basically just an excuse for their local government to get cheap labor to do stuff like cutting grass. Maybe I'm getting influenced too much by a stupid internet meme, but I certainly get the impression that Taiwan really doesn't have a strong military culture.
/images/17696657887718937.webp
That meme is classic military culture. Fits right in with the classic 'What I actually do' meme format.
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