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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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To add to this, you can't really damage the combat readiness of an army by leadership purges if it's not combat-ready to begin with.

You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'

One of the classic failure modes of officer purges is when the people doing the purging believe that issue with readiness is the officer corps, as opposed to the army as a whole. It typically comes with the underlying premise that the current issue is that the purged officers were being given everything they needed to make the force combat capable, and that by replacing the bad officers with good ones the previous malign factors will go away in relatively short order. Think of a strategy game where unit commanders provide modifiers to the units they are in- if you change the commander, the modifiers change as well, because the modifiers are tied to the commander, not the army.

If this seems silly due to the example, there is more historical precedent than one might remember. Leader personality do matter. Strong personalities can distort entire organizations around themselves, toxic leaders can poison a climate, and a transition from incompetent leaders to good leaders can see the same forces change in readiness without expensive campaigns abroad.

But it is also reflective of a sort of top-down control paradigm, the sort of mentality that leans into technnocratic or personal-control impulses on the underlying belief that everything would be better if people just listened to you/people like you/the people you 'know' are better. This sort of mental paradigm, in turn, is prone to its own forms of confirmation bias, particularly if your totally not yes-men more professional and competent officer corps begins reporting improvements that coincided with their assumption of the job.

You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'

Where are we getting the idea that this is what is happening?

Relevant fresh Chinatalk:

Jordan Schneider: What does this mean for Taiwan contingencies?

Jon Czin: I’ve actually been turning this question on its head. This isn’t the core driver of what’s going on, but Xi’s willingness to totally clean house — renovate the military, strip the high command down to its studs — shows he feels pretty comfortable about the external environment and the cross-strait environment in particular.

There are three big reasons for that. First, President Trump doesn’t seem personally invested in the Taiwan issue. The national defense strategy doesn’t even mention Taiwan, and they’re reading that signal pretty clearly. Second, President Lai Ching-te, whom they loathe, is in political trouble at home after the failed recall campaign this summer. There’s going to be an election in 2028, and the opposition KMT’s new leadership is saying very favorable things about Beijing. From their perspective, they’ve got breathing room, and 2028 is probably the next big pivot point where they sense a real opportunity to shape and shift the dynamic.

Again, that’s not a driver, but when Xi is thinking about all this, he probably feels pretty comfortable about the situation.

The other thing to point out: assessing the PLA is always challenging because, yes, there’s deeply rooted corruption, but the modernization effort remains really impressive. This is true of China’s economy and development writ large — there’s real rot, real dysfunction, and real corruption, but also real dynamism. They’re doing real things with actual impressive quality. Both coexist at the same time.

Even in the last few months, just a few weeks after the exclamation mark on the last round of purges at this fall’s plenum, the PLA conducted a pretty significant military exercise around Taiwan in the closing days of 2025. There was this theory floating around that because a bunch of people from the 31st Group Army were purged, they wouldn’t know how to do these things anymore. It’s pretty clear they still know how to do these things, based on the operation they pulled together at the end of last year.

You have to think this is terrible for morale. It’s not how you’d run a high-morale, high-tempo organization in the West. But it’s their system, and this is how they operate.

Where are we getting the idea that this is what is happening?

Where are you getting the idea that I am claiming that is what is happening?

Particularly when, just further down in the exchange, I helpfully clarify for any confused Russians in the audience who might have confused a general argument for a specific claim-

To step away from the analogy and make a clarification, I'm not saying that this is what is happening. But it is a failure mode that can happen, and would explain a bad decision- such as going forward into a war after an officer purge. No one rationally chooses a failure mode, but then no one would have rationally chosen China's Zero Covid policies either, and it still happened under- and because of- Xi.

You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'

One of the classic failure modes of officer purges is when the people doing the purging believe that issue with readiness is the officer corps, as opposed to the army as a whole. It typically comes with the underlying premise that the current issue is that the purged officers were being given everything they needed to make the force combat capable, and that by replacing the bad officers with good ones the previous malign factors will go away in relatively short order. Think of a strategy game where unit commanders provide modifiers to the units they are in- if you change the commander, the modifiers change as well, because the modifiers are tied to the commander, not the army.

This works if the new officers have, to use your analogy, negative modifiers.

Sure. It can also work if the new officers have positive modifiers. And thus we get into the implications of highly personalist autocratic systems that result in information flows for evaluation getting systemically distorted.

To continue the analogy, most strategy games work on an assumption that the numbers presented to the player are actually correct. When the game tells you the character has positive or negative modifiers, you can believe it because the game systems don't lie to you.

It would be a completely different dynamic if the character with negative modifiers was presenting as a character with positive modifiers, and that the only way for you to know it was different was to use that officer in combat first. And it would be an even greater deviation from that if using in combat didn't actually reveal objective stats. Say their negative modifier only comes into view if they lose- so if you actually win with them in an easy conflict, you think you have a good officer and that the costs were other issues.

But of course, between the paradigm of 'the game system doesn't lie to you' and 'the game system does lie to you,' reality is a bit closer to the later. The systems often lie, because the systems are made out of people with their own interests to distort the truth. China is no stranger to that, hence the economic statistic reliability for decades.

But that in turns is what helps drive the top-down paradigm that can over-emphasize a leadership solution. If you can't trust/rely on the reporting system, you trust/rely on what you can trust/rely on instead. Yourself first of all, but then intermediaries you trust, and then subordinates they trust. Less trust per degrees of separation, but a personalist system tends to run on personalities for a reason. And if a personality disagrees and isn't performing...

To step away from the analogy and make a clarification, I'm not saying that this is what is happening. But it is a failure mode that can happen, and would explain a bad decision- such as going forward into a war after an officer purge. No one rationally chooses a failure mode, but then no one would have rationally chosen China's Zero Covid policies either, and it still happened under- and because of- Xi.

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