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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19353 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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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.

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