With Washington substantially off-guard in power transition, China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping (習近平), is intensifying an anti-corruption campaign against the top military leadership.
At first glance, this resolution appears to be consistent with the emphasis on achieving better preparation of the army for a conceivable large-scale military invasion of Taiwan, since the army will have to be well disciplined and free of corruption.
However, upon closer inspection, a series of purges of several senior military officers since last year raises the question of what dynamic this anomaly played into.
Specifically, General Wei Fenghe (魏鳳和) and his immediate successor, Li Shangfu (李尚福), were dismissed from their positions as Minister of Defense of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and other high-level officials related to the game. army positions, and were later fired from their positions in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for corruption and disciplinary misconduct. More recently, Li’s immediate successor, Admiral Dong Jun (董軍), reportedly suspended from duty and is under investigation for disciplinary misconduct.
Furthermore, Admiral Miao Hua (苗華), one of the seven members of the CCP Central Military Commission, suffered the same fate.
It is well known that the communist regime suffers from deep-seated structural corruption motivated by clientelism, reinforced by the Confucian culture in which the most affluent member of the circle of kin is obliged to materially care for all his extended relatives. It is difficult to locate anyone who is not corrupt among the regime’s leaders, as demonstrated by the case of former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), who has long been the “cleanest” leader. as demonstrated by the so-called Chinese president, the so-called Panama Papers.
It is not surprising that the anti-corruption crusade is popular given the population’s growing resentment against corrupt leaders. One explanation for this is that, in the midst of a deepening depression, Xi has followed the political line of “common prosperity” while combining his crusade with a redistribution from the rich to the poor. In reality, until Xi’s private dictatorial force was consolidated, the crusade basically targeted his main political rivals and key figures in his factions, which is its arbitrary tool. struggle of forces.
However, those army leaders are neither Xi’s rivals nor key figures in his faction. Rather, the leaders are Xi’s protégés, hand-picked. This strongly suggests that either admiral acted in accordance with the interests of the army. Most tellingly, they are nonetheless the primary targets of Xi’s purges.
Xi has famously emphasized the central importance of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) in the event of an all-out war in Taiwan, with sustained precedence in budget allocation. Given Xi’s corporate control over the Central Military Commission and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, rivalry between the military services and the army over budget allocation can hardly contribute to the purges.
The most likely explanation is that the admirals oppose an all-out war against Taiwan in which the PLAN would suffer a general defeat at the hands of the American and Japanese navies, resulting in heavy losses, as simulated in several war exercises held during Giant Western and Japanese reflex teams.
This is because the US naval forces possess the world’s most advanced weaponry with the richest fighting experience, while the Japanese ones do advanced weaponry with highly sophisticated training with the US forces. On the other hand, the PLAN forces, as well as the air force, lack any actual fighting experience since its inception, despite its quantitative superiority, at least for a short and limited warfare centered in the Taiwan theater.
The PLA has one de facto defeat experience in the war against Vietnam in 1979.
This is probably why Xi carried out sequential purges to deal with the military’s reluctance and the veiled sabotage of a war in Taiwan. The need for space has increased as time runs out for Xi to realize “the Chinese dream of a wonderful rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” particularly through the unification of Taiwan. With the recent burst of a gigantic asset bubble and deteriorating demographic burden, the Chinese economy has already peaked. This may simply force Xi to wage war while the country still has a temporary quantitative superiority in subsidized military equipment through existing overproduction capacity and other binding economic power.
In this light, it is necessary to understand the significance of the most recent unprecedented maritime activities over Dec. 9 to 11, with about 60 major PLAN surface combatants and some 30 major China Coast Guard vessels that were deployed across the East and South China Seas and the wider western Pacific. The move was a rehearsed naval blockade against Taiwan, in contrast to PLA’s several large-scale, joint naval and air, live-fire exercises for the past two years.
Given its pacifist constitutional constraints, Japan’s military action against a blockade of Taiwan is highly unlikely, because it is not an unprovoked armed attack against Japan. Japan can only exercise the limited right of collective self-defense with the US in the Taiwan theater if the country faces “situations posing threats to the survival.” Without Japan’s rear-area and logistical support, the US might be unwilling to make an armed intervention.
The above maritime activities might be a well-calibrated move by the PLAN in which the PLA’s reluctance against Xi’s adventurism has surfaced.
Analyzing the secret strife between Xi and the military is inherently intellectual guess work, since it largely remains in a “black box.” Yet, the risks of Xi’s adventurism are real, so Washington, Tokyo and Taipei had better prepare for the worst now rather than later.
Masahiro Matsumura is a professor of international politics and national security in the faculty of law at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, Japan, and was a Taiwan Fellow at the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei.