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 a glance, the move seems to be consistent with his emphasis on the necessity of enhancing military preparedness for a possible full military invasion of Taiwan, because the military is required to be well-disciplined without corruption.
Looking carefully, however, a series of purges of several top military leaders since last year begs the question of what dynamics has worked behind the anomaly.
More specifically, general Wei Fenghe (魏鳳和) and his immediate successor, Li Shangfu (李尚福), were removed as People’s Republic China (PRC) Defense Minister and other related top party-military positions and then stripped of Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) membership for corruption and disciplinary infraction. Most recently, Li’s immediate successor, Admiral Dong Jun (董軍), again has reportedly been put on suspension of work and is under investigation for disciplinary infractions.
In addition, Admiral Miao Hua (苗華), who is one of seven members of the CCP Central Military Commission, has followed a very similar fate.
It is well known that the communist regime suffers entrenched, patronage-driven structural corruption, reinforced by the Confucious tradition in which the most successful of the family members is obligated to take extensive material care of the whole clan. Naturally, it is hard to find someone who is not corrupted among the regime leaders, as demonstrated by the case of former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), who had been long believed a “cleanest” top leader, as evidenced by the so-called Panama Papers.
No wonder the anti-corruption campaign is popular given the populace’s growing resentment against the corrupted leaders. This is particularly because, amid the aggravating depression, Xi has taken the policy line of “common prosperity” while combining the campaign with redistribution from the rich to the poor. In reality, up to the consolidation of Xi’s personal dictatorial power, the campaign primarily targeted his major political rivals and their key faction figures, which constitutes his arbitrary instrument of power struggle.
Yet, those military leaders are neither Xi’s rivals nor their faction’s key figures. Rather, the leaders are Xi’s hand-picked proteges. This strongly suggests that the two admirals have acted out of the military’s professional interests. Most revealing is that they have nonetheless become Xi’s primary targets for purges.
It is well known that Xi has stressed the central importance of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Navy (PLAN) in the event of a full Taiwan war, with sustained priority in budget allocation. Given Xi’s firm grip over the Central Military Commission and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the interservice rivalry between the navy and army over budget allocation can hardly explain the purges.
The most likely explanation is that the admirals are negative against a full Taiwan war in which the PLAN would undergo a complete defeat to the US and Japanese navies, involving high casualties, as simulated by several war games by major Western and Japanese think tanks.
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 has carried out sequential purges to discipline the military’s unwillingness and veiled sabotage to a Taiwan war. The necessity of discipline has rapidly grown, since time is running out for Xi to achieve “Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” especially through the unification of Taiwan. With the recent gigantic asset bubble burst and deteriorating demographic onus, the Chinese economy has already peaked. This could necessitate Xi to wage a war while the country still has temporary quantitative superiority in military hardware supported by the extant overproduction capacity and other necessary 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.
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