An “unprecedented purge” of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is affecting its exercise schedule and would make it difficult for China to launch a large-scale military operation against Taiwan in the short term, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in a report on Feb. 24.
Ministry of National Defense data showed that China did not dispatch a single warplane into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone — an area that Taiwan closely monitors, but is not its territorial airspace — in the week from 6am on Feb. 28 to 6am on Friday.
Bloomberg on Friday reported that it was a “mysterious absence that amounts to Beijing’s longest spell away from the sensitive area since Taiwan started regularly disclosing the activity.”
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of National Defense
The CSIS report said that on Jan. 24, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense announced that its military’s top general, Zhang Youxia (張又俠), and the chief of the Joint Staff Department, Liu Zhenli (劉振立), were under investigation for serious disciplinary and legal violations.
The downfall of the two senior generals marks the most dramatic move yet in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) years-long campaign to purge the PLA leadership, said the report, titled “Assessing Xi’s unprecedented purges of China’s military: Key developments and potential implications.”
“Since 2022, over 100 senior PLA officers from across virtually all areas of the armed forces have been swept aside or gone missing, amounting to an unprecedented purge of China’s military,” it said.
The report also analyzed the “near-complete decapitation” of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Military Commission.
The CCP’s highest military decisionmaking body no longer has leaders from the operational system, it said.
Regarding the PLA’s combat capabilities against Taiwan, the CSIS report said that “in the near term, given the significant vacancies, it would be incredibly difficult for China to launch large military campaigns against Taiwan.”
The removals have already negatively affected its daily exercises around Taiwan compared with last year, it said.
It took the PLA only three or four days to launch the two Joint Sword exercises in May and October 2024, but it took 19 days for it to launch the Strait Thunder exercise in April last year and 12 days for the Justice Mission in December last year, the CSIS report said.
The two exercises last year were assessed as hastily organized and lacking a thorough, comprehensive plan, it said, adding that the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command even failed to announce specific exercise zones.
Combining the US think tank’s report with the reality of recent “zero incursions” by warplanes for a week shows that the PLA is preoccupied with internal restructuring and personnel purges, the CSIS report said.
It is possible that the CCP is scaling back military pressure on Taiwan, said Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), director of the Division of Defense Strategy and Resources at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
Beijing might be attempting to use a brief “period of peace” to conduct cognitive warfare, as an intense partisan standoff is playing out in the legislature over the defense budget, Su said.
China’s goal would be to weaken the sense of urgency in Taiwan regarding the need to boost defense resilience, he added.
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