Kev

Xi Jinping has spent his tenure as China’s leader trying to build a world-class military. Now @nytimes reports that he can't even trust the generals he personally selected to command it. Per @ChuBailiang: In 2014, Xi warned PLA officers that the Communist Party’s control of the armed forces had dangerously eroded. Corruption, cronyism and insubordination were rampant. On Xi’s mind: autocrats in other countries who toppled when their militaries abandoned them. He doubled down on political indoctrination, vetting and monitoring for PLA officers. In 2022, he put General Zhang Youxia in charge and commanded him: “Direct all our energies to combat readiness.” But despite all his efforts, he still lost faith in his own generals, and recently warned: “The military must never have anyone who harbours a divided heart toward the Party.” When Xi sought to promote his PLA anticorruption czar to a more senior position than Zhang, he objected. This January, Xi purged him. The purges keep rolling: this month a military court sentenced two former defence ministers to death with suspended sentence for bribery. That adds up to life in prison. My take: Corruption is endemic in the Party-state and the PLA because there’s no transparency or accountability. One round of purges has to be followed by another, because the system itself is rotten. Xi is caught in the “red or expert” dilemma and tends to choose loyalty over competence. In trying to transform the system, he's created new contradictions: it now generates pressure for purges to validate itself, even as it eliminates the people who could plausibly replace or succeed him. The discipline apparatus he’s built is good at ferreting out corruption, but not at preventing it. The man and his system are in perpetual tension. Military readiness may be disrupted for years by these high-level purges and subsequent “ideological rectification” and “revolutionary forging” Xi deems necessary to purify and strengthen the ranks. A question: How the hell does anyone gain and keep the General Secretary’s trust these days? nytimes.com/2026/05/09/wor…