welcome to foreign policyOverview of China.
This week’s highlights: The Chinese Communist Party ended the year with: military purgePresident of China Xi Jinping Media mogul Jimmy Lai faces cliché in New Year’s speech trial in hong kong.
China ended the year with a purge, one of the favorite traditions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Now it’s the military’s turn, with nine high-ranking generals dismissed from China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, last Friday.
Although the NPC itself is unimportant, such dismissal often sets the stage for further discipline or criminal charges. Last week’s purge included several members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force, who had been under investigation since last summer. Former Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu was also formally dismissed from his post several months after he disappeared from public life. No charges have yet been announced against him.
One Western hawk school of thought considers any military purges in China to be preparations for war. In an abstract sense, that may be true. The job of any military is to prepare for war, and Chinese leaders see corruption as a threat to military readiness. However, these recent deletions do not signal preparation for any specific conflict. Military purges are a characteristic of dictatorships, especially in communist countries, where the ruling party feels the need to assert its supremacy over the military.
It has been clear and often said for decades that China needs to curb corruption within its military. People’s Liberation Army officers have been in the business for a long time, especially since the 1970s, when the military seized control of much of China’s economy during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Targeting corruption against the military is not an indication of preparations for war, just as the recent arrest of a Malaysian businessman at the center of the US Navy bribery scandal is not an indication of preparations for war.
Chinese President Xi Jinping did not begin anti-corruption efforts within the People’s Liberation Army, but the efforts intensified when he took office in 2012. In 2015, Chinese leaders made a point of arresting a dying general and expelling him from the Chinese Communist Party. cancer. In the longer term, Mr. Xi may find the purge necessary to prepare the military for a war over Taiwan. But in the short term, it will involve his own control of key institutions.
So, if there was any specific corruption within the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, what was it and how were those involved caught? Possibly a victim of China’s downturn in the real estate market? It is possible that you were caught. Or it could have happened more directly. China is expanding its nuclear weapons stockpile, including significant land acquisitions in western China, opening the door to corruption and detection.
The combination of real estate and government funding frequently created opportunities for graft. If officials have an excuse to expropriate land from local governments or buy it cheaply, they can sell it for personal use and make huge profits. But even if the Rocket Army scandal wasn’t a complete real estate scam, a lot of Chinese money is invested in real estate. Many questionable investments failed, leaving questionable holes in the books.
Weapons development and logistics are also areas prone to corruption. China has been closely monitoring Russia’s war in Ukraine, especially since its predictions about a Russian victory turned out to be so wrong. One of the reasons Russia’s invasion failed so dramatically in 2022 was endemic small-scale corruption, such as troops receiving expired food packs and worn-out tires. This led China to take a closer look at the PLA Rocket Force’s procurement and logistics, and may have led to some discoveries about how much was being stolen.
Whatever the plan, the cleansing of China probably won’t result in significant changes to PLA Rocket Force operations in the long term. After all, despite crackdown after crackdown, the same problems with corruption continue to arise. The military’s status and lack of transparency means that the only institution with effective oversight over the military is the Chinese Communist Party, which is even more senior and even less transparent. Without outside scrutiny and criticism, corruption will continue to reoccur.
But while outsiders rarely get a look inside China’s military, it is known that institutions under investigation in China tend to be less efficient in the short term. Authorities want to avoid becoming scapegoats. The small-scale, routine acts of corruption that keep the wheels of a highly bureaucratic system humming will cease until discipline inspectors look elsewhere.
As happened after the purge of Big Fund, the investment fund that was supposed to turn China into a chip-producing powerhouse, money invested in China’s nuclear modernization can stay there for quite a while.
President Xi’s New Year’s speech. In China, both January 1st and the Spring Festival, which celebrates the Chinese New Year, are opportunities for leaders to make speeches. This year, Mr. Xi talked about the usual stories of great progress, good harvests and the inevitable rise of the Chinese nation, but then paused to admit that there were “headwinds” and that “some companies are struggling.” By historical standards, this is a sign of serious economic concern.
Brief references to the inevitability of unification with Taiwan received some coverage in Western media, but were of little significance. If anything, China’s language toward Taiwan tends to get a little harsher when the Chinese Communist Party is trying to make up for something that hasn’t happened, and it has actually been the case ever since President Xi devoted an entire speech to the topic in 2019. has hardly changed.
The trial of Jimmy Lai. This week, Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai is on trial on sedition charges that combine colonial law with a tough national security law introduced in 2020. Lai, 76, has spent the past three years in prison and faces life in prison if convicted. That possibility is very high. Despite the structure of Hong Kong’s once-independent legal system remaining, this is essentially a show trial. As is usual in Hong Kong, there is no jury.
Mr. Lai has been accused of colluding with a foreign country, and one of the aims of his trial appears to be to scare Hong Kongers away from cooperating with international organizations. Two people from the Interparliamentary Alliance on China, a Hong Kong human rights group that works with politicians in many democracies, were named as co-conspirators.
Video game binge. In China, changes to gaming regulations have coincidentally exposed concerns within the market and technology companies, and revealed how the government is trying to restore trust. Online gaming rules announced last week caused a panic in the stock market, wiping out $80 billion in value. Chinese authorities have repeatedly targeted various economic sectors for ideological reasons. In 2021 and 2022, 14,000 video game companies closed down as a result of censors’ long-term freeze on approval of new games.
The government has been eager to restore trust with businesses in the wake of the economic downturn, quickly trying to roll back the latest regulations and even firing officials over the issue. But Chinese companies are acutely aware that excessive censorship can destroy their businesses, depending on the whims of their leaders. Alibaba, once Asia’s most valuable company, has lost 75% of its stock value since becoming a government target in 2020.
BRICS loses members. Argentina’s new president, far-right liberal Javier Millay, withdrew the country from plans to join the BRICS group. Argentina was scheduled to join the bloc on January 1, along with other new members such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. China has long-standing ties with past Argentine governments and is a major consumer of Argentine agricultural products. Mr. Millais has expressed his anti-communist views.
Argentina, suffering from an economic slump, will probably not be so overlooked by the BRICS bloc. But as the group enters 2024 with new members, its exact purpose remains unclear. After all, it was born out of a Goldman Sachs slogan. For now, BRICS appears to be an attempt by regional powers to hedge their bets about which superpower will dominate the future.