China’s military chaos could indicate Xi Jinping is preparing for World War III – expert

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by olivia land

Chinese President Xi Jinping is “trying to take control of the military” – suggesting he may be preparing for World War III, experts have warned.

The 70-year-old Communist Party leader “believes we need officers who are ready to actually fight,” Gordon Chan, a senior fellow at Gatestone Institute, told Business Insider in a report published Monday. Told.

“Many of China’s generals feel they don’t want to fight, and we actually have an army led by a corps of officers who are ambivalent about going to war,” says the author of China Goes to War. explained.

The newspaper noted that Mr. Xi has been reforming China’s military since taking power in 2012, and in his latest New Year’s speech expressed a particularly bellicose stance toward Taiwan.

“China will definitely be unified. All Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Xi declared, according to his official translation. address.

He also reportedly told President Biden at the APEC summit in November that China had every intention of seizing Taiwan.

Then, on December 29, 2023, Mr. Xi suddenly dismissed nine senior officials of the Chinese military.

Zhang told BI that reports that Xi’s military purge was aimed at eradicating officers involved in corruption could only explain that.

“If that were the case, we would all be fired,” he argued to the Chinese military’s top brass.

Mr. Zhang suggested instead that Mr. Xi was targeting people who were reluctant to go to war.

For example, Zhang pointed out that General Liu Yazhou of the Chinese Air Force warned of a possible invasion of Taiwan and received a suspended death sentence in February 2022.

Joel Wuthnow, a senior fellow at the Center for China Military Studies at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., argued that China’s war preparedness and the removal of corrupt influence go hand in hand.

“This dismissal shows that Mr. Xi is concerned about the quality of the people and equipment he has invested in over the past decade,” Usnow reasoned.

He added that the nine dismissed commanders had ties to China’s Rocket Force, which would play an important role in potential military operations.

“If that equipment breaks down or becomes unreliable, can Mr. Xi and his colleagues be sure that the People’s Liberation Army will do so?” [People’s Liberation Army] Will we win? ” suggested Mr. Usnau.

China has been involved in so many conflicts in recent years, from invading Taiwan’s air defense zone to clashes with Japan in the East China Sea, that it’s impossible to predict where a major explosion will occur. experts said.

“I don’t think you can say, ‘Oh, this is Taiwan or something,'” Chan told the outlet.

But Mr. Xi’s comments on Taiwan, including his 2021 warning that Mr. Biden was “playing with fire” on the issue, sound like he could “invite himself and China to war,” he said. he concluded.

“Remember, in the 1930s, there were separate wars that merged into what we now call World War II,” Chan continued, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Israel’s war in the Middle East. He referred to a series of conflicts that led to the Hamas war.

“The same power relations exist today, and it is entirely possible that some could even argue that these are likely to be integrated into global conflicts,” he added. Ta.

But Wuthnow suggested that Xi’s military ambitions could be hampered by Russia’s disastrous example in Ukraine.

“Russia has paid a huge price for its misfortune, and so will China. Moreover, if the invasion fails, politically it would be worse for Mr. Xi than not attempting an attack at all.” Ta.

Zhang said China’s invasion of East Asia would almost certainly push Western countries into a larger conflict.

“I think Xi Jinping has extracted two pages from Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution strategy. One of them was to encircle the cities from the countryside. “I think we see the United States as a city,” he explained.