Xi Jinping's PLA purges
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You can get three months of The Spectator for just £15 and a free bottle of Pro Roger champagne if you go to spectator.co.uk forward slash jingle. This offer is UK only and subject to availability. Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? More than a year after Xi Jinping purged two senior generals in the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force Unit, China's investigation into its military seems to be ongoing, with more scalps taken.

In recent weeks, Miao Hua, another senior general who had been a member of the Central Military Commission, has been suspended. While reports abound that the country's current defence minister, Dong Jun, is under investigation too. If suspended, Dong will be the third consecutive defence minister that Xi has removed. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one defence minister may be regarded a misfortune, to lose three looks like carelessness.

So what is happening at the top of the PLA? Is all of this movement a sign of Xi failing to get on top of corruption within the military or in fact a sign that he is gearing up for serious military action, perhaps over Taiwan? Just how successful have the military reforms that he instigated in 2015 been in the almost decade since he started them? Joining me on the podcast today is Oriana Skyler Mastro.

an expert on the Chinese military at Stanford University and author of Upstart, How China Became a Great Power. But first, I spoke to Dimitri Savasopoulou, US-China correspondent for the Financial Times. Dimitri was the first to report that Dong Jun was under investigation. Dimitri, welcome to Chinese Whispers.

So to start with, I wondered if you can tell us about what we know about what's happening at the top of the People's Liberation Army. You recently scooped a very interesting revelation, I think, from American intelligence rather than from Chinese sources. Well, so we had a story a week or so ago, which is that Admiral Dong Jun, who is the Chinese Minister of Defence, is under investigation for something. We don't know what he's under investigation for, but we know that he's under investigation for something.

And he also appeared in public in Shanghai on Thursday, December the 5th.

So some people are saying, is he really under investigation? Is it possible that US sources have got the wrong end of the stick? Those things are possible, but it's also the Chinese system. Just because you place it under investigation doesn't mean you're going to disappear from public sight immediately. These things happen in different ways. And I think if you step back, what we know is that Xi Jinping is engaging in a huge investigation into corruption in the People's Liberation Army for a whole range of issues, including corruption.

And, you know, there are a lot of people who have been taken down in the last couple of years. And I think there is a certainly a sense in Washington that we're going to see other names fall from grace, if not in the near future, next year. So this is something people are incredibly focused on in terms of Xi Jinping's control over his own military and maybe even more importantly, what it means for China.

the readiness of the Chinese military forces and whether they would have the capability to attack Taiwan at some point in the near future. That's something that people are laser focused on in Washington, at least. And actually, around the time of your own report, we also heard that Miao Hua, who is a member of the Central Military Commission, a more technically more senior person than Defence Minister Dong Jun himself, has actually been suspended and not just placed under investigation, but actually suspended and he has actually disappeared from view now.

Well, he has disappeared from view, but he's still listed on the Chinese Defence Ministry website. So he hasn't been completely purged. If he had, his name would have disappeared, but he's definitely under investigation. They've said that publicly. And to be clear, the Chinese Defence Ministry dismissed my scoop, as I forget the phrasing they used, but it wasn't very complimentary. LAUGHTER

But they also deny everything when the timing is not convenient for them. But the downfall of Miao Hua is much more significant because he is in the leadership of the Chinese military. The Central Military Commission is basically the leadership body, which is chaired by President Xi Jinping.

And Dong Jun, while if he falls from grace would be significant because he would be the third consecutive defence minister to be purged for something, probably corruption, he's really just the international face of the PLA. He's not involved in the decision-making like Miao Hua would be. I mean, Miao Hua is in the top five ranking offices of the PLA. Dong Jun is not. So Miao Hua is a much bigger deal. But I think, again, if you kind of zoom back out...

The broader picture here is that Xi Jinping started with the purge of corrupt officers in the army. He then moved at one point into the rocket forces, which is the branch of the PLA which controls nuclear weapons. So super important as China builds up its nuclear arsenal. And he purged certainly the two top commanders of the rocket forces, which was very significant.

and he replaced the top commander with a navy officer. So for the first time ever you had a Chinese navy officer running the Nuclear Strategic Forces Command.

He then brought Dong Jun in to be the new Defence Minister. Dong Jun is also the first Navy officer to be Defence Minister. So you see there's kind of a purging of the army. The navy was rising a little bit. Now what we're seeing with Dong Jun, if indeed he does fall from grace, and Miao Hua, who is an admiral now, but actually started in the army. So he's kind of a hybrid officer, but he's been in the navy for, I think, at least 10 years now.

The question is, is there now a purge of the top ranks of the Navy? And one of the suggestions is that China has been spending so much money on building ships for its Navy, you know, destroyers and other kind of warships. I mean, huge amounts of money at a time when the American military is struggling to build more ships for financial reasons. With that amount of money sloshing around and in the PLA, which has systemic corruption problems,

It's very hard to imagine that there are no problems close to the top of the Chinese Navy. So what it seems to be happening is that Xi Jinping is spreading out this investigation and now the Navy is coming more central on the radar than it was in the past. But overall, what we're seeing is a pretty dramatic campaign by Xi Jinping.

Yeah. And Dimitri, I think you spoke to an expert who basically said, you know, if you were Xi Jinping now, you'd be wondering, well, what corner of the PLA is not corrupt? Yeah, I mean, that's the big question. I mean, you know, there's two things going on here. There's

Mao Zedong, when he was chairman of China, he used to say that power comes from the barrel of the gun. And what he understood was that unless you control the PLA, you don't control China. And I think Xi Jinping understands that as well, if not better than Mao Zedong. And the PLA is way, way more powerful now, obviously, than it was when Mao Zedong was in power decades ago.

The two main questions are, can Xi trust his top officers and commanders from a political point of view? Are they loyal to him? Is there a possibility at some point that they could launch a coup or threaten him? You know, I'm not saying that that's likely, but if you have purged as many people as Xi Jinping has in the military and beyond,

You don't have to be paranoid to worry that maybe they might try and get you at some point. So there's that. And then there's the broader question of readiness and whether the combination of corruption in the PLA and senior commanders being corrupt in the PLA. And then also one element of the corruption problem in the PLA is that there's been a culture of paying to get promoted or pay to play, which has been endemic. So

Are your top officers competent? Like, did they rise through the ranks on merit or did they buy their way up the ladder? All of those questions are important when you're thinking about Taiwan, the readiness of your military, particularly at a time when tensions with the U.S. are at an all-time high. So I think, you know, Xi Jinping clearly wants to make the PLA, you know, get them into top shape.

is trying to purge these corrupt elements. But also at the same time that he purges corrupt elements, he also creates new enemies for himself. So it's quite a tricky thing. And in some ways, you know, there's a big risk element to what he's doing as well. That was Dimitri Sevastopoulou from the Financial Times. I then spoke to Oriana Scarlomastro, an expert on the Chinese military at Stanford University and author of Upstart, How China Became a Great Power.

I started by asking her for her take on these high-level movements. Right, so the first thing to know is that, as you mentioned, we know that Miao Hua is pending a probe for serious violations of discipline, which is a euphemism that they use for corruption. He oversaw the People's Liberation Army political work, things like propaganda organization, education, and he's the seventh member of the Central Military Commission to be ousted since Xi Jinping took power.

So it's very visible. It's particularly interesting compared to the initial oustings, because when Xi Jinping came into power, it made sense that maybe he wanted to get rid of several high level officials who, you know, loyalty to him might have been in question. But now the people who are under investigation like Miao Hua, these are people that are considered close allies to Xi Jinping.

She had assigned him to the People's Liberation Army Navy in 2014. She elevated him to be a three-star admiral in 2015 and promoted him then to the CMC in 2017. And they worked together previously in a region as well, didn't they? It was not just like since Xi Jinping has become the leader. It's before Xi Jinping was elevated to his current role, he had this kind of ally. Right. And so I think this idea of...

It's surprising that it's someone so high ranking. You know, that was surprising years ago when Xi Jinping first started. But the high ranking people were kind of thrown out in the first round of anti-corruption campaigns. Now the thing that's surprising is that these high ranking people are close allies of Xi Jinping.

So, you know, why are they being thrown out? You know, if you want to say because of corruption in the system for someone to get to that high of a level, everyone has something in their closet in terms of benefiting from that position. So corruption alone matters.

cannot be enough of the answer of why we see these individuals. And then, of course, you have the defense minister as well, who'd be the third one to be under sort of anti-corruption charges in a row, actually. And he was a former Navy chief as well.

Now, this is just, you know, current reporting. The Chinese have been trying to deny that the defense minister is currently under investigation. But his level is not as high as Miao Hua. In China, the minister of defense is not sort of akin to the secretary of defense of the United States. But even so, corruption is only a part. So what's going on? And there's honestly, we can just speculate. There's a lot of different

things this could mean. But until we actually know, like why they were ousted, like, it's really hard to predict. So I'll just give you some examples. If, for example, you know, these individuals,

We're really incompetent somehow. It wasn't only corruption, but that corruption led to some of the readiness issues that we see in the PLA. Then maybe some of the reporting that this actually shows clean governance and competence and that the system works, right? The disciplinary system works because the bad apples were found out.

And they're thrown out. You know, this tells you maybe that the system is actually strong and bodes well from the Chinese perspective for military readiness in the future. If instead it's that Xi Jinping is just what we're seeing is an example of his chronic distrust of

of the most prominent military officials. Maybe these individuals disagreed with him on something. Maybe they didn't even disagree with him on something. He just doesn't like the base of power that they have. And so he's throwing out people for that reason. Then it's probably the case that this is going to have a negative impact on PLA readiness as you have high level leaders who

that are unable to provide positive military, you know, and concrete, accurate military advice to Xi Jinping. And that Xi Jinping, if he doesn't have faith in his military leaders, when we talk about, you know, a Taiwan campaign after 2027, a large part about that is whether China will have the capabilities to conduct an amphibious assault. So you can imagine if he doesn't have faith in his leadership, if they come to him and they say,

OK, we can't do this. Maybe he, you know, that he might believe. But when they say, OK, we can do this, he might have his doubts. So from a war perspective, it might actually be a good thing that the relationship between the PLA and Xi Jinping is so stressed because it really, in my mind, as a military analyst,

it would be Xi Jinping's confidence in the capabilities of the PLA that might cause him to use force over Taiwan. So if he's not sure how to assess his own capabilities, that might actually impose caution on him. So it could be good, but it could be bad.

Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned the Central Military Commission. Just explain a little bit about the commission, because I think that's a system that perhaps in democracies, you know, is not so easily understandable because it's not quite a defense department. What is the role of the military commission and why does it have more power than the defense minister? So to put it clearly, China has sort of three parallel systems in the country, right? They have the party, the

They have the state and then they have the military. So when Xi Jinping, you might hear him be called like chairman or

He's the chairman of the Central Military Commission. He's the general secretary of the party. And then he's the president of China. Those three titles are because he's the head of the three different parallel apparatuses. Now, their Department of Defense or their Ministry of Defense is much more, it doesn't do so much of the training, equipping operations like ours does. In a lot of ways, the Minister of Defense was a position that was created for interaction with the external world, with foreigners.

in particular. So it's about kind of defense engagement, defense affairs. And like, that's what makes it kind of less important. The actual military decisions happen in this structure of the Central Military Commission, which is a separate structure from the party. That's where the Standing Committee of the Politburo is, for example. So you have these various levels of

of authority. The state is in charge of the day-to-day bureaucratic administration of China. Obviously, the party, that's where most of the decisions are made. And the CMC is where most of the military decisions are made. And it's mostly uniform members, of course, technically, besides Xi Jinping, though, just kind of like the U.S. president is the commander-in-chief. He also has a military role. So in the Chinese system, we would say probably the vice chairman of

of the Central Military Commission is the one that has the equal stature of our Secretary of Defense. But definitely the Minister of Defense doesn't really have decision-making authority and isn't really in charge of operations and things. And so that's why he's sort of seen as a foreigner handler, if anything.

And the other curious thing about the CMC, of course, in that tripartite system that you outline, is that the CMC has a parallel system to the party. And it's technically, you know, the PLA is an army of the party, not the army of the state.

Right. So the People's Liberation Army is technically the armed wing of the Communist Party. It's in charge of protecting the 80 million or so Communist Party members. It's technically not tasked with the protection of the Chinese nation. When modernization efforts first happened, Xi Jinping, when he came into power, and I talk about this a lot in my new book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power, the ways that they approached building military power.

They were very entrepreneurial about first modernizing their force, building up the numbers of capabilities. And so when Xi Jinping came into power, the real thing that was left was organizational, and he launched this major organizational reform. The anti-corruption was a part of it because some people didn't want him to throw out the whole system and build a new one. From a military ops perspective, it was absolutely necessary. And the Chinese military is much more capable now because of what Xi Jinping has done.

He got rid of army dominance to pave way for the types of joint operations China needs to be able to do. And so part of those organizational reforms, going back to what I started with, was the relationship between the military and the average Chinese person. Because they're not a professionalized force, their number one mission is

They don't put it this way, obviously, but is the repression of the Chinese people. It is that the party should be able to call on the military to repress any sort of uprisings. This is what happened in Tiananmen in 1989. Now, the PLA didn't like that, and they sort of brokered a deal with the party that...

Then they set up the separate People's Armed Police that tends to deal with that stuff more. The PLA has only been called in now a handful of times since 89. And those were in Xinjiang and Tibet, never against Han Chinese. But all of this is to say the average Chinese person wasn't necessarily like rah-rah PLA. And so Xi Jinping, definitely some of those organizational reforms were about elevating the stature of a military person within Chinese society.

So a lot of the propaganda and the cool movies that people had heard of, you know, Operation Red Sea, Wolf Warrior, all that kind of stuff. But also like for the first time having a separate line at the airport for military personnel or offering discounts on train tickets, just trying to like create this extra class so that they would be sort of better respected in the system or on the news. Now you see all the time about the exercises, the things the military is doing, you know, before none of that stuff was really publicized pre-Xi Jinping.

Had there been a crisis of trust before or was it just more that he was looking to bolster that kind of or to militarize the country as it were?

I think that that position between the party and the military always existed. It was probably exacerbated by Tiananmen, sorry, the party and the Chinese people. You know, there's a Chinese saying that goes something like, you don't take a good fish and make a soup out of it. You don't take a good man and put him in the military. So I think there's also like a social, societal, cultural element of which that's not like

you know, the most well-respected profession. While at least in the U.S. military, there's always these polls that say the U.S. military is one of the most trusted institutions in the United States. So I think part of it was he recognized that they were going to rely more on the military to achieve certain goals in the international system. And he wanted, you know, the Chinese people's support for that because it would also bolster the credibility of

of certain threats that China is putting forth, they often say like, the Chinese people are unhappy about this. And so to be able to show that they have societal support for some of their ambitions, definitely signals to the outside world that they mean business. So I do think it was part, he inherited this issue, but as part of a strategic decision as part of the securitization of a lot of Chinese policy to improve that relationship.

And in your book, in Upstart, you mention this process of emulation that's happened in the military when it comes to the reforms emulating the US. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that? How did that manifest in these military reforms?

So in the book, I talk about the upstart approach of which there's three components or three E's. There's emulation, exploitation, entrepreneurship. And I argue that contrary to popular belief, China doesn't emulate everything the United States does. So emulation means that China basically takes the same strategies that the United States employs and applies them in the same way.

And so there's some cases of this, right? We see China's shipbuilding, that they build a lot of ships. They say they need a lot of ships. You know, they look, the United States has a lot of ships. We do a constant ship comparison. It's not like they don't do anything similar to the United States. They still have a Navy. They still have an army, right? Some things, you know, are somewhat similar. And so they had recognized in most cases either that a certain capability was so important, in this case, you know, a surface fleet,

Or another case of emulation is what we call their C4ISR network. So this is basically space-based infrastructure, command control, computers, communication, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, that the nature of warfare is such that you need that constant information and connectivity. And so they did emulate those

They found that even if it did spark some threat perceptions in the United States, it was just so necessary. And in this space-based stuff, they were just so much more efficient at it. They had a competitive advantage in shipbuilding as well, that they could build ships more quickly than the United States, that it was worth it.

In a lot of cases, emulation is not worth it because China has different competitive advantages. They have a second mover disadvantage. It's overly threatening to the United States and threatens a counter response. So in those cases, they chose exploitation or entrepreneurship. And in the military realm, exploitation is when they take basically they look for gaps or vulnerabilities and fill those.

And so the Chinese strategy, we call it an anti-access area denial strategy or A2AD. That's really just a fancy way of saying China deliberately analyzed the U.S. military and

found what it relied on to project power into Asia, and then specifically designed capabilities to attack those weaknesses. So that's how you have, you know, counter space or anti-satellite stuff, missiles that can hit aircraft carriers, missiles that can take out, you know, close US basing to neutralize the air threat, all these different vulnerabilities. They're like, okay, what does the United States need? How do we take it away from them?

And then the last one is entrepreneurship. So these are areas where China does things that are completely different. And I talk in particular about their nuclear strategy and overseas interests protection, in which I argue that while China absolutely wants to dominate Asia militarily, there has never been a doubt in my mind about that. They largely want to rely on political and economic tools to shape policy in other regions of the world, like the Middle East or South America. I really haven't demonstrated a desire to rely on militaries

you know, projection of military power and foreign military intervention the way that the United States does it because they think it's expensive and it's ineffective and the econ-political stuff works very well. And same with nuclear. I mean, part of the book is to go through thousands of Chinese sources to get at how China sees certain things. And their view since 1964 was like, why do you need enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world like 10 times over? That seems silly. We'll just have about enough. Yeah.

to, you know, keep the United States and our enemies on edge. It's not just a strategic thing. Nuclear weapons are very expensive. And so until the 2000s, the United States spent more on its nuclear weapons than China spent on its whole military. So that's one of the ways that China has been able to compete with us so well conventionally is that they haven't been investing in the overseas base, which is expensive, or the expeditionary capabilities, which are expensive, or the nuclear weapons, which are expensive. They're just like very focused on

and the capabilities to get what they need to get done a couple hundred miles from their shores. That's fascinating. And how do you rate the success of these reforms? And do you think that Xi has managed to achieve his goals in terms of all three of these areas? From the outside, it looks like the answer to that is yes.

I mean, first of all, the reforms happen, the reorganization happen. We see their exercises have gotten much more sophisticated, have gotten more joint. It doesn't mean everything's perfect. A couple of months ago, a key aspect of that reform is they set up something called the Strategic Support Force, which combines cyberspace and electronic warfare. A couple of months ago, they threw out that kind of construct to separate out those different components to try something more akin to what the United States has with like cybercom and spacecom.

So it's not to say that that work is done, but it does suggest that the system is quote unquote working and that there was some sort of assessment process about whether or not that was facilitating joint operations and some sort of conclusion that it wasn't and that they wanted to try something new. Now, what everyone will tell you, which is correct, I don't mean to suggest it isn't correct, but they would say, well, China hasn't fought a war since 1979.

So, you know, who knows? Who knows? And when push comes to shove, it is extremely difficult to train people to run towards bullets instead of away from them. How is China going to perform? Now, here I go back and forth on it because I think the general tendency in the United States is to be dismissive. Right.

They haven't fought a war since 1979. We have nothing to worry about. This is really the only reason we sleep well at night. Because if you look at their technology, their numbers, their resolve, everything else, it's like it's not good. But at least our people are better. And yes, our people are better. But the problem with that argument is twofold. I mean, the first is the United States hasn't fought a war like this since probably maybe Vietnam, maybe even Korea. What I mean by like this.

is like a direct conventional interstate conflict. Like ships are shooting at ships. Aircraft are shooting at aircraft. Like there's been no other aircraft flying around with the United States in decades, right? We're just like up there hanging out by ourselves. Like-

There's like dogfighting is not happening. You don't have people on surface ships, like, you know, actually shooting at other ships. And we just haven't done like major naval combat and in a very long time. Some people say since World War Two, right? So yes, it has been a war for a really long time, but we haven't fought this type of war. And then

And then I also look back in history, and honestly, I don't know, but Japan went through a similar kind of military modernization and reform process during the Meiji period. And when they got out of it, everyone was like, oh, you know, that doesn't mean anything. They haven't fought. They'll never fight, right? And then the first...

You know, they walloped the Chinese in 1894, but then the first war that they fought against, you know, what was a big deal at the time, white people, right? Because the idea was that Asians couldn't fight as well as white people. And so then the Japanese fight the Russians in 1904, 1905, and then just destroyed them. And it just blew everybody's minds, right? So I kind

Well,

Well, it's just so interesting because there was a Bloomberg report earlier this year that part of what the anti-corruption investigation had found was that there was just such widespread, low-quality stuff going on in the army. So that report had said that some missiles were filled with water instead of with fuel. The lids of some of these missile silos were unable to open properly, which would mean that the missiles couldn't be launched effectively.

These reports coming out, in addition to the kind of corruption scandals and the people disappearing and being investigated, does kind of make you think, well, how much of it is he being fobbed off by his generals? And actually underneath that level, you know, you really don't want to look under that bonnet. Yeah, absolutely. So the big question is, is this just the tip of the iceberg? Or are these anomalies? Because we've had, and I don't mean to compare, again, the United States military is, you

the most sophisticated, best fighting force in the world. I don't want to give any indication of anything otherwise. But, you know, we've had some of these scandals too, right? Where there was like a mistake of a bomber flew across the United States with a nuclear weapon on it. We had those collisions because people weren't getting enough sleep and they were falling asleep in their ships more recently, right? And this isn't to say, and it was an indication of some institutional issues that needed to be dealt with, but it didn't give you the impression of like, oh my God, is everything rotten in the United States, you know?

military. That was more of an anomaly within the system. So the question is always like,

With a system like China's, it's much more likely that it is not an anomaly. I feel like in the U.S. system, especially with open reporting and things, transparency, civil military control, that it's much more likely that, quote unquote, all the problems in the military in the United States are public. And so, yes, you hear about them, but that's kind of it. Those are the problems. While in China, it's much more likely that

You know, you've only heard about a few things that are going on, but it doesn't, we still don't have an indication of like how far it goes because, and certain technical levels. I mean, we watch the exercises, we see the live fire tests, like it's not the case.

that all their capabilities are fake or something. Definitely, you know, we all saw that satellite blow up when they shot a kinetic kill vehicle at it, right? So there is definitely some stuff that works. And so trying to decipher, you know, what works and what doesn't is a real challenge. So tell us about the satellite. I missed that. Oh, this was like almost 20 years ago. I'm referring to the anti-satellite test that they did. They created 10% of the space debris that we currently have to

to deal with when they were testing, you know, this capability basically to launch something from the ground and hit a satellite in space with what we call kinetic kill vehicle. There's many different ways you can disrupt satellites. This is just the one that blows something up. And so that demonstrated to us like they very much have the capability to do that.

And how much of what's going on now is inspired by concerns over the Russian army's performance on the battlefield? For example, we've heard that Russian soldiers have been sent into battle with out-of-date ration packs or that fuel intended for Russian tanks were sold on the black market. Do you think that's playing on Xi's mind as well? So I don't think it is so much. But the reason is not because those stories are not important, but because those factors were already on his mind.

before it happened. So Xi Jinping, when he came into power, he did a review of the military and he kind of came to the conclusion that probably Putin should have come to before he invaded Ukraine. And he basically went to the military and was like, you guys have a lot of fancy stuff, but I don't think you know how to use it.

And his main concerns were, you know, this was part of the anti-corruption, but also just about realistic training, about ensuring that accurate information was being reported so that people reported to him failures and weaknesses and vulnerabilities and not just told him like, oh, we did this exercise and everything was great.

And in particular, there were two areas where he felt like they were the weakest, and those were logistics and command and control. In the assessment of Russia's struggles in Ukraine, those are two of the three reasons Russia is having a hard time. The third one being munitions, but China has like...

stockpiles of munitions. So that's not really a problem for them. So when they look, like the examples you gave about logistics, command and control, on one hand, it's like, yeah, they look at that like that's a problem, but they already knew that. And so a big part of the reforms was to fix the command and control issue, to fix the logistical issues. Then China has a lot of other policies, broader policies, political and economic policies to sanction proof themselves.

You know, BRI, a large part about that is seeking alternative markets to U.S. allies and partners, having overland options for natural resources in case they're blockaded by the United States. And so it's not to say that China looks at those things and dismisses them in any way. It's just that those were already considerations for the past 10 years that have directed the reforms.

And so in some ways, you know, China feels like they're much better prepared than the Russians were. Now, the reason China hasn't moved on Taiwan yet is because they still haven't completely resolved their C2 and logistics issues. So maybe with Ukraine, you know, maybe Xi Jinping wanted to be 100 percent, like, certain to get it right before he, you know, attacked Taiwan. And now after Ukraine, he wants to be like 110 percent certain. But it doesn't have like a completely different, like, logic or change the direction of his thinking. Yeah.

Yeah, and I do want to finish on Taiwan because, of course, that is the question on everyone. It's the question that I get asked the most is about Taiwan. And the last time you came on the show, Oriana, we were talking about just how difficult it would be for Xi to retake Taiwan. And I will direct listeners to that episode. Has your thinking moved on the last three years? And also, in particular, we often hear about this 2027 crisis.

deadline, quote unquote deadline. Tell us about that. So 2027 is not a deadline. 2027 is a no earlier than date. That's how I like to think of it. So the Chinese work in five-year plans. And according to those kind of five-year planning cycles, Xi Jinping wants the military to be ready to conduct military

the type of joint operation and amphibious assault that you would need to take the island of Taiwan by 2027. Not to take the island, but be ready by 2027. Now, this is a last stage of like three decades of military plans to get to this point. So I don't like when people have this impression that this is just like a Xi Jinping thing. Xi Jinping came into power, you know, with a military almost capable of doing this for a reason. And that's because his predecessors, you

took the initial steps of getting modern equipment, making sure the services had modern equipment, which initially in the 1990s, only zero to 4% of their equipment was modern, building up the numbers, you know, all this sort of stuff happened pre-Xi Jinping. Then he gets into the office and he has this sort of final component, which is the organizational component. So he wants them to be ready to go by 2027. That doesn't mean that they're going to do it in 2027.

I think at that point, it really is just a question of like whether or not the United States can prevent the success of a quick campaign. We are deterring a long war. Right. So if Xi Jinping thinks, oh, I could get Taiwan, but I have to fight a war against the United States for months, if not years. And then, of course, if Americans are killed, we know what that means. I mean, no relationship with the United States or allies moving forward. Those costs are too high for Xi Jinping.

for China because he does care about the national rejuvenation. But what they're planning on is a two and a half to three week, you know, rapid fire fait accompli before they even have to engage the United States. If he becomes confident that they can do that, then it becomes very tempting. And so the question is whether or not this anti-corruption stuff delays any of that. Like, will the military either, you know, not be ready by 2027 or if they tell Xi Jinping they're ready, will he not believe them? Yeah.

And, you know, the direction of the bias is positive, meaning none of what we see in the anti-corruption campaign tells us they are more likely to take Taiwan or that they will be ready sooner. So it's either that nothing has changed

changed or that things are going to be delayed. Those are the only two options here. Well, it's nice to end on a relatively positive note. Oriana, Skylar Mastro, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers again. Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Chinese Whispers. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're listening to this podcast on the Best of the Spectator channel, remember that Chinese Whispers has its own channel as well. If you just search Chinese Whispers, wherever you get your podcasts from, you will always get the latest episode first there. And if you're

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