China News Thread
- Thread starter KYli
- Start date
Guangzhou has fallen.
Something is seriously wrong with Chinas top military leadership or the only other explanation is that Xi Jinping is on a crusade of purging anyone with little disagreement/political issues. I can’t think of any time in modern times where a country’s entire top military leadership was purged taken down by the top leader in a span of a few years apart from Stalins era predating WWII. One or two might be about some good reasons of corruption as they say, but almost the entire top leadership? Then it’s unlikely it’s just about corruption/wrong doing. Something else is going on we will
Never know (maybe decades later ).
I don't think it has anything to do with politics necessarily, Zhang Youxia was in charge of weapons procurement and development as Director of the General Armaments Department (Xi appointed him to that role in fact) for around 5 years in the early 2010s, obviously weapons procurement is an area where corruption is most likely to occur. If anything his political and personal connections to Xi probably shielded him from a certain amount of scrutiny up until now.
However in Liu Zhenli's case, I don't see any obvious reason circumstantially for this at the moment.
I think this video makes a lot of sense.
PLA Daily's editor comments on the case:
The key accusation is 严重践踏破坏军委主席负责制. Sounds like these two were openly disagreeing with Xi on some previous anti-corruption cases in the military. They might have even tried challenging Xi's authority as the chair of CMC.
So it’s not really a corruption thing as I said before then. More of a political issue which I think should be obvious by now. I hope it doesn’t create a bad atmosphere in the military, especially with regards to experienced military leaders like this.
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I would say if Zhang and Li weren't individually engaging in corruption (from the article it seems like they might have not), but were disagreeing with Xi on actually prosecuting corruption within the PLA, then the core fundamental problem at hand is still corruption. And the definition of a good environment/atmosphere should be one where corruption is not tolerated. We've seen Xi try to engineer an atmosphere and culture of accountability within the ranks of civilian party officials, so him engaging in the same cultural engineering in the PLA isn't out of the question.