A bit of a translation misnomer here, the video referenced to the jurisdiction of MSS in responsible for military intelligence gathering (as opposed to previously leaving military-related intelligence to the specific military intelligence department under General Staff, now Joint Staff Department). As such, the Chairman himself now gets read into a more consilient/comprehensive intelligence landscape than previously. Which is how the supposed 'Rocket Force' leak resulted in the ongoing anti-corruption campaign (which started with a series of ).
The other element here is that Miao Hua + He Weidong supposedly 'came out swinging first' by going after the Minister of Defence (Li Shangfu) - and we've noticed an ongoing anti-corruption campaign in the military procurement apparatus (including the former Xinjiang Party Secretary Ma Xingrui). As Zhang Youxia was the head of General Armament Department (2012-2017) - he was likely involved. There was a specific statement on the Discipline/Investigation department website that specified they wanted graft/corruption whistleblowers *after* 2017 (meaning there was initial attempt to 'air gap' him from the previous corruption).
Afterwards supposedly they took advantage of this anti-corruption effort by trying to politically outmaneuver Zhang Youxia and Zhang went back at them and that was what led to the downfall of Miao Hua + He Weidong. There were also clearly false rumors a couple of months ago that suggested Zhang Youxia executed a coup against the Party Center.
A few takeaways:
1) There is definitely corruption involved in all of these people (Xu Caihou allegedly said only 2 of the generals promoted didn't pay him bribes, which was supposedly 20mln RMB.)
2) A big question of what *type* of corruption - were they simply grossing up procurement prices by 10%? Or were they more nefariously overstating capabilities or appropriating money earmarked for increasing 'salvo depth' (cue the Beiyang memes)? Or were they lying about 'domestication rate' of military procurement by importing parts that they reported as already domestically made? Or are there programs/procurement that reflects the PLA's equivalent of the LCS or Zumwalt?
I would argue the former is much less nefarious (as people have noted here, lots of Commissioner Smiths in the US MIC) and the latter way more damaging.
One thing I'm reasonably comfortable with, is that the corruption is unlikely to be foreign intelligence funded - a corrupt person stands way more to benefit from making money from domestic MIC procurement than say the CIA could afford to pay them. However, this is more conjecture and I have no way to ascertain this risk.
Another thing we should be quite comfortable with, is that the technical capability of modern PRC weaponry is not an issue (evident in the Pakistan/India conflict) - the only risk is that perhaps the specs of mass procurement was less than what they were otherwise capable of procuring with the money siphoned off by the crooks (Analogy: They were given money to buy the iPhone Pro Max but instead bought the SE and pocketed the difference). Or perhaps they embezzled the pay for the technical talent in the MIC and forced them to work like slaves to get to capability that was necessary (we've also heard plenty of anecdotes about the shit pay of working in domestic MIC).
That being said, in light of this series of anti-corruption investigations, when discussing the 'product market fit' of PLA programs/platforms - when there are question marks as to why they need something or why something feels underarmed (as I recall there was some debates wrt the 054B) - an explanation that shouldn't be dismissed too quickly should be 'is this a pork barrel project that isn't truly necessary'?
3) As we are all well aware on this forum, PRC's investments into its domestic MIC over the past decade has seen a marked increase vs previous decade. Associated with this type of money sloshing around (hundreds of billions if not trillions) there's bound to be people trying to take some for themselves - this is especially pronounced given the culture left behind by Xu Caihou/Guo Boxiong. An important question to think about is what the culture is like among the younger officers.
Finally, in context of all of these investigations, perhaps it should not surprise anyone when we saw Yang Wei removed from the AVIC website about a year ago:
@taxiya am I still the "insidious moron"?
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