This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… CROSSPOST: ADRIAN MONCK: The End of China’s Central Military Commission“What the Zhang Youxia purge tells us about Xi Jinping’s China” is Adrian Monck’s subhead. I see a through-line from the story of Sergei Kirov to Zhang Youxia, as Xi Jinping turns China’s army into...
“What the Zhang Youxia purge tells us about Xi Jinping’s China” is Adrian Monck’s subhead. I see a through-line from the story of Sergei Kirov to Zhang Youxia, as Xi Jinping turns China’s army into a perpetual inquisition machine, and has taken a chainsaw to the top of his own military, purging five of six uniformed members of the Central Military Commission. But what is Xi to do when he believes that a corrupt army is no army at all—and has that belief reinforced by watching Muscovy ’Rus’s kleptocratic forces die by the tens of thousands in Ukraine each month to no rational purpose?...
Zhang Youxia, Liu Zhenli, He Weidong, Li Shangfu, Wei Fenghe, Miao Hua, He Hongjun, Wang Xiubin, Lin Xiangyang, Qin Shutong, Yuan Huazhi, Wang Houbin, Wang Chunning—all central committee members, all senior military-politicians of great authority and weight, all purged, and they are only the tip of the iceberg. This AM we have:
The rest Adrian has put behind his paywall. So I get to continue this by saying what I think we should draw from this bizarre chain of events—which, I think, is largely aligned with Adrian’s point of view. A drian puts what I think is the right big conclusion in an if mode: “If Xi genuinely believes that a corrupt PLA is no PLA at all—that selling ranks poisons everything downstream—then the purges follow their own logic, whatever the cost to institutional continuity.” I would make that stronger: it is not an if hypothesis but has a very high probability of being a correct description of what is going down. Because Xi believes, and all the stories the CCP tells itself about how it won the 1945-9 civil war reinforce his belief, that a corrupt army is no army at all, Xi now believes that he has no choice but to continue the purges until all of the corrupt rot in the PLA is, well, purged. To that end, Xi Jinping has constructed a bureaucratic machine to carry out purges of the corrupt: a political order whose main tool is permanent, performative purging—much like what Stalin did in the 1930s when he concluded that something big had gone wrong when Stalin’s hand-picked senior party officials like Sergei Kirov more than they liked him. And so Stalin built a machine to find and root out the disloyalists. And, ultimately, it turned out nearly everybody old enough to have known Kirov before Stalin had him assassinated was disloyal. As Adrian says: When you build an Inquisition, you should not be surprised that it keeps finding and burning heretics. This dynamic is reinforced by three other things very much in the forefront of Xi Jinping’s mind:
Hence when the purge trail reached Zhang Youxia, not princeling status, not war veteran status, not longtime Xi ally status, not having been at one time Xi’s “elder brother” in the party, could keep him from becoming a subject of the purge. So now Xi has completely dismantled the Central Military Commission: purged five of six uniformed members since 2022, leaving the PLA’s top command effectively beheaded. Lower down, the number of officers in some way disciplined really has now probably risen into the six figures. I reach for analogies as to what this is doing to the PLA as an organization—both a peacetime bureaucracy and something that might actually be tasked with doing something violent—and I find myself at sea. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-adrian-monck-the-end-of-chinas-central-military-commission |
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