It was the kind of report that no national leader wants to see leaked to the global press…a handful of small but shocking revelations that cast doubt onto a far more massive institution.
On the 6th of January 2024, the Bloomberg Media Company revealed that, according to multiple intelligence sources, widespread corruption within the Chinese Armed Forces has compromised China’s military so badly that it’s an open question whether China could even fight a war if it chose to…
The news breaks just weeks after a major purge closed out 2023 at the head of the Chinese Communist Party and amidst a rapidly evolving geopolitical situation in East Asia and beyond…
So, in today’s special episode of War Graphics, we’re going to dig into the Bloomberg report and attempt to assess just how bad China’s military problems really are..
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what’s gone wrong, what China could do about it, and how this single small piece of news might have dashed China’s global ambition for years, if not decades, to come.
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The Purge.
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The revelations at the highest level of China’s internal politics.
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the events of Tuesday, October 24th, 2023 were both earthshaking for the CCP and entirely unsurprising from the perspective of an outside observer.
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On that date, Chinese President Xi Jinping made it official.
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after a short tenure in his post, Minister of National Defense Li Shang Fu was out of a job, along with State Councillor and former Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
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By October, the official announcement had been a long time coming.
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both men had disappeared from public view all the way back in the summer with no explanation, and their absence had been on full display during subsequent televised gatherings of the CCP’s top decision-makers.
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But as predictable as Xi’s final announcement might have been, it still capped off an affair that had captured international speculation for months.
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Li Shang Fu had gone from being a prominent general handpicked for the defense minister post to being out on his ass in less than six months.
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Councillor Qin had been pushed from his prior post as Foreign Minister and replaced all the way back in July.
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And they weren’t the only ones either.
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The two officials who had until then led the Chinese military’s Rocket Force had also been suddenly replaced, along with two other Rocket Force generals and a handful of other military leaders.
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These expelled leaders weren’t bottom-of-the-barrel armchair generals either.
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Like Li Shang Fu, they had been handpicked for their roles, seen as some of the very best and brightest rising stars that China had to offer.
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The two generals at the head of the Rocket Force had been instrumental in China’s recent manned space missions and its launches of satellites into space.
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Another casualty of the purge: an admiral who had been a leader in China’s effort to assert dominance in the South China Sea.
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Another was the president of the Army’s military court.
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Li Shang Fu himself had been a trusted liaison with global partners and adversaries from Russia to India to the United States.
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He was previously believed to be rather close to President Xi, but now the whole group was gone, with Li Shang Fu believed to be part of a rapidly broadening corruption investigation that may have played a role in some other disappearances as well.
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Now, in early January 2024, we’ve finally got a bit of a resolution.
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According to Bloomberg News, US intelligence has assessed that Xi Jinping’s latest purge was indeed part of an effort to tamp down on corruption.
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What it had found went far beyond individual cases of wrongdoing.
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To quote Bloomberg directly: the corruption inside China’s Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case.
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Among the specific instances of graft that China allegedly uncovered were shocking failures by the Rocket Force.
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In one case, missiles were found to have their fuel compartments filled with water instead of, you know, fuel.
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In another case, not just one, not just a handful, but entire fields and fields of missile silos in China’s Western provinces were found to be fitted with malfunctioning or improper lids.
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Meaning that if a launch order ever came to activate those missiles, they’d be unable to escape their silos at all.
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These would be devastating problems for any modern military.
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But for a military with China’s ambition to be a global superpower, they’re cataclysmic.
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In fact, Xi’s bold and very publicly amplified ambitions to make China’s military world-class make these allegations by Western intelligence all the more stunning.
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He has long made it his mission to root out corruption across the Chinese government, including in the military, where he led prior purges to remove corrupt senior generals.
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Ever since he began his tenure in 2012, he’s pledged that the Chinese military will be fully modernized by 2035 and stand among the best as a “world-class military” by the middle of the 21st century.
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That would mean, among other things, uncontested dominance in East Asia, the ability to rival or shout down Russia in Central Asia and the Middle East, and the ability to operate without military concern for the United States’s ability to intervene in what Xi sees as his own part of the world.
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But it doesn’t matter whether China has more warships than the US, whether they’ve got hundreds of nuclear warheads, or whether their expanding fleet of aircraft carriers could eventually rival the US.
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If, after a decade or more of crackdowns, China’s feared missiles are still powered by tap water.
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And amidst the Bloomberg revelations, other sources have suggested that similar acts of official graft within the military have been commonplace for years.
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According to an article published by Radio Free Asia, one former lieutenant colonel of the Chinese Navy described instances in which Air Force personnel had taken chunks of solid missile fuel and burned the stuff in order to cook traditional Chinese hotpot food.
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Said the former official, Yao Chang, to Radio Free Asia: “When I was in the military, we would drain fuel from aircraft fuel tanks for cooking, which burns green and has no smell at all.
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We would eat hotpot.
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We would take out the solid fuel in the missiles, piece by piece, because there were insufficient supplies.
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” Notably, Yao Chang himself fled to the United States in 2016 with his testimony, thus indicating that acts like this have been commonplace for quite some time.
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The idea that China’s military could be corrupt is certainly not new.
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For years, Western analysts have raised suspicions that the country’s military officers have little incentive not to exploit the system, where oversight has been limited, and rule enforcement has been toothless at best.
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When an officer believes their own higher-ups will protect them from repercussions, it’s not hard to see how things could go awry.
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But again, we’ve got to emphasize that the corruption referenced by Bloomberg goes well beyond what most experts assume China’s military deals with on a daily basis.
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There’s a massive difference between officials choosing to skim off the top of their budgets and officials taking actions that fundamentally disrupt China’s ability to use its military capabilities in the first place.
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One is an inconvenience; the other is catastrophic.
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The Fallout.
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Alright, so Xi Jinping has a problem, but what happens now?.
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On the one hand, the United States and other Western nations have kept a close eye on Xi’s standing within the CCP.
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As his purges continue, for the most part, the verdict seems to be that he will not personally suffer as a result.
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If anything, the purges have only cemented Xi’s hold on the government, implicitly indicating that both he and the rest of the CCP believe he has a firm enough command of the party that these sorts of actions won’t set off any sort of retaliation against him.
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Not only that, but the willingness of other Chinese officials to stand by and allow these corruption investigations to take place suggests widespread support for Xi’s focus on enhancing China’s military capabilities in the long run.
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On the other hand, though, these revelations are a critical blow to China’s military readiness overall.
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The examples shared by Bloomberg are unlikely to be the only instances of this sort of corruption across the entire Chinese military or even the only ones that Xi and the CCP have now learned about.
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What other problems might have been uncovered? We can’t speculate, but whatever they are, they will, and should, lead to China significantly lowering its confidence in its own military readiness.
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In particular, confidence in the Rocket Force is most likely down the drain.
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