By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Is China Ready for War?

A new wave of purges has engulfed the senior leadership of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army. Since the 20th National Party Congress in October 2022, more than 20 senior PLA officers from all four services—the army, navy, air force, and rocket force—have disappeared from public view or been removed from their posts. The absence of other generals has also been reported, which could foreshadow additional purges.

Most notably, since the fall of 2023, three of the six uniformed members of the party’s Central Military Commission, the top body of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) charged with overseeing the armed forces, have been removed from their posts. The first to fall was Defense Minister Li Shangfu, who was removed in October 2023 and expelled from the party in June 2024. Then, this past November, Miao Hua, the director of the CMC’s Political Work Department, which manages personnel and party affairs, was suspended for “serious violations of discipline” before being formally removed from the CMC last month. And most recently, the Financial Times reported that He Weidong, the second-ranked vice chair who has not appeared in public since early March, had been purged.

Never before has half the CMC been dismissed in such a short period. Even stranger is the fact that all three generals had previously been promoted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping; they were appointed to the CMC itself in 2022, after Xi consolidated his control over the party at the 20th Party Congress. He Weidong was even a member of the Politburo, one of the party’s top decision-making bodies, comprised of the 24 highest-ranking party leaders. And Miao and He have been described by analysts as being part of a Fujian faction within the PLA, because the generals had been stationed in that province at the same time as Xi and are believed to have close ties with him.

The fact that these high-profile purges are occurring now is not lost on outsider observers. In 2027, the PLA will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. It is also the year by which Xi expects China’s armed forces to have made significant strides in their modernization. Finally, the year is noteworthy because, according to former CIA Director Bill Burns, Xi has instructed the PLA to be ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion” of Taiwan. Xi’s instructions do not indicate that China will invade Taiwan that year, but, as Burns put it, they serve as “a reminder of the seriousness of his focus and his ambition.”

With such ambitious goals set for the PLA, the question then arises as to how this new wave of purges could affect the PLA’s readiness. The purges themselves are likely to slow some weapons modernization programs, disrupt command structures and decision-making, and weaken morale—all of which would degrade the PLA’s ability to fight in the near to medium term. Beijing may now be forced to exercise greater caution before pursuing large-scale military operations, such as an amphibious assault on Taiwan, even as the PLA continues to pressure Taiwan with aerial activity and naval patrols around the island.

Nevertheless, it is useful to remember that Beijing has rarely waited for the right conditions before ordering the PLA into battle. In 1950, for instance, Chinese forces intervened in support of Pyongyang in the Korean War, even though China’s economy and society had been devastated by years of civil war. In 1962, the PLA attacked India, even though China’s most senior military officer had recently been purged for questioning Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. And in 1979, Beijing dispatched an ill-prepared PLA to Vietnam, where Chinese troops suffered significant losses for limited political gains. Now, as then, Chinese leaders may pursue war even if the domestic economic and political conditions appear unfavorable—and even if the PLA is not ready to fight.

A ceremony to commemorate Martyrs’ Day in Beijing, September 2024

 

Castaways

For outsider observers, it is notoriously difficult to gather detailed information and analyze the ongoing purges in China. The CCP rarely announces them, and even when they are publicized, the charges leading to dismissal are often vaguely described only as violations of discipline. Charges announced publicly may also not reflect the true underlying reason for an official’s removal from office. Still, there are several likely reasons that Li, Miao, He, and other senior officers were purged.

First, a common reason for many purges is graft. Corruption has long plagued the PLA and the CCP more broadly. Since Xi came to power in 2012, Beijing has more than doubled its defense budget in order to fund the military’s rapid modernization. This flood of new money, especially related to weapons procurement and construction projects, has increased opportunities for officers and defense industry executives to pad their budgets or skim money off the top. Before becoming defense minister, Li had been in charge of the CMC’s weapons development department, which oversees the procurement process. A few months before Li’s dismissal, both the commander and commissar of the PLA Rocket Force, and two of the commissar’s deputies were all detained. The PLARF’s rapid expansion on Li’s watch, including the construction of more than 300 silos and the significant expansion of its ballistic missile arsenal, likely offered many opportunities for self-enrichment.

Some generals may also have been purged because they were engaging in bribery related to promotions and patronage networks. This has been a long-standing problem for the PLA: often, the most well-connected officers, rather than the most competent ones, are promoted to higher ranks. Miao, the head of the Political Work Department, oversaw personnel and appointments. If the promotions he signed off on were not strictly merit-based, it may have contributed to his undoing. Miao’s predecessor, Zhang Yang, was placed under investigation in 2017 for similar reasons. Less than two months later, he died by suicide, and the following year, he was posthumously expelled from the party.

CMC members and other senior officers may also have been removed if they were deemed to be using personnel appointments to create their power centers, or “mountaintops,” within the PLA. Senior officers who prioritize the accrual of personal power are a liability for Xi because they create conflicting loyalties and factional tensions within the armed forces that can harm operational readiness. Because Miao and He were newly appointed members of the CMC, they may have sought to strengthen their positions at the expense of veteran members, such as the first-ranked Vice Chair Zhang Youxia, a childhood friend of Xi’s. Xi has kept Zhang, now 75, on the CMC despite the normal retirement age of 68.

Finally, it’s possible that the purged senior officers committed no offense at all beyond incompetence: Xi may simply have been dissatisfied with their performance and lost confidence in their ability to lead and achieve his goals for the PLA. As Joel Wuthnow and Phillip Saunders observed in their new book, China’s Quest for Military Supremacy, the structure of the relationship between the party and the armed forces makes it hard for Xi to trust his generals. The PLA enjoys substantial autonomy with little direct supervision, so the party must rely on the PLA to discipline itself. Moreover, the highly specialized nature of modern military affairs means that the party lacks the expertise to ensure that the PLA is meeting the party’s modernization goals.

 

Insecurity Dilemma

Whatever the reasons for the recent purges, they will almost certainly degrade China’s combat readiness and the Chinese leadership’s confidence in the PLA’s capabilities. In order for the PLA to prevail in potential conflicts on China’s periphery, especially a war over Taiwan, it seeks to master joint operations, which combine elements from the different services and branches to achieve military objectives. The complexity of such operations requires unity of command and integrated planning, the interoperability of platforms within and across services, delegation and flexibility, and robust command, control, communications, and surveillance systems. Reorganizing the PLA to better conduct such operations was one of the main reasons Xi launched unprecedented organizational reforms in 2015. Now, although Xi has a number of reasons to avoid taking major military action against Taiwan, he may also be concerned about how well the PLA would perform so soon after the purges.

If the CCP uncovered corruption in the weapons procurement system, for instance, the party leadership may doubt the reliability and performance of the advanced weapons systems developed and fielded over the past decade. According to U.S. intelligence, some of China’s new ballistic missiles were filled with water, not fuel, and the blast doors constructed for new silos needed to be repaired or replaced. Efforts are likely underway to review and recertify new and planned weapons systems to ensure they will function as expected, which may slow their development and deployment.

The purges also disrupt the functioning of the entire command system. The CMC, a six-member body that Xi chairs to oversee all aspects of the PLA, has 15 subordinate units. Yet with three of its six members missing in action, key decisions relating to operations, planning, and force development may be delayed until new permanent members are appointed. Before joining the CMC, for example, He played a key role in planning operations in his capacity as commander of the Eastern Theater Command, whose forces would play a central role in any operation against Taiwan; now the apex of military decision-making in China lacks someone with his experience.

Decision-making and command may also be affected in other ways. Officers at all levels are likely to become much more risk-averse for fear of making decisions that could later ensnare them in a purge. The willingness of more junior officers to take initiative will also suffer, reinforcing the PLA’s already strong tendency toward centralization in decision-making that undermines effective joint operations. Officers at all levels will spend more time engaged in political work and study sessions related to party ideology and discipline at the expense of their professional military tasks. Morale may suffer, too, as officers worry who might be next, fueling distrust within the officer corps and weakening cohesion.

 

Ready or Not

But the focus on how the leadership upheaval in the PLA may affect its operational readiness should not obscure a basic fact: Xi may well deem it necessary to fight even if the PLA is not completely prepared. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, China has usually gone to war when conditions appeared to be unfavorable.

In 1950, after much debate among the party’s senior leaders, Beijing decided to intervene in the Korean War, transforming the conflict into one largely between China and the United States. At the time, the CCP was focused on consolidating control over the entire country and rebuilding the economy after its war with the Nationalists. Many senior party and military leaders, weary after years of a punishing civil war, were reluctant to go up against the strongest force in the world. Yet in the end, the strategic rationale of keeping the United States off China’s border (and ideally off the entire Korean Peninsula) trumped these concerns. Yet by the time of the armistice in 1953, China’s armed forces suffered more than 500,000 casualties, while the war ended roughly where it began, along the 38th parallel, and the United States began to build an alliance network along China’s eastern periphery.

Early the following decade, China attacked India’s forces on the two countries’ disputed border. At the time, Mao was on the back foot politically after his disastrous Great Leap Forward, an industrialization campaign in which as many as 45 million people perished in famines. Yet Chinese party and military leaders concluded that war was necessary to blunt Indian pressure on Tibet and restore stability to the Chinese-Indian border. Moreover, the attack occurred only a few years after Peng Dehuai, China’s top military officer throughout the 1950s, was purged for questioning the wisdom of the Great Leap Forward. Peng’s dismissal also led to the removal of other senior military officers who were seen as closely tied to him, shaking up the PLA high command. In this instance, China enjoyed overwhelming superiority on the battlefield, destroying Indian forces and achieving its political objectives, as India did not challenge China on the border militarily for the next two decades.

In 1979, Beijing invaded Vietnam, ostensibly to teach Hanoi a lesson for allying with the Soviet Union, then China’s nemesis, and for invading Cambodia, which Beijing was supporting. At the time, China had only started to recover from the economic and political upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping remained in a power struggle with Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. And the PLA was divided between Maoists and reformers. Deng was keenly aware of the PLA’s shortcomings, having described the force as “bloated, lax, arrogant, extravagant, and lazy”—hardly in fighting form. Deng even delayed the invasion by a month after his chief military adviser reported that the troops were not ready. Nevertheless, the need to signal resolve to counter Soviet encirclement outweighed the state of readiness. PLA forces paid a high price, with more than 31,000 casualties in just one month of fighting, and Vietnam did not withdraw its military presence from Cambodia until the late 1980s.

These military actions in Korea, India, and Vietnam represent the largest uses of armed force that the PLA has undertaken since the founding of the People’s Republic. In all three cases, political calculations trumped military readiness and favorable domestic conditions. Chinese leaders viewed these operations as conflicts of necessity, not choice or opportunity. If the recent purges harm the PLA’s readiness and reflect Xi’s confidence in the PLA, then opportunistic uses of force may be less likely in the near to medium term. But if Xi views military action against Taiwan as necessary, he will still order the PLA into battle.

 

 

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