China's Xi at War With His Military

China's President Xi is "trying to gain control of the military, and I think that he is thinking that he needs officers who are prepared to actually fight," said Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and author of "China Is Going to War."   "There is a sense that many of China's general officers don't want to fight," according to Chang. "And so we really have a force led by an officer corps that is ambivalent about going to war."

Since taking power in 2012, Xi has overhauled China's military by cutting deep into its personnel, seeking to improve military-civilian cooperation, and reshaping its structure, among other reforms.  His efforts reached a crescendo on December 29, 2023, when Xi dismissed nine senior officers in one stroke.

Since then, reports and US intelligence have suggested the decisions were to root out corruption — a motive often cited when Chinese officials are abruptly dismissed.  However, to Chang, this theory misses the point.  "Because if that were the case, all of them would be sacked," he said.

For him, Xi is likely purging officers who are reluctant to go to war.  He cited Chinese Air Force General Liu Yazhou, who cautioned against an invasion of Taiwan and received a suspended death sentence in February 2022, per the AsiaNews agency.  BI also spoke to Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington, DC.  He argued that rooting out corruption and readying China for war were aligned goals.

China has been engaged in low-level hostilities with many of its near neighbors.  There is India in the disputed Himalayas, Japan in the East China Sea, the Philippines in the South China Sea, and Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory.   China's incursions in Taiwan's air-defense zone over the last five years have prompted some US Navy and Air Force officials and military observers to predict that China would invade Taiwan in the next few years.

Xi has also been ramping up war-like rhetoric.  In his New Year's address, Xi said China "will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," according to the official translation of his speech.  Xi drove the message home in a recent face-to-face meeting with Biden, NBC News reported. The network said Xi told Biden at the APEC summit in San Francisco in November 2023 that China intended to take control of Taiwan.  It continued previous interactions on those lines — in November 2021, Xi warned Biden that his administration was "playing with fire" and urged Biden not to encourage Taiwanese independence, calling it "dangerous."