Xi’s purges also target military, civilian corruption

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, a few of you wrote in yesterday, pointed out rightly that there is corruption in the Chinese government. And it’s not at not everything that Xi Jinping is doing is a purge of personnel for political reasons. I mean, that’s the primary thing. But it’s not the only one. He’s already pushed a quarter of a million people into corruption charges. But for the military, specifically, we’ve had a few things that have kind of bubbled up over the last few days that are just a riot. So we now know that the guy who was in charge of the country’s missile forces, as well as the Secretary of Defense, were in part dismissed last year because they had been siphoning money off from the pyramid process. And at some point over the summer and the fall, Xi Jinping discovered that all of those missile silos that the government has been building out in western China to achieve some sort of strategic parity [with] the United States, a lot of the hatches don’t open. And, but that’s not the best part. The best part is that for a lot of the intercontinental ballistic missiles, instead of fuel in the tanks, they just filled them up with water. And that is something that, you know, you would expect to get kind of caught on. So, you can only imagine how much stuff down the line has been lied about and stolen. But the only country that we can compare here to this level of theft would be Russia. We now know from the Ukraine War that probably two thirds of the funding that Putin has allotted to the military over the last 15 years were just stolen.

I have no idea what the percentage is going to end up being for China. I’m sure it’s a lot higher than people were expecting. The only specific incident that I can think of where this fuel tank water issue is even a meaningful comparison is back in the 90s when Russian MIG maintenance crews started siphoning off the coolant from the MIGs in order to drink it, because it was cheaper than buying alcohol. The scale of this appears to be just massive, and obviously it’s going to have an impact on the readiness and the expansion of the modernization program of the Chinese military. Anyway, so this is kind of a yes, but or a yes, and to yesterday, and everybody, I hope you get a good chuckle out of it. Unless of course you’re Chinese, in which case you know, tough.