Xi Jinping's high-rank purges show a 'systemic rot' in China's military that could threaten its readiness for war: senior US official

Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in New Delhi on April 28, 2023. He was replaced in October 2023. AFP via Getty Images

• China’s latest military purge shows that it’s suffering from more than just graft, a senior US official said.
• It’s likely the PLA’s corruption had a material effect on its war capabilities, said Ely Ratner.
• Ratner said these systemic issues will likely alter Beijing and Washington’s calculus on potential war.

Beijing’s recent purge of top defense officials signals that its military is grappling with a sort of corruption different from typical graft in China, and that could undermine its capacity for war, a senior US official said.

“I think it should give China’s leadership pause about how deep and how systemic that corruption runs,” Ely Ratner, US assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, said on Tuesday. “And to what degree this very advanced military is going to work when they need, and frankly are they ready?”

Speaking to “War on the Rocks” podcast host Ryan Evans, Ratner said the corruption observed within the People’s Liberation Army typically involves top officers getting rich or people buying jobs.

“There’s a lot of graft, there’s a lot of sloshing around in a very opaque system, a lot of people lining their pockets,” Ratner said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made stamping out rampant government corruption one of the key pillars of his tenure, and Ratner assessed that this was largely an effort to restore order in the party.

“So down with the big banquets, down with the really expensive ‘bai jiu,’ back to the principles of the Communist Party,” said Ratner. “Bai Jiu” is Chinese liquor.

But, according to Ratner, Xi’s latest military purge indicated a more serious problem.

The appointments and responsibilities of those ousted indicate the purge “focused not only on this traditional question of graft but also the material effect on their modernization program,” Ratner said.

“So the corruption revealing itself not only because some general has a really fat bank account in Switzerland, but rather because a specific capability isn’t really working,” Ratner added. “And the money that has been siphoned off has resulted in detrimental effects to their capabilities.”

Xi’s anti-corruption sweep last year extended as high as China’s defense minister, Li Shangfu, who was replaced in October. Several top commanders were also fired from China’s Rocket Force, a branch that Xi has emphasized as key to Beijing’s strength.

Bloomberg reported at the time that the results of the graft were so serious they could force Beijing to reassess its capacity for aggression in the region, citing examples from US intelligence that said some of China’s missile fuel may have been swapped for water.

One former PLA officer, an ex-lieutenant colonel who fled to the US in 2016, told Radio Free Asia amid the corruption reports that Chinese troops would use solid fuel to cook hotpot.

“So I think this question of corruption is significant not only because it shows some sort of systemic rot, but also because it does factor into PLA and PRC leadership calculations about the actual capabilities of the PLA,” Ratner said.

Such corruption should also influence the political and military calculus for the US as China attempts to modernize its forces, Ratner added.

“And that’s the fundamental question, is will they succeed if they were to choose to employ aggression?” he said. “And as long as their answer to that is no, or maybe not, then I think we’re going to be able to reinforce deterrence.”

Still, the assistant defense secretary urged the US not to let its guard down. “But none of that suggests that we ought to be complacent about what we’re seeing about very rapid military modernization,” he said.

Before his appointment in 2021, Ratner was the director of the Defense Department’s China Task Force and served as senior advisor to the US defense secretary.

Beijing has given few details to explain Li’s ousting, which was met with skepticism from observers due to China’s reputation for graft and the fact that Xi had handpicked many of the officials he later fired.

“Corruption alone is an unlikely explanation for the removal by Xi of top military officials that he had appointed just months earlier, raising the possibility that intelligence leaks may have triggered the action,” the International Institute for Strategic Studies said in its annual The Military Balance report.