Chinese President Xi Jinping is “trying to control the military” – suggesting he may be preparing for World War III, experts warn.
The 70-year-old Communist Party leader “thinks that he needs officials who are really ready to fight,” Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang told Business Insider in a report published Monday.
“There is a feeling that many Chinese general officials do not want to fight. So we really have a force led by an officer corps that is ambivalent about going to war,” explained the author of “China Is Going to War”.
Xi has overhauled China’s military since taking power in 2012 — and adopted a strongly anti-Taiwan stance in his latest New Year’s speech, the outlet said.
“China will definitely be reunified, and all Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common goal and share in the glory of China’s national rejuvenation,” Xi declared, according to an official translation. address.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has warned President Biden that he is “playing with fire” over Taiwan. AP
He also reportedly told President Biden at the APEC Summit in November that China fully intended to seize Taiwan.
Then on Dec 29, 2023, Xi suddenly fired nine high-ranking officials from the Chinese military.
Reports that Xi’s military purge was to remove officials linked to corruption only explain so much, Chang told BI.
“Because if that happens, all of them will be fired,” he stressed about the Chinese military establishment.
Instead, Chang suggested that Xi target those who refuse to go to war.
President Xi has overhauled China’s military since 2012. AP
For example, Chinese air force General Liu Yazhou warned against a possible invasion of Taiwan — and received a suspended death sentence in February 2022, Chang said.
Joel Wuthnow, senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of China Military Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, argues that preparing China for war and reducing the influence of corruption go hand in hand.
“The removal shows that Xi should care about the quality of the people and equipment he has invested in over the past decade,” Wuthnow said.
The nine axed commanders are tied to China’s Rocket Force, which will play a key role in a potential military campaign, he added.
Xi may be preparing for an all-out global war, one expert says. EPA
“If the equipment does not work or is not reliable, how confident are Xi and his colleagues that the PLA is [People’s Liberation Army] will win?” Wuthnow suggests.
China has been embroiled in so many conflicts in recent years – from its incursion into Taiwan’s air defense zone to attacking Japan in the East China Sea – that it is impossible to predict where a major explosion could occur, the expert said.
“I don’t think we can say, ‘Oh, this is Taiwan or whatever,'” Chang told the outlet.
But Xi’s remarks about Taiwan — including his warning in 2021 that Biden was “playing with fire” over the issue — sounded like he could “talk himself and China into war,” he concluded.
Xi had previously warned Biden over the Taiwan issue. Reuters
“Remember, in the 1930s, there were separate wars that merged into what we now call World War II,” Chang continued, referring to a string of conflicts from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East.
“The same dynamic exists today, and it is entirely possible and some could argue that it is very likely that this will coalesce into a global conflict,” he added.
But Wuthnow suggests that Xi’s military ambitions may be hampered by Russia’s disastrous example in Ukraine.
“Russia has paid a huge price for its accidents, and China will too. Moreover, a failed invasion would be worse for Xi politically than not trying at all,” he said.
Chang said China’s aggression in East Asia would almost certainly push Western countries into greater conflict.
“I think Xi Jinping is taking two pages out of Mao’s Peasant Revolution playbook. One of them is to besiege the cities from the countryside. And in this regard, I think Xi Jinping sees Ukraine, northern Africa, Israel as rural areas, and the United States as urban,” he explained.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
