Coinciding with a top Chinese military official giving nuclear secrets to the US, there has been a rumored coup attempt, lots of arrests and executions, the whole nine yards. Xi was tipped off a few hours beforehand apparently. Goes to show the power of intelligence agencies, even your joint chiefs of staff can’t pull off a coup without them. Truly the backbone of a regime.
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If you know what China society is really like, this is no great surprise. China is still tribal and corruption is rampant, all up and down society. It has long been a life goal for many Chinese to get on the government payroll and rake in graft and corruption for themselves and their family. I don't mean since the communists took over, either, I mean for thousands of years, since the dynastic periods.
I guarantee that all the shiny planes, ships, and tanks their military have are just show pieces. Their crews are ill trained, unmotivated, maintenance is shoddy, and corruption saps the logistical trail that is required for fighting modern warfare.
So China is no different than "liberal" "democracies" in Europe. NGOs, green funds, being able to set your own salary, etc. It's one giant grift to steal tax payer money.
No, but only because Europe doesn't even have the shiny planes, ships, etc. Except maybe Poland and Turkey if you count them as Europe
Different in theory? No. Different in degree? Oh hell yes. We really don't know what it is like to live in a society where to get anything done you have to slip the government a bribe. Italy comes closest when it comes to historically European powers, but even there, the difference is huge. Even Ukraine, as corrupt as it is, isn't as corrupt.
Name the amount of times you've literally had to bribe a police officer with cash-on-hand at a traffic stop.
I haven't ever done that.
That is the difference in corruption between the west and everywhere else. That shit is so normal they'd hold their hands out for the bribe.
The only way to coup an emperor in China is if he loses the Mandate of Heaven, usually after some great disaster. Modern globohomo-aligned Chinese forget this.
Do commies even count as emperors anymore?
It's one of the things that keep Taiwan out of commie hands, the fact that commies regularly turn on each other to grasp power.
That and the lie, a lot about their capabilities. Commies oversell their capabilities, the US UNDERSELLS what it can do as I wouldn't be surprised if the US already has a moonbase ready to be deployed.
The Moon has been promised to us 3 thousand years ago.
What? Ethnicity worked in our favor for once?
Someone forgot the golden rule in state secrets about attractive women.
Highly doubt the nuclear secrets angle is true, the guy was more a top level bureaucrat passing xi's orders to the actual generals than the one dealing with actual details of nukes.
Nuclear logistics would be very valuable information as well
No shit OP. China needs a new Age of Enlightment lasting few centuries in order to fully recover from the scarlet rot. Western world as well, to a certain degree.
China's problem is that, no matter what color their government's stripe, they love authoritarianism. It's more than just the typical Asian tendency towards conformity: in China it reaches a level and a fervor you almost never see elsewhere. Imperial China was just as much of an autocracy perforated by occasional palace coups. It was just as brutally repressive, just as dismissive of its people's natural rights, and just as prone to treating the working classes as disposable.
I think that has something to do with what happens to Chinese peasants when there's isn't a powerful autocracy controlling everything...
There's a theory that it was cia and another anti xi faction that set it up so xi purged his last actual "ally" before they force xi off the next term so one of theirs can take over the important offices and eventually the presidency. It's really moot to speculate, as long as it's the ccp in power, it'll just be the same shit anyway. Best outcome for the rest of the world is Chyna lock itself up like North Korea and go play imperial China by itself.
If mao's don't wasn't killed in the Korean War that's probably exactly what would have happened in China.
But now absent some major internal crisis I doubt they would go all hermit kingdom
First, their oil supplier got curbstomped, now this? Those Amish-fearing desert rats counting on the chinese communists to commit the mass executions for them are probably looking pretty stupid right now.