00:00Chen has voted to remove senior military official Miao Hua from the country's highest level command.
00:06The former People's Liberation Army political ideology chief was a member of the Central Military Commission, or CMC.
00:13He was suspended from his post amid an investigation into serious violations of discipline, a euphemism for corruption.
00:21Miao is one of the highest-ranking members of the CMC to be removed since the 60s.
00:25He is the latest in a series of more than a dozen high-ranking PLA officials, ousted as part of President Xi's ongoing anti-corruption campaign.
00:34To find out how these purges and corruption scandals could affect China's military planning, I spoke to John Dotson, director of the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C.
00:44Let's first set this up, John. How significant is this recent corruption case within the PLA, and how big of a problem is corruption in general within China's military?
00:53It's very significant. We've really been seeing for about two years now, or maybe two and a half, an almost ongoing purge of some of the most senior figures within the PLA.
01:09I mean, in a way that goes far beyond just the occasional personnel swap out to being something that's really systematic.
01:16But we've also seen the purging of people that have been placed in a very senior positions by Xi Jinping himself, and who actually had experience earlier in their careers serving alongside Xi earlier in his career in Fujian province.
01:31You know, the corruption was so endemic in the PLA, going back into the 1990s, the earlier parts of the 2000s, and so forth.
01:42Corruption was really endemic. Officers frequently had to buy their promotions or give bribes to superiors for the sake of advancement, things like this.
01:52So it's probably hard to find someone who came up during that era, or who kind of came up as a mid-level officer in that area and then advanced into the flag ranks.
02:04It's going to be hard to find people with clean hands.
02:07Now let's look specifically at this case with Miao Hua. Why do you think he specifically was purged? What set it off?
02:14Once again, it's educated guesswork. We really don't know for sure.
02:18The way I tend to interpret some of these most recent high-level purges, that being of a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission,
02:29and even more recently, Miao Hua, who was a Navy Admiral and who had been the former head of the CMC Political Work Department.
02:39And it may well be that there was an impression on Xi's part, particularly following a series of editorials that came out of PLA publications beginning in late 2024
02:53that were advocating for collective leadership and, you know, which could be coded language for criticizing the very autocratic nature of Xi's rule.
03:03And so another explanation is that Xi looked at these two men and said, you know, you failed at upholding discipline and proper indoctrination within the PLA, which should mean loyalty to me.
03:14And how is this going to affect planning for China's military in terms of a possible operation around Taiwan?
03:21We saw with the war in Ukraine what happens when Russian leader Vladimir Putin surrounds himself with a bunch of yes-men lessons there.
03:29Is that the same case that's happening here with Taiwan and China?
03:32Well, once again, in the case with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you know, I'm sure there were more, you know, sober-minded people in Russia who could have told Vladimir Putin,
03:43maybe this isn't the greatest idea, but any of that was swept aside.
03:47It was a one-man decision.
03:48And so as far as Taiwan is concerned, I think that's the greatest danger there.
03:52Decisions regarding military actions or how, you know, how the CCP might choose to use its military tool, the PLA, may come to be more and more the decision of one man.
04:04Sort of these very heavy purges within the PLA, obviously it creates a great deal of disruption.
04:08So that could, at least in the shorter term, impede the possibility of larger term military operations, if the PLA is preoccupied with getting its own internal house in order.
04:24That was John Dodson, director of the Global Taiwan Institute.
04:28That was John Dodson, director of the Global Taiwan Institute.
