Since January, when elections in Taiwan returned the independence-leaning Lai Ching-te as president, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing has been very quiet. But we shouldn’t mistake the relative silence for calm. Beneath the surface, the CCP is clearly experiencing quite a bit of turmoil at the moment.
Take its armed wing, the two-million strong People’s Liberation Army (PLA). At the end of last year, President Xi fired nine of his top generals, several of whom oversaw China’s nuclear deterrent. The word is that one or more were guilty of fiddling the books around weapons procurement.
Yet there is more to the latest firings than meets the eye. China’s spending on weapons and armed services has more than doubled since Xi took power in 2012. It is set to rise by a further 7.2 per cent in 2024 alone. This is causing problems as the enormous scale of funds is tempting senior military people to skim something off the top. What’s more, China will have to divert yet more national resources to warfare if Beijing’s military budget, currently at $236 billion, is to get close to America’s, set for $850 billion in 2025.
Xi hasn’t just strengthened his hold over the military. He has also tightened his grip over all aspects of Chinese life. This means that political debate is more stifled than ever. And since 2021, when Alibaba co-founder and billionaire Jack Ma was forced to sell off many of his assets, Xi has sought greater control of the private sector, repeatedly clipping the wings of large private corporations.
Xi is clearly worried about political dissent. He won’t have forgotten how, in late 2022, large protests swept China over his Zero Covid lockdown policy and related deaths in a fire in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi. Just last week, China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), passed new laws that further subordinated the State Council, China’s cabinet, to CCP control.
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Author: Ruth King
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