Last month, Lei’s Real Talk discussed Red China’s ongoing audit operation, Sharp Sword 2025, expected to continue through 2026. This military inspection is said to be discovering “mismatched inventory, downgraded components, falsified test results, and even training drills that were staged for show.”
What we know about the audit seems to come from WeChat group discussions. Jennifer Zeng compiled highlights from those discussions on X:
“Method: Four ‘No’s’ and Two ‘Directs’ (no notice issued, no greeting made, no listening to reports, no accompanying personnel; go straight to the warehouses and go straight to the sites).” The annual visits of the U.S. military’s inspector general are warm and friendly by this standard.
“Scope:… Retrospective investigation of all old accounts from procurement, acceptance, warehousing, and maintenance in the past 9 to 15 years.”
Widening the aperture to 9 to 15 years guarantees more discoveries than if findings had been limited to 2025 and 2026.
“Check for shadow companies, related-party transactions, or experts setting up their own companies to bid and review.”
In other words, check for procurement chicanery.
“For missiles/ammunition: disassemble for inspection, X-ray imaging, explosive charge weighing, fuze testing.”
That’s getting down to the nitty-gritty.
Rat problem
Late last year the Central Military Commission issued a report on “Professional Ethics and Conduct Norms,” which the National Interest said represents a “grim admission of entrenched graft and inefficiency in procuring and maintaining the very weapons systems at the heart of China’s defense modernization and aggressive foreign policy.” Or as the People’s Liberation Army Daily put it, “big rats” have been eating away at the PLA’s budget and undermining combat readiness.
But could the rat problem be structural? If corruption is endemic throughout the system, how could the military stand outside of it?
Note that data from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CCP “shows that in 2025, commissions for discipline inspection nationwide initiated 1,012,000 investigations into government officials for corruption-related issues. These investigations implicated government officials at all levels, from top-tier leadership to local officials.”
When Brookings says that “Xi Jinping’s sweeping purges of senior officers are aimed less at corruption itself than at ensuring absolute political control of the PLA,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence makes some interesting caveats:
“Although Xi has not used the campaign primarily to target his political rivals, a drive to eliminate competing power centers factored significantly into decisions made in the initial phases of the [anti-corruption] campaign. Early in Xi’s tenure, senior officials with ties to his predecessors were targeted with investigations and arrests. However, academic analysis of anti-corruption investigations over its 10-year span has not identified a focus on officials with specific factional ties or backgrounds, indicating that the campaign has broadly sought to root out corruption in all levels of government where it exists.”
Let’s consider then that the purges can be both, political and criminal.
And there is a third dimension.
Useful disorder
Miles Yu, of the Hudson Institute, says that the PLA reacts to events with purges and then again reacts to events with purges, over and over again in a cycle that substitutes action for innovation. Every PLA improvement seems triggered by a U.S. success, which activates the cycle. Consider, for instance, the reaction to the Venezuela operation. “Rather than reassessing structural weaknesses, the regime has initiated sweeping purges across both military leadership and the defense research community. Since America’s success in Venezuela in early January, large numbers of senior PLA commanders have been made ‘nonpersons’ and disappeared from public view, including figures at the highest levels of command.”
Parallel to the military purges are the deaths and disappearances of scientists and researchers. These include “Fang Daining, 68, and Yan Hong, 57, China’s two leading hypersonic weapons researchers. The lack of clear explanations for their deaths has fueled speculation.”
So the purges may have reform or retributive aspects as well as control and anti-corruption aspects. But among the possibilities, only one can dominate.
An interesting study appeared in 1999 that offered a new paradigm for understanding Africa: “Disorder as Political Instrument.” Disorder is needed to accumulate power. Corruption is needed to build networks and bestow patronage. Anti-corruption threatens patronage systems, networks, and of course personal wealth.
Viewed in this way, Xi Jinping’s purges fuel a disorder helpful to him and his power. They work against a dynamic of corruption that, given the incentive structure, cannot be tamed, and they are always available to create more disorder with more “campaigns.” Xi pits his authoritarian “higher network” against various decentralized “lower networks,” including military networks.
Africa Works describes regimes in which corruption and disorder work together, in a single package. Beijing’s shows us separate phenomena with corruption triggering useful disorder, again and again.
This is communism “with Chinese characteristics.” □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
Also see:
Lei’s Real Talk: “Behind China’s Massive Military Audit and What It Reveals” (April 21, 2026)
African Arguments: “Disorder as Political Instrument: Lessons from Patrick Chabal’s African Scholarship for Contemporary America” (September 16, 2025)
“Ironically, Chabal and Daloz argued that this pattern of instrumental disorder characterizes a developmental path that is relatively unique to Africa. That last claim seems less plausible with every passing day, as the relevance of their ideas expands to cover territories that they themselves might have considered unlikely.”
