Is the Chinese Communist Party at war with itself? Observers quoted by the Epoch Times suggest that one motive for the latest large-scale military drills, the second of 2025, conducted to practice invading and blockading Taiwan, is the desire to distract from turmoil in the CCP. Among other Party leaders, in recent weeks and months many of the military’s top brass have been purged (January 4, 2025).
While the drills may aim to showcase Beijing’s displeasure over increasing international support for Taiwan, political pressures within the Chinese Communist Party leadership could also play a role, according to Su Tzu-yun, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a Taiwanese government-funded think tank.
He noted that the Chinese military staged the drill one week after its leadership unveiled a new commander overseeing operations in Taiwan….
As the purge of the [People’s Liberation Army] deepens, the command has emerged as a main target of political cleansing. In one of the largest single-day dismissals of military leaders in decades, Beijing expelled nine senior commanders from the Party and the military, accusing them of corruption and abuse of power….
Pointing to recent rumors about the Chinese defense minister, Su suggested Beijing might be using the stepped-up action against Taiwan to divert attention from a power struggle in the upper echelons of the CCP….
The leadership in Beijing appears to be using Taiwan to show that, even though it’s corrupt, the PLA remains capable of taking a region it has long claimed as its own, according to Shen Ming-shih, a research fellow at Taiwanese think tank the Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
“The PLA aims to use this military exercise to demonstrate that its combat capabilities remain intact, despite the corruption plaguing top military officials,” Shen told The Epoch Times. “They want to prove they can still carry out large-scale exercises and, if necessary, to use force against Taiwan.”
The Epoch Times notes that the dozens of military leaders expelled by the “anti-corruption” campaign include “longtime associates of CCP leader Xi Jinping.” But is the campaign really about fighting “corruption”? Or is it about weakening Xi Jinping, as Lei of Lei’s real talk argues? Other analysts agree that the purges are not about corruption but suppose that Xi himself is doing the purging, even of (former?) Xi loyalists.
In Lei’s view, although the drills were as usual about intimidating Taiwan and—emphatically this time—defying such allies of the ROC as the United States and Japan, they were also intended to hide the fact that Xi is no longer fully in charge.
“While the self-destructive purge continues and the rumors that Zhang Youxia [shown above] now controls the military, Xi Jinping does not want the outside world to believe he’s losing control. He uses Taiwan as a distraction to cover up the fact that he no longer controls the military and that a major internal purge is eating away the PLA.”
