On Thursday, the Chinese Ministry of Defense announced that Admiral Miao Hua (苗華), the director of the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission, was suspended from his responsibilities and was under investigation. In the same press conference, the ministry emphatically denied reports that Minister of Defense Admiral Dong Jun (董軍) was under investigation on the same charge.
Those reports came from the Financial Times on Wednesday, citing unnamed former and current U.S. officials. Miao’s arrest had been rumored for weeks online but hadn’t been splashed by legacy media in the same way as the Dong Jun story. While we cannot know for sure, it seems plausible to conclude that the announcement about Miao was a response to the reports about Dong.
There is, as always, much that is unknowable about the workings of the Chinese government. So what can we conclude with the limited information we currently have? And what if anything does this mean for Taiwan?
Firstly, it is unlikely that Dong is in as much trouble as the Financial Times reported. The emphatic denials of the defense ministry do not match the pattern of previous cases where Western media and analysts have realized that a senior Chinese minister has effectively disappeared from public view. Indeed, Dong has been seen quite recently, at various meetings on the sidelines of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting in Laos.
However, he did miss a relatively important engagement with a Singaporean admiral last week, so there’s some smoke to go on. Before the news about Miao officially broke, it was speculated that he was implicated in Dong’s trouble. The reverse could still be true, or it could simply be that Dong and the people around him are currently distracted and focused on keeping themselves away from that situation. Or maybe neither of those things is correct.
Regardless, given that we don’t know the nature of the intelligence that led to the reports from U.S. officials, we can’t disregard them entirely, despite Chinese denials. But they look a lot shakier now than they did on Wednesday. The big tell will be whether Dong appears in public in the coming days. If he does not, especially if he misses another appointment, the rumors will be back with a vengeance.
What does the news about Miao mean? Despite Dong being defense minister, Miao actually outranks him in defense matters because he is a member of the Central Military Commission, the military leadership body of the People’s Republic of China and Chinese Communist Party. It is President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) chairmanship of this body that makes him commander in chief of the People’s Liberation Army. While it is customary for the defense minister to be a member of the commission, Dong is not, possibly because he replaced another defense minister, Li Shangfu (李尚福), last year, after Li was also taken down for corruption.
Miao has been on the Central Military Commission since 2017. This is significant, because it means that he was elevated before the recent wave of corruption removals that have devastated the P.L.A.’s senior leadership. It’s more plausible that old information has now come to light. Because Dong was elevated last year, we can only assume that he was vetted incredibly thoroughly given the circumstances of his predecessors’ falls. This is one factor that made the Financial Times reports a little confusing.
Miao is seen as one of Xi’s men. He came from Fujian, where Xi previously worked, and Xi promoted him fast. This changes the tenor of the investigation against him, since in theory Xi should not want to remove the people he has put in place to be loyal to him for political reasons. Corruption is endemic to the PLA, so we can only assume that Miao is accused of something particularly egregious.
The other possibility is that this isn’t about Miao at all. A note from the China Maritime Studies Institute suggested that after purging the Rocket Force, Xi has turned his attention to the navy. But this doesn’t really deal with the point about him being close to Xi. It was also posited in the same note that this move comes not from Xi but from General Zhang Youxia (張又俠), who is a vice chair of the Central Military Commission and thus second only to Xi in the command structure. But if this is the case, and he is moving against Xi’s people, what would that say about Xi’s control within the P.L.A.? It’s hard to credit. The reality is we simply know too little about the internal workings of Chinese leadership.
What does this mean for the P.L.A. and for Taiwan?
It’s very hard to say. There are two strands of thought and they entirely contradict each other. There have been so many senior generals and admirals removed in recent years, including this year. It is hard to believe that this turnover isn’t having some impact on the P.L.A. Too much change is bad anyway, and if new leaders spend most of their time trying not to be purged, this seems likely to affect their performance too. Of course, if the allegations are true, then the P.L.A. has been under egregious leadership for years. That’s not great for China either.
The other thought, as espoused in the very comprehensive note from the China Maritime Studies Institute, is that this is happening because Xi is ruthlessly focused on improving the P.L.A. as a tool for external action and that this is putting better leadership in place. This, too, seems credible even if it is undermined by some in the new waves immediately succumbing to the ongoing purge.
Taiwan and the U.S. cannot afford to treat the second option lightly. Indeed, it would be more than prudent to steelman the situation and prepare to face the best possible version of the P.L.A. that is constrained by our understanding.
However, other analysts can take a more holistic view. We must not fall into the “rational agent” fallacy, assuming that at every turn Xi makes the best possible decision that anyone in his position could take, with all the information he could theoretically access. You don’t have to think very long to see that in fact this is very unlikely to be the case for a multitude of reasons.
We should instead try to understand this situation as a fuzzy cloud of possibility space, where a large part of the cloud is Xi making large mistakes. Then potential strategies can be crafted that take advantage of such missteps, strategies that would be missed if Xi is automatically given all benefit of the doubt.
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