The Republic of China – the legitimate government of China now operating from the province of Taiwan since its 1949 forced retreat from the mainland – conducted a free and fair election on January 13, 2024.
Much to the disappointment of globalists and Communist-appeasers everywhere the pro-liberty, anti-Communist Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party was elected as the Republic of China’s next president.
Mr. Lai once described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence,” and maintains that since the Republic of China government on Taiwan is already independent it doesn’t need to make any further declarations of independence from the Communist government on the mainland.
Lai Ching-te has for years been reviled by China’s Communist Party as a dangerous foe that is pressing for full independence for his island democracy. Yet, despite Communist China’s months of menacing warnings of a “war or peace” choice for Taiwan’s voters, Mr. Lai was elected president. Mr. Lai, currently Taiwan’s vice president, secured 40 percent of the votes in the election, giving his Democratic Progressive Party, or D.P.P., a third term in a row in the presidential office.
This makes President-elect Lai a major thorn in the side of Red China’s dictator Xi Jinping. And there are many indications that the Communists on the mainland are preparing to make good on their threats to reunify China by force.
One of the most concerning “Indian signs” of Chinese Communist aggression seems to have slipped past America’s foreign policy establishment and their stenographers in the media: The purging of officers in the Chinese Communist Peoples Liberation Army.
At the turn of the New Year Xi axed nine senior military officers from their positions. Among them were three former commanders or vice commanders of the PLA Rocket Force, which looks after China's nuclear missiles, a Navy commander who oversaw the South China Sea, a former Air Force chief, and four officers who were in charge of equipment.
"It is a clear sign that they are being purged," Andrew Scobell, a Distinguished Fellow for China at the United States Institute for Peace, told Reuters.
Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, said there were likely more purges to come.
"More heads will roll. The purge that centered around the Rocket Force is not over," he said, per Reuters.
Ostensibly, the purges were precipitated by revelations of corruption first discovered in the Rocket Forces, however, corruption is endemic in the Communist Chinese military, so why now?
The Times of India -- acute observers of the subcontinent’s historical antagonist -- reports Xi is engaged in a struggle within the ranks of the military to purge senior commanders and reshape the military for potential combat scenarios. Xi's objective is to ensure that the leadership of the People's Liberation Army is prepared and willing to engage in warfare. These efforts have led to dismissals of senior officers and reforms in China's military structure. The dismissals, reported TOI, were only partly attributed to corruption. Analysts believe Xi's underlying motivation is to eliminate officers hesitant about going to war.
The Chinese leader is "trying to gain control of the military, and I think that he is thinking that he needs officers who are prepared to actually fight," said Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and author of "China Is Going to War."
"There is a sense that many of China's general officers don't want to fight," according to Chang. "And so we really have a force led by an officer corps that is ambivalent about going to war."
According to Mr. Chang, the corruption theory misses the point.
"Because if that were the case, all of them would be sacked," he said.
To bolster his analysis Gordon Chang cited the case of Communist Chinese Air Force General Liu Yazhou, who cautioned against an invasion of Taiwan and received a suspended death sentence in February 2022, per the AsiaNews agency.
In an interview with the Business Insider Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington, DC argued that rooting out corruption and readying China for war were aligned goals.
"The removals indicate that Xi should be concerned about the quality of people and equipment he has invested in over the last decade," he said.
"If that equipment malfunctions or can't be relied on, how confident can Xi and his colleagues be that the PLA will prevail?" Wuthnow asked.
What’s more, as Gordon Chang noted, Xi has been ramping up warlike rhetoric.
In his New Year's address, Xi said China "will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," according to the official translation of his speech.
Xi drove the message home in a recent face-to-face meeting with Biden, NBC News reported. The network said Xi told Biden at the APEC summit in San Francisco in November 2023 that China intended to take control of Taiwan, noted Thibault Spirlet in his reporting for the Business Insider.
While the Biden administration seems to buy the cover story that eliminating corruption was behind the end of the year purge, the proximity of Xi’s warlike New Year’s address and the dismissals of nine senior officers who were apparently fat and happy on corruption was no accident.
The Red Chinese have many “grey zone” confrontations going right now: India in the disputed Himalayas, Japan in the East China Sea, the Philippines in the South China Sea, however, Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, is the most likely to turn from grey to red hot.
China
election interference
Taiwan elections
National Intelligence Council
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines
Chinese Communist Party
2022 Election
Republic of China
gray zone tactics
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
Lai Ching-te
Vice President Lai Ching-te
Hsiao Bi-khim