Miles Yu reacts to Xi Jinping’s latest purging of a plethora of military leaders, including China’s defense minister, and Xi’s speech commemorating 70 years of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” Meanwhile, the United States Department of State released its annual report on international religious freedom, which detailed the CCP’s repressive practices against religious minorities in China.
China Insider is a weekly podcast project from Hudson Institute's China Center, hosted by Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world’s future.
Episode Transcript
This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from the Hudson Institute's China Center. I am Miles Yu, senior fellow and director of the China Center. Join me each week along with my colleague, Shane Leary, for our analysis of the major events concerning China, China threat and their implications to the US and beyond.
Philip Hegseth:
Today is Tuesday, July 2nd, and we're back with Miles to cover three more news items from last week. The first is Xi Jinping's expulsion of defense minister Li Shangfu on claim charges of corruption, adding yet more names to Xi's laundry list of purged military leaders. Second, we dissect the CCPs five principles of peaceful coexistence after Xi gave a speech commemorating 70 years of the plan and Miles illustrates just how hypocritical the party's actions are to their own principles. And third, the State Department released their annual report on international religious freedom last week, stating that the Chinese government restricts activities and freedom of religious followers it believes threaten the state or the party’s interests. All right, Miles. Happy Tuesday.
Miles Yu:
Happy Tuesday to you, Phil.
Philip Hegseth:
So, we start this week with an epilogue to last week's episode. Actually, we covered last week Xi's speech to the PLA about loyalty and detailed in very small font - I remember in person I saw it because there was a lot of names - The history of Xi’s purges of military leadership. Well, you can add a few more names to your spreadsheet Miles, because last week the CCP purged a new group of defense officials, most notably Li Shangfu, the current, now former defense minister. According to Reuters, the CCP claims that Li was receiving huge sums of money in bribes as well as bribing others, and a CCP investigation found he did not fulfill political responsibilities. So Miles, we cover the history behind moves like this last week and we won't cover that same ground again, but what's your read here on this latest military reshuffling? What does this all mean?
Miles Yu:
Well, Xi Jinping has many nicknames, monikers. He's known as officially, of course, the General Secretary of Communist Party. He's also known as the chairman of everything because virtually every title the PRC has and is held by him. He's also known as accelerator in chief. This is mostly from the dissident group who believe that he's done so many bad things for the regime, the regime is going to, going to speed up to its demise. Right now, he should have another moniker that is, he's a “Purger in Chief”. He has purged so many officials in the name of corruption - and I'll explain to you why corruption is just a ruse, It's basically a non-issue. It's a political purge. And we said last week, last Tuesday when our previous episode came out and it was mentioned that Li Shangfu and his predecessor General Wei Fenghe would be purged and we understand that was the case.
But then Thursday, the PRC made a huge announcement, made it official and with specific charges against the latest two defense ministers, Generals Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu. And those charges were very, very interesting. Now, what's so important thing about these purges are actually there timing. So, it has something to do with the procedure of how the CCP goes about to conduct this business. Procedurally, usually you have this third plenum of each account's party. This is now the 20th party Congress. So, the third plenum is very important because it makes a major personnel decision as well as a major economic policies. Normally third plenum would take place in the fall and then in the spring the rubber stamp, the National People's Congress, would put a stamp of approval on it. So that normally takes place in March, but Xi Jinping lives in paranoia constantly. But before the third plenum of the 20th party Congress, which would convene last fall, Xi Jinping basically purged his defense minister, Li Shangfu, and his foreign minister, Qin Gang, and he made his general before Li, General Wei, disappear.
So, he was telling the party that to heck with the party plenum and I am the king and I want to do whatever I want to do. So, there was no need for the third plenum. So, there was no third plenum in the fall last year, which is kind of odd, which poses an embarrassing problem for the upcoming National People's Congress that would take place in spring, in March, because it had nothing to put their stamp on because the party did not have the third plenum and nothing was official. So this year's NPC that took place in March was kind of a super weird, there was no pre-event promo and there was no hoopla and the entire meeting was cut short by half. Normally it's two weeks, but this then barely lasted for a week. No major announcements whatsoever. So now Xi Jinping, in June, 2024, faces a lot of backlash from within. So, he had to have a settlement on all his brutal internal purges since last year. Therefore, you have the third plenum scheduled for July 15th until 18th of July, which is basically in two weeks. But before that happened in two weeks, Xi Jinping wanted to upstage the procedure again and the party and made last Thursday’s announcement of the purges of Li and Wei, his two recent defense ministers. So, this is basically though Xi Jinping is acting like a Mao, complete disregard of the party, its own procedure.
Philip Hegseth:
So, what is he trying to signal to the party and the rest of the military with this move against the regular procedure?
Miles Yu:
That means his supremacy is unchallenged and that nobody could even harbor any iota of doubt about his awesome news, about his omnipotence. This is a guy whose ego is totally inflated. Every day, He makes speeches pointing the directions where the world should go. By the way, he did not just purge Li and the Wei, in last Thursday’s announcement also nine other senior PLA leaders, very senior, including deputy chairman of the joint chief of staff, two deputy commanders of the PLA Armament Department, commander of the PLA Rocket Force Armament Department, and the Peoples Liberation Army's Air Force Chief General Ding Lai hang, two PLA Rocket Force Commanders, the latest one, Li Yuchao, and the previous one, Zhou Yaning, and also Deputy commander of the Southern Theater and the commander of the Southern Fleet. So, all those very senior PLA officers were announced as being purged ostentatiously for corruption. Obviously, this is not the case. Now, most international reporting has been wrong because it's not really about corruption, right? If you read the indictments against Li and Wei, the number one crime against the two defense ministers is “in violation of political discipline”. Political discipline, that means that he doesn't follow Xi Jinping’s orders, right? Yeah. The number two crime against these two guys was resisting the party's supremacy in military work and the comprehensive command of the party over the military.
Now, that's nothing to do with corruption. That's basically, this is a political purge and then followed by these people took a lot of bribes. Of course, they will say that they, every single person purged by Xi Jinping is done in the name of corruption, but specifically how much this guy took in what form? There are no details. And then most importantly, there's no defense from these guys. They're disappeared! I think ultimately this new round of purge really points to the profound dilemma and unsolvable problem of the CCP. That is the complete impossibility of being both “red and expert”. In other words, “red and expert” was a Maoist error slogan that is every soldier in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army must be both “red” meaning communist, loyal to the party, loyal to the communist cause, and “expert” that is you’re professional, he knows handle the weapon, how to do military training, how to fight a war and win.
If you are so much into communist ideology, you cannot be expert. And I think that's why if you look at the guys who Xi Jinping has purged, most of them are in a very professional field. Most of the disciplines in the rocket force, right, they require a lot of professional knowhow. And Xi Jinping has promoted a lot of political commissaries, assuming loyal to him with a hundred percent guarantee, and then they get rid of all these guys who are professionally qualified. And I think that this really, really is about that, it's about the complete impossibility of being both “red” and “expert”.
Philip Hegseth:
Can I ask a practical question here? How does this constant purging and what has to be constant fear within the actual ranks of being purged if you aren't “red and an expert”, how does that practically impact military readiness and the strength of the PLA?
Miles Yu:
Well, there's a lot of internal reports, obviously, but if you look at the episode that we talked about last week, Xi Jinping took the entire CMC political work team to Yan’An to stress the importance of ideological correctness. That means that there are some people who he considered as the ideological incorrect. That also means a lot of people who are very, very unhappy. Each one of the senior officers they purged. There are also being a lot of people, hundreds of officers, they promoted down the chain and those guys were also being affected. At least their military promotion path is done. They cannot really be promoted any further if not being demoted. So this is why the impact on the morale will be very tremendous.
Philip Hegseth:
It's got to be, yeah. Alright, moving on. This next one, I got to be honest, is a doozy, and I'm going to need your help here because last Friday, Xi Jinping gave a speech commemorating 70 years of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. His speech was literally titled, “Carrying Forward the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and Jointly Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind”. I mean, this was actually hard to read seriously. So, let's just go back to school here. Miles, start by explaining to us what the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence are one by one. The first is mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, and that's real cheap.
Miles Yu:
Yeah. Well, Five Principle Peaceful Coexistence is actually kind of a joke. It's a height of Chinese Communist Party's hypocrisy because this is probably the supreme example of China as a United Front Work. It assumes that other people are not for peaceful coexistence. Only China, Chinese Communist Party is the angel of peace, which really is laughable. Now, this has been China's sort shibboleth since the 1950s. Every time China show aggressiveness, they say, ah, you know what: “We're not the one who's aggressor and let's just be peaceful. Let’s just make sure that we're in coexistence.” The first one is mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty. This is number one of China's So-called peaceful coexistence, the five principles. What really China means that please respect my disrespect for other country's territorial integrity and sovereignty. My gosh, look, think about it. No country in the world has more territorial demands for others land than China does. As of now, China has ongoing territorial disputes with the following countries. India, Bhutan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Taiwan, Japan, and if you add the South China Sea, that would also include the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. Those were ongoing disputes that China wants other people's land from. Currently dormant, but potentially resurgent disputes China has with this following countries, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. Do you know how many land neighbors China has? There are 14 land neighbors. Do you know how many I have just listed? 14. So, you added Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. That would include virtually all of China's maritime neighbors. So, the conclusion is that China has territorial and maritime disputes with virtually every one of the neighbors, land and maritime. So, this whole issue about respect for other country's territorial integrity and their sovereignty by the Chinese Communist Party is really a joke. A big joke. So, we have to understand when we talk about stopping China from invading Taiwan, we're not just about talking about Taiwan, we're talking about stopping a long chain of aggression by China against the virtually all of its neighbors. That's not disrespectful of China. That's respect for world peace and prosperity.
Philip Hegseth:
Yeah, each one of these can be laughable in their own right. Number two is mutual non-aggression.
Miles Yu:
Again, this is also a very, very strange, mutual non-aggression. China has a fought war and has taken military actions against more of its neighbors than any other major countries in modern history. Wars against India since 1950s, For example. Wars with the Soviet Union in 1969, wholesale invasion of Vietnam in 1979, the intermittent wars and shelling of millions of artillery pieces into Vietnam in the entire 1980s. Let alone, China's role in facilitating global conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. So mutual non-aggression means when China tried to invade others. You know what? It is not our business. Stop. Just make a big fuss over my aggression.
Philip Hegseth:
I like how you're turning the tables on all of these. Number three, mutual noninterference in each other's internal affairs.
Miles Yu:
This is also a joke. The most expensive PRC government programs other than domestic repression and the military spending are dedicated to operations of interference in other countries internal affairs. It's called the United Front work. The first of a multi domain, three magic weapons for the CCP is United Front Work. The second one is armed struggle. Third one is the party construction. CCPs interference with the US Internal affairs, for example, would include the following. Number one, big money to cultivate proxies among US, policy, business and education elites to lobby and influence US sovereign and foreign policies toward China in particular. Number two, setting up friendship organizations with the US subnational entities including state legislature, sister cities, university exchanges, et cetera, et cetera. Number three, setting up secret police stations in New York and other places, intimidation squads among Chinese diaspora communities, in all the Chinatowns and university campuses or national labs where hundreds of Chinese students and scholars concentrate. So lastly, China has conducted massive electronic and human intelligence penetration into Western countries, particularly United States. Those were interference in others' internal affairs. So, China says this without any blink of the eye, it's just really, really shameful.
Philip Hegseth:
Alright, number four is equality and cooperation from mutual benefit.
Miles Yu:
You ask China's neighbors, China views most of its neighbors as “the little countries shall go.” Literally the very condescending. One reason why the ferocity expressed by China toward countries like the Vietnam and the Philippines is because China would never expect little countries like Philippines and Vietnam to openly oppose to China's demands, territorial and maritime. And that's why their respect for those so-called little countries was virtually nonexistent. They also talk about the mutual benefits. When China constantly talk about the win-win to the Americans, that normally means that China wins twice and the US loses twice. That's basically, it's not mutual benefits. It's a one way street.
Philip Hegseth:
And to close up, the fifth principle of peaceful coexistence is peaceful coexistence.
Miles Yu:
Well, this is the ultimate one. The irony is this, peaceful coexistence was the first uttered by the Soviet leader Khrushchev. In the context of United States and the Soviet Union Cold War contest. China was absolutely against it, this is one of the major crimes of Khrushchev, of being a Marxist-Leninist revisionist over which China and Soviet Union would eventually split. The phrase peaceful coexistence domestically within the Chinese Communist Party rank and file, it sounds very insidious. It shows China's ideological intransigency that phrase, peaceful coexistence, the betrayal of Marxism Leninism because you cannot really coexist with a capitalist country, with the United States, the imperialist. So peaceful coexistence is aimed for different audience here, that is mostly Westerners, who have naively thought that the Chinese communist model of governance would be benign, It would pose no threat to western democracy, and both can win, East and West. That's why there's a peaceful coexistence.
This is really, really interesting because there's a huge audience within the Western democracy. I mean, I used to work at the Trump administration and there are some very high senior officials within the Trump administration god’s sake, and to believe the Chinese Communist Party poses no threat to the United States, that they're not really communist. This is nonsense. The CCP wants to dominate and win because if you read the Xi Jinping’s speeches, if you read a Mao’s works, every communist party leader believes that democracy and the communist of the world could never coexist because it is, as Xi Jin often said, and said this many, many times, he said, “you die. I live. zero sum game.” “你死，我活着斗争“ (Ni si wo huozhe douzheng). “ “You dieI live” struggle.” Is an epic struggle. In other words, the regime in Beijing will have to change the democratic regime of the world or the regime in Beijing will be changed. That's how they view the world. So unfortunately, we still have some silly people in Washington, today, endlessly debating whether regime change in China should be an option. It's not really useful. So we have to look at the peaceful coexistence from this perspective. Number one, it has this domestic audience. Number two, it has a global audience. This is just a big dial in United Front Work.
Philip Hegseth:
Is it just a translation thing or is it just me that one of the principles of peaceful coexistence is peaceful coexistence? That doesn't make sense. You know what I'm saying? That's saying, that's like saying the best way to be good at basketball is to be good at basketball. It, you know what I mean, its self-fulfilling.
Miles Yu:
I mean, there's a Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, mostly for China to work on the non-Western countries, newly independent countries in particular. It was first used in 1955 on the massive scale in the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, because China wanted to grab the leadership role of the non-alignment movement. And that really didn't work out because India took the leadership and that's one reason why China and India didn't get along. But ultimately it is not going to work because actions speak louder than words here. When Xi Jinping convened this 70th anniversary of this Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the world barely pays any attention to it at all. But it sounds pretty good to the other people who were not in the first world or the second world.
Philip Hegseth:
Alright, and finally to wrap us up, the State Department released last Wednesday its annual report on international religious freedom, and in no surprise, China was deemed rightly as oppressive. The report covers the well-documented persecution of Muslim Uyghurs, which is ongoing and notes that quote “the Chinese government restricts the activities and freedom of religious followers it believes threatens the state or Chinese Communist party interests.” But it's not just the Uyghurs. The report cites another group, the Church of the Almighty God, which alone had over 12,000 of its members arrested in 2023. CCP has officially labeled that group a cult, but the evidence doesn't lie. Miles, could you expand on this report's findings here and help illustrate what some of this religious oppression looks like
Miles Yu:
For several decades? Many people in the West believed that somehow China and the United States could coexist economically, also through trade, and to a certain degree they're right, but fundamentally, that's also a dead-end alley because the engagement with China is really not just about economics, not about trade, it's really about ideology. It's about political systems, it's about the models of governance. One of the most important hallmark of that kind of a true nature of the bilateral relationship is religious freedom. Religious freedom tells the difference between United States and China in many, many ways. Number one basically is freedom of speech, right? Is freedom of worship. Number two is really about how the Chinese government governs the nation through total ideological control. Many of the US China economic engagement has been affected by this. For example, China’s massive detention, massive torture of Uyghurs in Tibet and Xinjiang province that has affected the US trade because there are so many sanctions right now in effect about goods and labor used in Xinjiang. And also you have many of China's leading companies of global significance. The makers of the world's largest surveillance systems, cameras, ultra rate monitoring devices. They were used by the Chinese government to monitor the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and that would have no place in the trading relationship with the West because they would violate several laws. So you can see in the end, pure economic engagement with China can never be separated from political and religious issues. In the end, it's really about Cold War II, right? It's about the communist system versus western democracy. I would also like to point out that religious freedom, human rights issues like this should never have taken second place in bilateral relationship with China. In the past, we have this kind of reports last week, for example, we not only have the religious report, we also have the human trafficking report. China also ranked very high, one of the worst violators of human trafficking. Those issues are fundamental not only to the values of our country, but also to how the future of the world will look like.
Philip Hegseth:
Yeah
Miles Yu:
If we don't tackle this as the first and primary issues of the day, our relationship can never move forward, we cannot just address issues that China wanted us to address. the transactional issues of trade, of tariffs. Those are important, but most importantly, on top of that, we should always place religion, human rights and political freedom at the top. The United States is the strongest in those. China is the weakest over there. We have to use our strength fighting against China's weakness.
Philip Hegseth:
That's a good note to keep in mind and end on. Miles, appreciate you joining me again this week and we will see you next week.
Miles Yu:
Thank you very much.
Thank you for listening to this episode of China Insider. I'd like to thank my colleague Shane Leary, for taking part in this undertaking every week. I'd also like to thank our executive producer, Philip Hegseth, who works tirelessly and professionally behind the scenes for every episode. To make sure we deliver the best quality podcast to you, the listeners, if you enjoy the show, please spread the word. For Chinese listeners, please check our monthly review and analysis episode in Chinese. We'll see you next time.