China’s Major Military Corruption

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The USA intelligence agencies determined that China had uncovered major corruption in it military. Xi Jinping purged many Generals and top military leaders.

It was found out that there was water instead of fuel in missiles and the lids of missile silos are not reliable.

This could be just the tip of the iceberg of military corruption.

Russia recently found out at the start of the war with Ukraine that military trucks and other equipment were not properly maintained. There was also missing ammunition, supplies and equipment. There was widespread corruption that caused a loss of 30% of the budget over many years.

China has a similar problem of military corruption but at an unknown scale.

China will likely need to take many months to determine the scale and severity of the problems and it could take years to fix problems and verify quality. This means that China does not know how ready its military is to actually perform in combat operations.

13 thoughts on “China’s Major Military Corruption”

  2. It’s hard to imagine a federal government more riddled with corruption, incompetence, ignorance than our own, yet still able to keep the country at least from falling apart.
    Here’s a report on a recent DoD industrial analysis: https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2024/01/12/pentagons-industrial-strategy-describes-the-problem-not-the-solution/
    It shows huge deficiencies that may imperil America’s ability to defend itself, let alone provide for prodigious users of military weapons and ammo like Ukraine. Ukraine is starting to lose this war, in part because of failures to supply it record levels of need to counter Russia, which is now on a full war production footing.
    The question isn’t why Russia has shown so much logistical and military incompetence – though it has – it’s why the combined forces of the far larger and richer West have failed to defeat Russia on the single battlefield of Ukraine after 2 years, and why the West has now run out of outdated surplus stock and is seemingly incapable of ramping up production to supply Ukraine with what it needs to defeat the new Axis of Russia, Iran, North Korea and, partially, China.

    • Russia views this war an existential to it going forward, while the US people don’t care about it. This war doesn’t effect us, Biden did his best trying to fund Ukraine, but corruption only gets you so far.
      But I’m not trying to de-rail this thread, China can be very corrupt, while also being a capable adversary.

  5. Political competition through parties and elections disciplines corruption; the lack of competition – especially the lack of true journalism and open criticism – leads to the corruption of power.

    The weakening of the competitive party system and its replacement with individual, for-profit political service is part of what’s killing America right now. There are no political bosses who can shove aside losers who cost them elections even when they may be raising funds and support from a substantial non-majority of the population. The goal in democracy is getting 51+% of the vote and delivering for everybody, not just those paying you.

    Of course, such a system also assumes decent news coverage. We couldn’t have that until internet and other media companies went back to functioning like regulated, common carrier public utilities concerned with the accuracy of their information over the eyeballs delivered by sensationalism. The corporate media profit motives that gave us the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” attitude started destroying decent journalism back in the 1970s. The anti-social media era merely accelerated the trend. And since what we’re calling “artificial intelligence” is just a more efficient way of doing search, this will accelerate the trend towards disinformation-for-profit faster.

    In privatized goods and services, the trend is to reduce supply – in this case, accurate, edifying information – and increase demand – here, replacing truthful information with engaging disinformation. This corporate profit-maximizing behavior reduces the production costs to zero for content while maximizing the advertising revenue generated by said content (the eyeballs). This dynamic is inevitable with any ad model for content – as well as any subscriber content that might be addictive or whose consumption in some other way might robber a subscriber of their rational faculties. I predicted this disinformation problem in the 1990s in my grad school work on “telerights.” Take a look at my open letter to the House Telecommunications Committee republished in the Computer Underground Digest. (My criticism of commercial hypertext and proposed solutions using encrypted ledgers was privately endorsed by Ted Nelson.)

    The fact that Putin and Xi swim in the same cesspool may be all we’ve got going for us. In many ways, they are in the same boat we are with propaganda, lack of disciplining criticism and fawning, toadying corrupt lick-spittles.

    • To sum up, politics requires quality control inspection, just like every other economic activity that has parts moving on a production line. When you sabotage loan portfolio reviews in banks, you get bank collapses and panics. When you stop performing autopsies, doctors stop learning from their mistakes and more patients die. When bar associations stop policing incompetence and fail to enforce the oath upholding the rule of law above all else, ethical standards plunge and the legal system becomes a bunch of hacks for sale to the highest bidder.

      And airplane doors fall out midflight.

      • Simplistic and unrealistic.
        People are not fundamentally Good; they’re lazy, greedy, and stupid; but mostly not Evil. Rich societies were not built by the Average, the Nice, and the Law-Abiding. Rich societies were not conceived, lead, and improved by the Inspirational, the Driven, and the Facilitator/Team Player. Rich societies of the protestant-work-ethic (mostly non-religious) flavour – US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc., spawned, grew, and became Great due to the aggregate sum total of the selfish competitive nature of their constituents set in front of a backdrop of opportunity, minimal regulation, limited transparency, and a tinge of litigative/legal fear. If anything, it is an ‘Honor Among Thieves’ idea, played out under politicians that wish to facilitate the greatest perception of improvement and ideological vision. We know this is true and ongoing since people move from comfortable conformity to chaotic opportunity (i.e. cities) constantly, though they may punish overt failures, corruptions, and defacing dramas for as long as the news cycle runs. This remarkable high-trust society (as opposed to 75%+ of the world’s ‘low-trust’ system (great wiki article on these)) operates on a controlled chaos that is self-correcting in the employee-employer, buyer-seller, owner-renter, litigator-litigee, rich-poor dynamics; very little on the ‘democratic’ and regulatory systems. I am on the fence about the value of journalism as it is only the 1-in-1,000,000 article that actually sheds light or provides guidance or correction to a society which would otherwsie purr along on its own free-market, property-rights, and driven-self-interest values.
        Your pollyana-ish values may play out to the 13-year-old junior Republicans, but we all know better how individuals and societies succeed.

  6. There is plenty of real corruption in Russian and Chinese military (all human institutions but statist militaries in particular) but China has often used “anti-corruption” drives just to clean out political rivals. When everyone in any position of power is corrupt you don’t have to explain why you are firing or arresting a bunch of people. The ones you want gone deserved it while the ones you let stay get the message as to why loyalty has its privileges.

  7. Not sure we should bet any country “doesn’t know how ready its military is to actually perform in combat operations.”

    Nothing motivates like a crisis. Nothing unites like a common foe.

    • I’d bet the US is ready for a fight. Reason being we are always fighting and there is no time to slack off.

      Honestly the war in Ukraine has really compared western to Russian military technology and training and Russia isn’t looking very good. Russia would have lost by now if it wasn’t for meat waves, mines, and lots of NORK shells of dubious quality.

      Maybe the lesson is that you can’t trust what you aren’t actively using. Hope Xi is taking notes.

      • “Maybe the lesson is that you can’t trust what you aren’t actively using”
        That is a sad, but likely true, quote.

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