The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - How Extensive is the Corruption in the Chinese Military? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

I had a handful of y'all point out that not everyone in the recent Chinese purges was targeted for political reasons; instead, many of these folks are facing corruption charges. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/how-extensive-is-the-corruption-in-the-chinese-military

Everybody, Peter Zine. A few of you wrote in yesterday, pointing out rightly, that there is corruption in the Chinese government. And it's not everything that Xi Jinping is doing is a purge of personnel for political reasons. I mean, that's the primary thing. But it's not the only one. He's already pushed a quarter of a million people into corruption charges. But for the military specifically, we've had a few things that have kind of bubble up over the last few days that are just a riot. So we now know that the guy who was in charge of the country's missile forces, as well as the Secretary of Defense, were in part dismissed last year because they had been siphoning money off from the procurement process.

And at some point over the summer or the fall, Xi Jinping discovered that all of those missile silos that the government has been building out in Western China to achieve some sort of strategic parity of the United States, a lot of the hatches don't open. But that's not the best part. The best part is that for a lot of the intercontinental ballistic missiles, instead of fuel in the tanks, they just filled them up with water. And that is something that you would expect to get kind of caught on. So you can only imagine how much stuff down the line has been lied about and stolen. But the only country that we can compare here to this level of theft would be Russia. We now know from the Ukraine were that probably two-thirds of the funding

that Putin has a lot of the military over the last 15 years, was just stolen. I have no idea what the percentage is going to end up being for China. I'm sure it's a lot higher than people we're expecting. The only specific incident that I can think of where this fuel tank water issue is even a meaningful comparison. Back in the 90s, when Russian mig maintenance crews started siphing off the coolant from the migs in order to drink it

because it was cheaper than buying alcohol. The scale of this appears to be just massive, and obviously it's going to have an impact on the readiness and the expansion and the modernization program of the Chinese military. Anyway, so this is kind of a yes but or a yes and to yesterday and everybody. I hope you get a good chuckle out of it. And of course, unless you're Chinese, in which case, you know, tough.