FFAA da China: corruptas e sem controle do PCC? (China Talk)

O Imperador limpa o terreno... 

PLA Purges! What does it all mean for Xi and Taiwan Risk?

“Surprising and a little bit worrisome for China...” 

JORDAN SCHNEIDER AND NICHOLAS WELCH OCT 25 ∙ PREVIEW

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Yesterday Defense Minister Li Shangfu got officially purged. To discuss, we brought on Joel Wuthnow, a fellow at NDU. His research areas include Chinese foreign and security policy, Chinese military affairs, US-China relations, and strategic developments in East Asia. He joined ChinaTalk to discuss Xi Jinping’s recent purges of high-ranking members of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi’s larger vision for the PLA, and what all this internal turmoil might mean for China’s longer-term designs on Taiwan.

Key insights:

• Over ten years after coming to power, Xi is still purging corruption from the military, reflecting his continued lack of trust in the PLA;

• Corruption is historically endemic in the PLA in part because of its incentive structure, which makes graft a prerequisite for rising through the ranks;

• Xi’s efforts to break up the PLA’s supervisory apparatus have only been partially successful (they’re still the same people even if they’re in a different department);

• Amid the anti-corruption shakeup, China’s Rocket Force has been successfully developing hypersonic missiles, technology viewed as critical to countering US intervention in a regional conflict over Taiwan;

• Despite Xi’s apparent distrust of his inner circle of military advisors, an echo chamber–induced invasion of Taiwan is still a live possibility.

Trust Issues in the PLA

Jordan Schneider: Xi Jinping’s got some trust issues. Over the past few months he’s run through a number of PLA generals he appointed less than twelve months ago! Joel, two-sentence overview: what has happened with these purges of late? 

Joel Wuthnow: There have been many purges inside China, even beyond the PLA. Qin Gang 秦刚 disappeared, a whole bunch of people from the defense industry up and disappeared. In the PLA, a number of senior generals are missing in action; right now, frankly, we don’t know where they are. There are a lot of rumors circulating about these key figures, including the Defense Minister [Li Shangfu 李尚福] and the former commander of the Rocket Force [Li Yuchao 李玉超]. It’s not a good look for Xi Jinping.

The fact that there are so many people missing all at once means that Xi has a lack of trust and lack of confidence in some of his senior leadership right now.

Jordan Schneider: From the PLA watcher community, I had one friend reach out to me who said he was bummed about all this! He’s been following Li Shangfu for a decade, and all of a sudden he’s gone.

Are you excited or sad to see your friends leave the stage? What’s the emotional response when you see a new round of crackdowns?

Joel Wuthnow: For me, the feeling is surprise coupled with curiosity. It’s a shocking state of affairs, and the reason is this: us PLA watchers all mostly assume that Xi’s really in charge of the machine over there, that he put his people into place, and that his political rivals were gone a decade ago.

So it’s really surprising to wake up and find that the Defense Minister, someone who is probably pretty close to Xi — he’s on the Central Military Commission — is just gone. It’s surprising and a little bit worrisome, if you think about its implications for China.

Li Shangfu, China's Defense Minister, has not made a public appearance since late August. The Print/ANI.

Jordan Schneider: I think we should start by unpacking the idea that Xi has controlled or put his stamp on the PLA. To do that, we need to start with a little bit of institutional history. What was the bargain that Deng Xiaoping gave the PLA coming into the 1980s?

Joel Wuthnow: Back in the 1980s, the PLA was governing society. They were stacked in the Politburo. They were a very important part of the leadership and had a huge amount of power. Then Deng Xiaoping said, “No, we’re going to focus on reforming the economy. We want to bring in technocrats, and we want the military to be put in its place and put back in its barracks.” He said to the PLA, “We want you to modernize, but we’re not going to give you that much money to do it.”

It didn’t seem like a great bargain for the PLA. They had to give up a lot of authority and status without getting a lot of money. So, Deng said, “Okay, go back to your barracks — but you decide what you’re going to do. We’re not going to look into your affairs or get too involved in your business.”

So, Deng gave the PLA a huge amount of autonomy, and this was acceptable to them.

However, this also created a situation that allowed the PLA to become very corrupt and very inward-looking — very secretive and poorly supervised by the Politburo and the senior civilian leadership of the Party. This is really the origin of a lot of the problems that we’re seeing today.

China doesn’t have Western-style civil-military relations where there’s a lot of civilian oversight of the military — political appointees, courts, judges, media. There’s really none of that in China. So that’s the situation that the PLA found themselves in: corrupt and secretive, though not rebellious — they weren’t starting military coups against the leaders, as you saw in 1991 with the Soviet Union. But they weren’t fully professional and or fully “clean.” So the seed for what’s going on today was planted about forty years ago — in the 1980s — with Deng Xiaoping.

Jordan Schneider: The reason the PLA was so ingrained in society was because Mao decided that they were the only way to get the country out of the Cultural Revolution. So it was basically PLA power or complete chaos. This resulted in a very awkward situation where, if you’re in the PLA — if you’re not about to fight a war anytime soon and everyone else is getting rich around you — the dominant strategies if you want to rise up and be successful are to either do things like import luxury cars and run hotels; or to just graft on the procurement that’s been allocated to your budget instead of doing what the Premier wants (which is to get you in tip-top shape to potentially deter adversaries and maybe even fight an aggressive war).

So, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao: what did they want to do, and how did they struggle to execute their vision of what the PLA should be doing in the 1990s and 2000s?

Joel Wuthnow: Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao both basically wanted to make the PLA give up its business interests. The PLA was running all sorts of business empires as a way to make ends meet. Part of the way Jiang and Hu tried to undo this was by giving the PLA larger budgets; so in the 1990s and early 2000s, there were double-digit budget increases, as well as new rules and regulations.

A lot of the PLA’s operations, like the casinos and the luxury cars, were actually shut down — but this didn’t really change the basics: the PLA wasn’t well-governed or -supervised.

Rising in the ranks … a PLA promotion ceremony in July. Japan Times.

Jordan Schneider: To give folks a sense of just how broken the system was — there was not a way to rise up in the ranks without being corrupt? Because at a certain point you ended up having to buy your rank. All these positions had dollar amounts attached.

Say you want to get promoted and you don’t have a rich Chinese uncle that you can find to bankroll you. Who else might be interested in supporting folks getting promoted in the PLA system? Foreign intelligence agencies. So you end up with this very vicious cycle of the people who are getting promoted actually being the ones who are on the take from adversaries. This is the dynamic that Xi is facing as he comes to power in 2011 and 2012. Any other thoughts, Joel?

Joel Wuthnow: You’re right; it was really prolific, with schemes inside the general political department, which is like an HR system. Becoming a general had a renminbi 人民币 amount attached to it.

So when Xi comes to power in 2012, everybody who’s in the PLA is complicit in this system.

Xi’s dilemma was that he needed to fix the system, but couldn’t just get rid of everybody. So the top people on his list were those who were not only corrupt, but who were also associated with his political rivals. He focused first on Jiang Zemin’s people.

Jordan Schneider: So the hope was that you could scare people straight, while at the same time hopefully changing the institutional incentive such that everyone who may have had a dirty past ends up seeing the light, focusing on military national rejuvenation as opposed to making sure that their grandkids can have a beach house in Malibu, or what have you.

Joel Wuthnow: Exactly. But this isn’t to overstate or overplay the problem or imply that these guys are just sitting around doing corrupt schemes. Some of them are probably competent officers.

Reforming the PLA?

Jordan Schneider: So Xi starts off with a bang, throws a lot of folks out, including a lot of very senior folks, and then tries to build in some institutional reform so that this doesn’t happen again. At the same time he has a very ambitious vision for what he wants the PLA to achieve. So Joel, walk us through those two things: the reforms and his hopes for the PLA.

Joel Wuthnow: The reforms have many different pieces, some of which are about making the PLA a better warfighting organization, others of which are about making the PLA better managed. I’ll focus on the latter.

What Xi is trying to do is rearrange the system so that the people who are the supervisors — the internal control people — are a little bit disentangled from each other. Previously the General Political Department had all the power and was doing all the supervision. Corruption was investigated at that level. Xi Jinping broke up the General Political Department into a bunch of different components — financial auditors, anti-corruption people, military-court people. They’re all different from each other now; they don’t work for each other and are not part of the same bureaucracy.

These days, there are a few different control chains that come up independently to Xi Jinping’s level. He’s trying to eliminate corruption from that angle.

Ultimately, though, it’s a limited solution to the problem — because these are all still PLA officers. They all came up through the same corrupt system.

They’re all former GPD people, and they don’t work for each other anymore — but there’s no outside supervision or external control. So it is a reform that may make the system a bit better, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem, which is that the PLA is in its own little box.

Jordan Schneider: I assume another dynamic is that Xi has a very ambitious dream for the military power that China is able to project,which has led to 10% annual increases in the budget and, all of a sudden, a whole lot more money sloshing around than there ever has been in the history of this organization.

So the temptation is probably greater than it ever was in the Jiang and Hu eras, just because there’s so much more cash floating around.

Joel Wuthnow: There’s a lot of money sloshing around — the latest rumor is about the two guys from the Rocket Force [PLARF] who disappeared. That’s part of the PLA that’s undergoing a big expansion right now. They’re building silo fields; they’re building new ICBMs; they’re doing all sorts of construction there. The dominant rumor is that the entire leadership in the Rocket Force was in on some kind of scheme that’s not yet known, but it’s likely that there was so much money going into their strategic arsenal that the temptation was too great and the supervision was too limited and something got out of control, which led to Xi’s crackdown. But the details are totally opaque right now, and there are so many different rumors. It does seem to be about money.

Jordan Schneider: Can we get a two-second sidebar on what the Rocket Force is? It’s not something that most countries currently have.

Joel Wuthnow: It’s a little bit of a misnomer because they’re called the Rocket Force, but really this is the ICBMs, the land-based ballistic missiles. The Rocket Force runs most of the PLA’s nuclear arsenal for the PLA.

In addition to nuclear, they also manage the long-range conventional missile forces. You may have heard of the anti-ship ballistic missile or the DF26, the Guam killer. This is all part of the Rocket Force’s arsenal. It’s not so much rockets as it is ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.

Jordan Schneider: This is the really interesting internal contradiction here: on the one hand, something is wrong enough for Xi to want to fire these folks; but at least to outside observers, the Rocket Force has had some real technological successes. Can you talk a little bit about hypersonics and the broader development capabilities that the Rocket Force has presumably overseen?

Joel Wuthnow: The big thing with hypersonics is that it’s not like a ballistic missile. It’s a different trajectory. It’s not the speed — it’s that they’re very hard to track and intercept.

The reason why China is investing so much money in this is because it sees this technology as critical to countering US intervention in a regional conflict. China understands that we are reliant on large bases in the western Pacific, and they’re also aware that we’re building ballistic missile defenses.

It’s technologies like hypersonics that China thinks are an ace card, a game changer in terms of deterring, disrupting, and defeating us. Of course it’s also the case that the Chinese are just very, very good — historically and today — at missile forces and artillery and rocketry. 

It’s operationally very significant and they’re good at it; hence, there’s a whole lot of money going into hypersonics.

Jordan Schneider: To that point, we’ve seen very impressive tests, which is at least a data point that the Rocket Force isn’t wasting and stealing everything that’s going through their coffers.

Joel Wuthnow: Right, it’s not that this money is going for naught. The question for Xi Jinping is: if they haven’t been honest about the spending, are they hiding something? So this gets to trust. Showing off in parades and a successful test here and there is one thing, but if the balloon ever goes up, will this huge arsenal be reliable? It’s not just the missiles that have to work — it’s the satellites and the people that are sitting at the controls.

Jordan Schneider: How much less likely are you to start a war involving very tricky joint operations if you don’t have a ton of confidence in your generals?

Joel Wuthnow: My view is that you probably don’t want to go down that path. Xi seems to have confidence in what they’re doing right now in terms of coercion: sending planes slightly across the midline, sending a bunch of planes up into the ADIZ and so on. The PLA is able to do that, but when talking about the requirements of a war, so much more is on the line for him and the Party.

If Xi has questions about whether things are going to work and his people are competent, then the incentive to go down the warpath starts to decline very quickly. I think this internal dynamic is something we don’t pay enough attention to on our side.

What’s This Mean for the PLA’s Future?

Jordan Schneider: You wrote recently that there’s tremendous pressure on the PLA to demonstrate progress and prove that it deserves the government’s largesse. We’re at a moment where China’s macroeconomic health over the next few years is very unclear. Do you think there’s any potential that Xi becomes so frustrated and fed up with his current PLA that he decides to starve the beast a little bit, given competing priorities and the clear lack of trust that exists between him and his military?

Joel Wuthnow: I don’t expect that he’s going to cut the PLA’s budget. Xi talks about security all the time. He seems to be rather paranoid.

For example, he needed to be talked down back in 2020 when he thought the US was going to attack him. In October 2020, the PLA leadership seemed to genuinely fear that the US was going to attack them as part of a so-called “October Surprise,” and they needed to be reassured. This was the big story with General Mark Milleyhaving to reassure his PLA counterpart.

This incident speaks to the larger issue of paranoia: Xi thinks the US is out to get him, that we’re doing color revolutions — which doesn’t match with trying to starve the beast.

The PLA is also not an insignificant political actor. I think they need to have some level of autonomy and attention from the top. Xi’s going to keep giving them funds, and he’s going to hope that they’re using them in the right way, but I think he does feel the need to continue to make examples out of people and show that he’s serious about these problems.

Nicholas Welch: When Xi came to power, he fired a whole bunch of people. And then during the recent Party Congress in October 2022, he stacked the Central Committee with loyalists. But now he’s firing people again. Do you think that this move makes him more or less likely to be influenced by a so-called echo chamber and to make rational decisions?

Joel Wuthnow: If you’re China, how do you get into a war? If you look at a pure cost-benefit analysis, I think the costs are very high and the benefits are not necessarily huge. But how else can you get into a war?

One possible way would be an echo chamber. Say the PLA is making a case to you as the boss: we’re ready. So Xi Jinping gave the PLA a 2027 deadline; they need to be ready to go to war with Taiwan by 2027. When that day comes, he’ll be asking the PLA, “What’s your update? I gave you time, I gave you money, I gave you a whole lot of inspirational talk — have you done it at this point?” And who’s going to come to him and say, “No, sorry, boss, we need another five years”?

So this is a concern — that the PLA lines up and says, “We’re ready, we think America is in decline, they’re a paper tiger, and Taiwan is having a lot of their own problems.”

If Xi Jinping comes to trust that and makes a decision based on false optimism — a bit like Putin being misled by his generals and invading Ukraine — it’s something worth worrying about.

That’s a different way of plunging into a war than just saying, “I’ve counted my missiles and counted their air defenses, and mine are superior” — that’s a clinical cost-benefit. This is more based on what you believe the outcome will be, regardless of how you’re actually going to perform. That echo chamber is worth worrying about.

Jordan Schneider: Doesn’t that echo chamber scenario seem pretty unlikely right now, as Xi is firing top leadership?

Joel Wuthnow: That’s basically right. If you had asked me the question a year ago, right after the Party Congress when the entire narrative was, “Xi has installed yes-men who aren’t going to give him candid advice and are going to tell him what they think he wants them to” — I would have given you a firmer answer on the overconfidence bit.

Now, given the shock of people disappearing and what that means in terms of his confidence, I’d say the chances are less than they were a year ago, less than they were two months ago — but not zero. That’s the reason to keep worrying. Five years from now, when Xi is seventy-five and he’s surrounded by people who may be giving him simple answers, we don’t know if there’s a 1 or 2 percent chance that he’ll believe them. To me, that’s still worth worrying about. What we’re really talking about is a 1 or 2 percent chance of calamity, so that’s still a pretty huge expected problem.

China Talk

The Russian Coup and its aftermath - Kamil Galeev, interviewed by Jordan Schneider (China Talk)

Um China Talk dedicado inteiramente à tentativa de golpe na Rússia. Muito interessante as comparações com fatos históricos do passado, mas eles nunca se aplicam inteiramente à situação presente. Putin vai se manter até que a situação material na Rússia se deteriore significativamente. Com o apoio da China de Xi Jinping, isso pode demorar.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Yevgeny Prigozhin (center) enjoying a weekend chat | Reuters

The Russian Game

Jordan Schneider: Did Putin survive a coup this past weekend?

Kamil Galeev: More like an unsuccessful coup attempt. But even if were unsuccessful, it is still consequential. What many foreign observers may not know is that the Russian army has not really been a factor in “big politics” for most of the time.

An interesting feature of the Russian regime, including the Soviet period, is the exclusion of the army from big politics.

There are some exceptions, of course, especially during the transfer of power. The aftermath of the death of Stalin is one example.

But for the most part, the army has not been a factor in big politics. The influence of the military never converted into factional strife. What we have seen in the past few days is probably the most significant attempt to do so in the last seventy years.

Jordan Schneider: What were Prigozhin’s reasons for doing this?

Kamil Galeev: It looks very shady. Things like this usually look shady. Attempted or successful coups often have an element of 4D chess among the political leadership. Different forces try playing their own games.

Some observers in Russia, Eastern Europe, or Ukraine might write off what happened as staged events. But even if it were hypothetically staged, the consequences are real.

Consider the Kornilov putsch in 1917. It’s highly probable — some would say it’s almost certain — that the events in August or September 1917 showed signs of 4D chess by the provisional government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky. He at least somehow participated in it. In a sense, that coup attempt was orchestrated by the supreme leadership.

But even if it were orchestrated or staged, the consequences of the Kornilov putsch were still real. What we are going to see now will be very similar.

Jordan Schneider: So it doesn’t matter who orchestrated this — the end result is that Putin is weakened?

Kamil Galeev: Absolutely. Now, I could speculate that Prigozhin’s coup was a negotiation — not an internal negotiation but an external one with the West and especially the US. Putin might be saying, “If you continue pressuring me, some group of crazy gangsters and Nazis could take power and seize parts of our nuclear arsenal. Catastrophe will follow. Stop pressuring me.” That is pure speculation, but it is possible.

Another explanation might be that it was an attempt to scare the Russians themselves. In this sense, Putin might be saying, “If I fall down, you all go with me. Some horrible, absolutely unhinged rascals are going to take power. That will bring terrible consequences for everyone.” That is a nice explanation.

We could develop more speculations like this. They are absolutely possible. Some of them have an element of truth in them. It is plausible that some factions in power participated in orchestrating and staging what we saw.

But even if the coup were orchestrated or staged, the consequences are still real. We should keep in mind that complex, sophisticated 4D chess often does not work — or it works until it goes wrong.

My favorite story is the 1801 assassination of the Emperor of Russia Paul I. He invited the general governor of St. Petersburg, Count Pahlen, and told him, “You see, they are preparing a coup attempt against me.” Pahlen said, “Yes, and I am participating in the coup so that I may collect information. Everything is under control.” “Great,” said the Emperor. He calmed down. He decided it was okay. Very soon he was killed.

Everything can go wrong for many reasons on the tactical level. On strategic level, it looks even more complicated.

A coup legitimizes the use of direct military force in the internal competition of factions — a dynamic they had previously tried to avoid.

The previous attempt to consolidate a base for a potential military coup was in Yeltsin’s era with General Lev Rokhlin. But that never got past the preparatory stage. What we have seen now is that you can start a coup and achieve significant results. That normalizes the use of the military for advancing the interests of your faction.

“The murder of Tsar Paul I of Russia,” March 1801. A print from “La France et les Français à Travers les Siècles,” Volume IV | Wikimedia Commons

Barons and Courtiers

Jordan Schneider: When we last spoke, we discussed a world where Russia’s elites amass their own private armies to secure their spots in Russia’s future. It sounded far-fetched at the time, but the events of this past weekend suggest it is plausible. Now everyone in Russia knows mutinous action is possible. How does that change things?

Kamil Galeev: Who attempted this coup? It is not some independent baron or someone who rose without Putin. It’s basically a gangster who took power only because he was a member of the St. Petersburg gang, commissioned by Putin to do dirty jobs for him abroad in Ukraine. That’s really the only source of his power.

It’s very revealing because it’s not some regional interest group or provincial actors who made this move against the supreme power. It’s the supreme power’s own agents.

Niccolò Machiavelli made a distinction between two types of regimes. There are regimes that resemble France and those that resemble the Ottoman Empire.

The former are relatively easy to overthrow but difficult to control.France was a baronial regime with many dispersed barons. Aggressors could make alliances with these barons to overthrow the central power. But once you overthrew the central power, you couldn’t really rule the country because there were still lots of barons.

The Ottoman Empire was a very different type of regime. It didn’t have strong baronial factions like France did. It was more difficult to defeat the central power because aggressors could not ally with any independent powers. But once an aggressor took control, it was easy to hold.There were no independent powers to conspire against the aggressor.

People from baronial regimes are naturally shaped by them. They generally fail to comprehend other types of regimes, like one centered around a royal court.

America is a baronial regime. Russia, on the other hand, is ruled by courtiers. Many things happening in Russia are just unintelligible to Americans. The same goes for Russians looking at American politics.

For Russians, it is absolutely incomprehensible that the federal government in DC could have a major investment plan thwarted by a Senator from West Virginia. It’s unimaginable. Most Russian people — including people with resources, people with power — would not really believe that happened. There should have been some 4D chess within the federal government.

Russia does not have strong baronial factions. They exist but they are much weaker.

Russia is ruled by courtiers. When there is upheaval — when there is betrayal — it is not the barons who betray. They are weak. It is the courtiers. The Kremlin most fears not regional separatists, governors, or provincial interest groups. The Kremlin fears its own federal agents. No one else has the resources.

Photograph by Mikhail Svetlov | Getty

Après Putin, Le Déluge?

Jordan Schneider: How does the coup change the calculus for the Prigozhin-in-waiting — the inner-circle courtiers who have the independent means to do crazy things?

Kamil Galeev: We can only read the clues. We have seen that a military uprising is basically possible.

Most of the military and paramilitary structures, when faced with a coup, did nothing. It looks as though most of the military and paramilitary groups in the region where the attempted coup took place did not join Prigozhin. But they did not stand against Wagner either. They acted more like part of the landscape.

There was also quite a lot of public enthusiasm. On the streets of Rostov-on-Don, there was much cheering when the Wagner guys came, and there was a lot of booing when the police came in after.

The southern regions — cities like Belgorod, Rostov-on-Don, and Krasnodar — are really socially conservative and relatively well-off. They are very much pro-war — much more than the average Russian. They have traditionally been framed as the pro-Putin regions of Russia. 

This shows that a simple “pro-Putin” versus “anti-Putin” dichotomy is just wrong when it comes to measuring overall Russian political attitudes. When another force presents itself as more brutish, patriotic, and militant, the people will cheer. They prefer some warlord like Prigozhin rather than Putin.

The people of southern Russia did not do anything to help or obstruct Prigozhin’s revolt either. They are absolutely willing to accept the intrusion of the military and paramilitary into political affairs. They’re basically waiting for it.

There’s a lot of discourse when people analyze electoral maps in Russia: “This region has traditionally voted for Putin, or that region has voted against him” — it’s not completely senseless or meaningless.

These analysts wrongly assume Russia has elections. It does not. It has never had elections, at least on a presidential level. 

Elections have options. There is still some intrigue. There is still some anticipation, because America — the leading global power — has changed after many elections. The supreme executive power in Russia never changes as a result of elections. But elections still take place formally.

These are not elections. They are acclamations, as one might do for a Byzantine emperor. A ruler may succeed to power, but he still must receive his acclamation.

Yeltsin got his acclamations. Putin gets his all the time. But the crowd that would readily acclaim Putin would acclaim another guy, too.

Then there is also Putin’s standing within the circle of Russia’s ruling elite. He can say, explicitly or implicitly, that people hate the elites in general but they love him. He could say he is the only legitimate ruler and that the others enjoy their positions because of him. That would be a strong argument. 

But that now looks like a much weaker argument than it did a few months ago.

Jordan Schneider: How has the attempted coup changed Putin’s options?

Kamil Galeev: His options are probably somewhat weaker now that other members of the ruling circle see that the willingness to acclaim Putin is not necessarily all about Putin.

People in general — especially the population in the regions deemed pro-Putin — are ready to cheer and acclaim pretty much everyone. It’s not some unique property of Putin which makes him irreplaceable for the existing elite.

It may not be a drastic change, but the experiment has been conducted. 

Putin will probably be forced to repress those who were prone to supporting Wagner. The lords of the military and paramilitary, even if they did not outright support the mutiny, did not raise a finger either. That includes paratroopers, warrior cops, and the infantry.

The regime does not see all these fellows as absolutely loyal when facing an internal enemy. There will probably be some purges, though not necessarily bloody. We’re already seeing them on some of the more gruesome videos showing allegedly pro-Wagner troops getting their throats cut.

Marx wrote in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Prigozhin’s coup basically looks more like the Kornilov putsch. There is a mutiny, it is suppressed, but the repressions and purges the regime conducts then weaken the regime, exposing it to further mutinies.

Jordan Schneider: What does all this mean for the war in Ukraine?

Kamil Galeev: Some Ukrainians, including those close to the regime in Kyiv, have been excessively optimistic. Many hoped the Russian regime would fall immediately and the war would stop. That did not happen, and it will not happen for a while.

But now that the taboo against military force in internal political games has been broken. The regime is weaker.

My personal prediction is we will see a second attempt — not necessarily by the same force, but quite probably by another force — within three to six months.

A Coup by Any Other Name

Enver Pasha forcing Kâmil Pasha to Resign | Wikimedia Commons

Jordan Schneider: How else might the lessons of the October Revolutionapply to today?

Kamil Galeev: Many people, including Putin himself, are drawing parallels to 1917. He compared Prigozhin’s coup attempt to 1917 when he said the mutiny was a “stab in the back.”

These parallels have been already normalized. Once the Bolsheviks took power and consolidated the regime, they made it their top priority to prevent any potential threats from the military. The Soviet Army was optimized for that purpose — so that it would not challenge the Communist Party’s rule.

Control of the Soviet Army was heavily centralized. Relatively few decisions are delegated. This hurt the army’s fighting efficiency, but also made it less of a political challenge.

It was successful. For many decades, the Communist Party ruled. There were no successful coup attempts. All were suppressed in their earliest stages, usually just at the point of talking.

Coups happen in relatively centralized regimes. If a regime is sufficiently decentralized, you don’t get a coup — you get a civil war. That’s quite different. Coups are usually executed by military and paramilitary forces. People are the source of legitimization.

I love how Enver Pasha did it: during the Raid on the Sublime Porte in 1913, he came to the Grand Vizier Kâmil Pasha, the prime minister of the Ottoman Empire, and demanded he write a letter of resignation. So he started writing, “At the suggestion of the military.” Enver interrupted him, adding, “…and the people.”

The “people” are a source of legitimacy — but they are usually passive. They cheer for one force. They can also cheer for another.

Wish Upon a Falling Czar

Kamil Galeev: We’re probably seeing the end of the regime that naturally evolved from 1917.

That regime was revolutionary. It came by an abrupt, radical break with the past. The previous order was overthrown. The previous elites were persecuted and physically slaughtered. The Soviet regime was very different from what had existed previously and it was headed by different elites.

After that you just had evolution, not revolution. Lenin’s regime quite organically evolved into Stalin’s, and Stalin’s into Khrushchev’s, and so forth. Putin himself may have a personally negative opinion of Lenin and his regime — but Putin’s regime is ultimately the result of the gradual evolution of Lenin’s regime.

Quite probably after Putin, we’ll see a replacement, not an evolution, of his regime — something far exceeding what we saw in the 1990s. It wouldn’t be so much the fall of Putin as the replacement of elites in Russia on a gigantic scale.

Jordan Schneider: Why do you believe that whatever happens next will be a much more radical transformation of the regime and not just a changing of the guard?

Kamil Galeev: Regimes fall. We do not usually foresee these falls before they happen. The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak wrote a book called Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. That’s what usually happens. It’s usually impossible to predict it exactly, but it will be easily explained retrospectively, which everyone will be doing once it happens.

When there is an interconnected group of families ruling for decades with relatively low social mobility, that makes a regime fragile. The low level of being selected out of the regime helps secure the positions of individual families or interest groups, but it makes the system as a whole much more brittle.

The Russian ruling regime would be more robust were it to enthusiastically remove its own members. For example, there are generals in Russia — generals of the army, police, FSB, and many other services. They used to have a maximum age for retirement, somewhere around sixty years of age. Then Putin raised it to sixty-five or thereabouts — then seventy, then eighty, and then he just abolished it all.

Putin is naturally a conservative person. He doesn’t want to experiment much. He doesn’t want to change his people. If he were retiring staff one by one and getting new people, the ruling circle would be more mixed-age.

But if you just refuse to do anything, you will have the same group of people in power until they die. Then they’ll be dying one by one very quickly. That is similar to what happened at the end of the USSR.

Jordan Schneider: How worried should I be for the future of humanity in that case?

Kamil Galeev: Many Russians believe the West and especially America conspired against Russia and are just plotting to devolve the country into microstates. These Russians never comprehend how scared most Americans — including most political analysts — are about that scenario.

I understand your concern. While I cannot cure you, it’s a completely sound perspective. Maybe it makes sense to prepare in case that happens.

Jordan Schneider: Any final thoughts on Russia’s future? What have we neglected?

Kamil Galeev: Look at how the US intelligence and military command evolves over time. They put much less focus on military production than they used to during the Cold War. These concerns probably peaked in the 1970s, and it’s been downhill since then.

As a result, the nuclear status of Russia is discussed as a given — grass is green, the sky is blue, the sun is yellow, and Russia is a nuclear power. But in most cases, Russia’s nuclear power status is not problematized at all.

Russia went through the post-Soviet collapse. It lost most of its machinery. It lost most of its supply chains for military production. How can it still maintain its weapons of mass destruction as well as its delivery systems? How can it even produce new weapons and delivery systems? The short answer is that Russia outsourced its production of industrial equipment. The US and its allies provided this. There are no other alternatives in the world.

Both the maintenance of the existing part of the weapons of mass destruction and of delivery systems and their placement now fully depend on the importation of industrial equipment. In this case, it’s mostly machine tools, components, and maintenance supplied by US allies. Almost no one is discussing this. It gets almost zero attention nowadays, and I don’t fully comprehend why.

Next up, a 4000-word conversation where Kamil and I discuss:

• Prospects of nuclear war;

• His advice for Biden, European leaders, and Putin’s courtiers;

• Predictions on state stability;

• The trajectory of Moscow's grip on the regions...

Mais reflexões sobre a nova Guerra Fria, desta vez China vs EUA - Stephen Kotkin (Hoover Institutuon, China Talk)

 Um dos debates mais importantes da atualidade.

Kotkin on China: Cold War 2.0, Reagan, and Stalin vs. Mao

“We want a world in which the rule of law, open society, an open, dynamic market economy, rules, reciprocity — where those are the values, those are the terms of the relationship.”

NICHOLAS WELCH AND JORDAN SCHNEIDER MAY 4 ∙ PREVIEW

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ChinaTalk coverage continues with another stream of insights from the legendary Stephen Kotkin! Today’s newsletter digs into:

• The case for optimism about US-China relations, despite — or because of — the recent ratcheting up of tensions;

• Why Kotkin believes a US-China Cold War is both good and necessary;

• How the US can get on the diplomatic “front foot”;

• Making sense of Reagan’s foreign policy — how he was both a “movement conservative” and a “dealmaking conservative.”

Midjourney: “naive art: Chinese dynasty fairytale land, removed from Cold War foreign-policy realities”

If Kotkin Ran America’s China Foreign Policy

Jordan Schneider: [On March 6], Xi said,

Western countries — led by the US — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.

Any thoughts on that as the new rhetorical space that Xi is now comfortable occupying in public?

Stephen Kotkin: It’s hurting now, isn’t it? He’s feeling it now. The changeover that we got from Secretary of State [Mike] Pompeo, and National Security Advisor [HR] McMaster and his deputy Matt Pottinger, and the Trump administration (which sometimes played out clumsily because “Trump” and “policy” are hard to put in the same sentence, and Trump was the president, but his staff was remarkable, and his cabinet officers in some cases were remarkable) — we got a turnaround in China policy.

We went from a fairytale — from an imagined China, from a China that didn’t exist in reality and an engagement policy based on a fairytale — to a better understanding of what China was doing, and where it was going in the game it was playing, and the game that we were in. That’s actually the basis for a better engagement policy, ultimately — for a better diplomacy, for a stabilized relationship.

Trying to engage in diplomacy and stabilize a relationship based upon illusions and a misunderstanding of the nature of the Chinese system and the direction it was going is not a sustainable project.

So the ratcheting up of tensions that we’re in right now is actually more promising for getting to a stabilization of the relationship — more promising because it’s more realistic, it’s more empirical, it’s more accurate; it’s a better understanding of how each side is operating, and what the strengths and weaknesses are of each side.

So I’m actually quite optimistic about the state of play right now — provided we open up the diplomatic stuff, because being strong, and being deterrent, and showing your teeth, and putting some export technology control is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end — and that end has to be a more stable relationship.

And the Biden administration is complaining — and no doubt that this is accurate — that the Chinese are refusing to engage, they’re refusing to meet, that they don’t want to engage in diplomacy again. So I would be appearing in every single capital of the world — I would fly into all the ASEAN capitals, I would fly into all our allied capitals, and I would fly into all the Global South capitals — and I would announce, “We are ready to engage with the Chinese in diplomacy, and here are the fifteen issues that we’d like to talk about, and the Chinese won’t meet with us. So let’s meet right now — any place you want.”

So if it’s empirically true that the Chinese are not responding to the overtures of the Biden administration to engage in diplomacy again because they see the US as overly aggressive, I would say, “Let’s get on the front foot there. Let’s put the Chinese on the back foot.”

The Chinese like to say that the US is engaged in the suppression of China’s rise: that’s all we do — we’re committed 100% to holding China down. And then out of the next breath, they like to say, “Oh, nobody can hold us back. Nobody can hold China back.” And so what’s our response to that? Our response is to deny we’re trying to hold them down, that we’re trying to prevent China’s rise.

And nobody believes that response. The Chinese don’t believe it. The Global South doesn’t believe it. Some of our allies even don’t believe it — and I’m not sure how many people on our side believe it. So that’s actually not the correct response, even if the Biden people think it’s true to their word.

The correct response is, “You say that we’re trying to hold you down, and then in the next breath, you say that nobody can hold you down. So what are you afraid of? We can’t hold you down. You just said that. Why are you all bent out of shape about us trying to hold you down when you are declaring across the world that nobody can hold you down?”

And so that’s how you get on the front foot as opposed to the back foot. That’s how you win that kind of debate. That’s how you engage in the diplomatic give-and-take and say, not just to the Chinese, but to all of the others who are listening and watching how this crucial relationship for world order and stability is being managed.

And now we have Xi saying that “we’re having problems because they’re trying to hold us down.” And so my view on that is we are doing something right — because Xi’s now trying to use that as an excuse for his own ineptitude and his own failures. I’m not of the opinion (many China watchers are) that Xi Jinping is an American agent — that is to say, he is eroding Chinese power in every domain, vigorously and really across the board: he’s ruining China’s reputation; he’s undermining China’s strategic position.

The Europeans (Angela Merkel) attempted to appease China in the first instance by rushing through a trade agreement with China minutes before Joe Biden was going to be inaugurated. It was a distancing of Europe from the US on China policy. And what happened? Xi Jinping did not permit the Europeans to appease him at the expense of the Americans. He undermined the Europeans’ attempt to undercut the Biden administration before it was even in power.

And I look at that, and I say, Sure, I understand why you think [Xi] is an American agent, that he’s doing our work for us — but we can’t talk like that. We have to talk in terms of, “China is a great civilization. China has remarkable achievements. You don’t need me to explain the greatness of China. You don’t need a visit to a museum to see the greatness of China. It’s everywhere in our common civilization, so many of the innovations and the achievements — [China] is just a spectacular story, and it will continue to be so going forward.”

That’s how we talk. That’s how we talk about China. We love China. We’re impressed by China. We think China is one of the greatest civilizations that has ever existed. We want to share the planet with China.

The issue is: under what terms are we going to share the planet?

Is it going to be what happened to Lotte World inside China and the boycotts of South Korean businesses? Is it going to be the terms that they tried to impose on our friend Australia, those fourteen demands and those boycotts? Is it what they did to Hong Kong — are those the terms, with that National Security Law? Is it what’s happening in Xinjiang? Is it what’s happening in Tibet? What are the terms of sharing the planet?

And my answer to that is: we need better terms than what the Chinese have on offer — but we need to negotiate those terms. And the way you negotiate those terms: you get on the front foot; you’re not anti-China — you’re pro-China; you deconflate Xi Jinping and China; you deconflate the regime and the people, the nation and the civilization and the history — and you say, “We’re going to deal with your regime because you are the legal government of China right now. But we’re going to deal with it not on the terms that you’re trying to set. We’re going to deal with it on our terms. And if you don’t want to talk, we’re going to tell everybody that you don’t want to talk."

What are we doing shutting down Confucius Institutes — like we’re afraid of them, or like we’re the Communist regime? We opened a Confucius Institute at Stanford University — and we love-bomb Chinese culture, and ours is pluralistic, and it doesn’t eliminate certain ways of thinking, certain ideas, certain topics. In fact, Communism can be one of the topics. We can have Communist officials deliver lectures about Communism at our own Confucius Institute because we practice pluralism and we’re not afraid. And we love Chinese culture, and we love everything about their great achievements, and we do have to share the world with them.

But, we want a world in which the rule of law, open society, a dynamic market economy, rules, reciprocity — where those are the values, those are the terms of the relationship. And if we can’t get it all with China, we have to get as much of that as possible — and we have to keep both the pressure on and the diplomacy.

There’s a new biography of George Shultz, my former colleague here at the Hoover Institution. We were yesterday in his seminar room, the Annenberg Room, where he presided for decades over conversations, including China policy. Let’s remember that Shultz was a diplomat, that Shultz dedicated his whole life to dealmaking — but the issue was always the terms of those deals. That’s in our DNA; that’s something we can do.

And so this is not hawkishness for hawkishness’s sake. This is not “run China right off the globe.” We can’t do that, we shouldn’t do that, and trying to do that would ruin us. We’re in this together. But what are the terms of that deal?

And so I like the fact that Xi Jinping is now crying uncle and trying to use American pressure as an excuse to cover up his own mistakes and failures and some of the weaknesses of [his] system. It would be foolish to count the Chinese out. It would be foolish to count Xi Jinping out. It would be foolish to think that he’s an American agent, and he’s going to go on continuing to mess up. There’s only so far a superpower like the United States can go when someone else is doing the work for them. We have to do some of that work ourselves.

Midjourney: “sketch illustration of a ‘movement conservative’ and a ‘dealmaker conservative’ — patriotic overtones”