Not sure I believe this but this news from last week may corroborate: Ex-CNNC general manager faces disciplinary probe China Daily
Gu Jun, former deputy secretary of the Party Leadership Group and general manager of China National Nuclear Corporation, is suspected of serious violations of Party discipline and national laws and is currently under disciplinary review and supervisory investigation, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission announced on Monday.
He took office as general manager of China Nuclear Engineering and Construction Corporation in April 2015, and in 2018, he transferred to the post of general manager of CNNC, a post he held until his retirement in 2024.
From wikipedia:
CNNC oversees all aspects of China's civilian and military nuclear programs.
Xi spent 10 years fighting corruption only to realize that it came from the people closest to him lol.
Zhang Youxia is considered a close ally to Xi because their fathers were close comrades and served together during the war. During the 20th CPC Congress in 2022, Zhang who was supposed to retire was given an extended appointment at the CMC.
The entire bureaucracy is deeply corrupted and with the recent news, likely the entire military chain-of-command as well. No amount of purge is going settle that, as is evident after 10 years of anti-corruption campaign. The system needs to be completely reformed.
Anyone with some familiarity of Chinese culture will known that corrupt bureaucracy is a latent feature that has run for thousands of years. When you’re inheriting thousands-years old civilization, you also inherit the deeply entrenched cronyism (euphemistically called guanxi, or “relationship”) that can be traced back to the rise of Imperial Court Examination during the 5th-8th century, the Northern Wei-Sui-Tang dynasties. The careers of court officials are tied to the examiners who promoted them from the examination in the first place, and become part of the cliques of the political factions their superiors are tied to. This is still how it works today in China, whether it is in academia, in the private sector or in the government bureaucracy. Coming from the right “lineage” (e.g. who did you serve under, who promoted you etc.) is very important when it comes to career promotion.
Mao already realized the gravity of the situation after purging the landlords in 1953, that the reactionary elements never went away but instead shapeshifted within the party. This was why he considered a Cultural Revolution necessary and an urgency, because according to Mao, a new socialist society could only emerge if it makes a complete and decisive break with its past, and rid of all the historical burdens.
Of course, Mao was fighting thousands-years old institution and it was too radical a move, and we all know how that turned out. The liberals won, and here we are.
This was the same problem that Stalin faced as well. After the great purge, the liberals still came back under Khrushchev as soon as he died.
Still, none of what you’re saying addresses my point, which is that material analysis must necessarily come from understanding the historical progress.
I’ll give you one example: I have heard so many “Western leftists” trying to argue why China should/should not have billionaires and despite all the rhetoric and the flowery language, they never approach it from the historical trajectory itself. They’ll tell you how the CPC controls the billionaires (lol, in that case, why do you need billionaires in the first place), but not the entire economic history since post-Mao reform, the decentralization of the economy, the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, the privatization wave of the mid-1990s, the end of welfare housing and the liberalization of real estate market under Zhu Rongji in 1998, the joining of WTO in 2001 etc.
Without understanding the historical progress, you cannot understand why we come to where we are today. The system and the policy framework evolve out of such historical events. No amount of rhetoric or flowery language can explain that.
As I have explained before, the Imperial Court Examination evolved out of the emperors attempting to curb the influence of the feudal haozu (豪族) since Emperor Han Wudi’s Northern Expedition, which later evolved into the feudal lords (menfa, 门阀) by the Northern Wei dynasty. Such bureaucratic system for class mobility (a core aspect of East Asian culture) is still very much alive in China today, albeit taking different forms.
As Marx said, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. To understand where we are today, we need to go way back in time and approach history from the perspective of class analysis. How the mechanism for class mobility arose in China, and how that evolved into the deep bureaucracy of the modern Chinese state today.
And if one cannot understand that, one cannot understand why Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution. Remember that Mao himself claimed to have read Zizhi Tongjian for at least 17 times (!!), I’m sure he knows very well how the deep bureaucracy of the Chinese society works.
(To be clear, I am not on board the CR stuff like the ultra-left, but I am starting to grasp the thinking behind it after re-reading a lot of Mao Selected Works lately lol).
There is no need to downplay the purging of all the highest ranking generals in the CMC. We know these are serious problems. If you think this is just removing a few leaders at the very top and that the core integrity of the chain-of-command is somehow going to remain unaffected, then I don’t know what else to say. This isn’t some mid ranking officials, these are the people commanding vast influence over the military corp.
EDIT: Just want to add that I don’t expect everyone here to exercise the same academic rigor as I do (which isn’t much, to be honest, since I’m not trying to publish in an academic journal), as this is a fringe shitposting forum, so having as much fun as possible while learning from real world events should be the priority.
But understand that flowery language, while nice for propaganda purpose, is both non-materialist (not rooted in class-based analysis) and ahistorical (does not confront historical evidence).
Anyone can say “China is working towards achieving socialism”, but the statement in itself is meaningless from a dialectic materialist standpoint.
If it succeeds, I can say “see, I told you so”, and if it doesn’t, I can also say “look, I never said when it will happen, there are many twists and turns before we get there”. It doesn’t help you abstract the core contradictions from a historical materialist perspective, does not provide any explanatory power for the current events, nor does it serve anything useful for material analysis as it doesn’t involve concrete and specific examples of historical evidence.
So, while I don’t pretend that everything I say is correct, I try to approach my analysis with these criteria in mind.