China's Military Scandal: Why a Taiwan Invasion Might Have Just Become Impossible

It was the report that no national leader wants to see leaked to the global press — a handful of small but shocking revelations that cast doubt onto a far more massive institution. On January 6, 2024, Bloomberg revealed that according to multiple intelligence sources, widespread corruption within the Chinese Armed Forces has compromised China’s military so badly that it is an open question whether China could even fight a war if it chose to. The news broke just weeks after a major purge closed out 2023 at the head of the Chinese Communist Party, and amidst a rapidly evolving geopolitical situation in East Asia and beyond. What follows is an assessment of just how bad China’s military problems really are: what has gone wrong, what China can do about it, and how this single, small piece of news might have dashed China’s global ambitions for years, if not decades, to come.

The Purge: Xi Jinping’s October 2023 Shakeup at the Top

At the highest levels of China’s internal politics, the events of Tuesday, October 24, 2023 were both earth-shaking for the CCP and entirely unsurprising from the perspective of an outside observer. On that date, Chinese President Xi Jinping made it official: after a short tenure in his post, Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu was out of a job, along with State Councilor and former Foreign Minister Qin Gang. By October, the official announcement had been a long time coming.

Both men had disappeared from public view all the way back in the summer, with no explanation, and their absence had been on full display during subsequent televised gatherings of the CCP’s top decision-makers. Xi’s final announcement might have been predictable, but it still capped off an affair that had captured international speculation for months. Li Shangfu had gone from being a prominent general hand-picked for the Defense Minister post to being out in less than six months.

Councilor Qin had been pushed from his prior post as Foreign Minister and replaced all the way back in July. They were not the only ones, either. The two officials who had until then led the Chinese military’s Rocket Force had also been suddenly replaced, along with two other Rocket Force generals and a handful of other military leaders.

These expelled leaders were not bottom-of-the-barrel armchair generals. Like Li Shangfu, they had been hand-picked for their roles, seen as some of the very best and brightest rising stars that China had to offer. The two generals at the head of the Rocket Force had been instrumental in China’s recent manned space missions and its launches of satellites into space.

Another casualty of the purge, an admiral, had been a leader in China’s efforts to assert dominance in the South China Sea. Another was the president of the Army’s military court. Li Shangfu himself had been a trusted liaison with global partners and adversaries from Russia to India to the United States and was previously believed to be quite close to President Xi.

But now the whole group was gone, with Li Shangfu believed to be part of a rapidly broadening corruption investigation that may have played a role in some of the other disappearances as well.

The Bloomberg Revelations: Missiles Filled with Water and Silos That Cannot Open

In early January 2024, a measure of resolution was finally obtained. According to Bloomberg News, US intelligence assessed that Xi Jinping’s latest purge was indeed part of an effort to tamp down on corruption, but what it had found went far beyond individual cases of wrongdoing. To quote Bloomberg directly: “The corruption inside China’s Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case.”

Among the specific instances of graft that China allegedly uncovered were shocking failures by the Rocket Force. In one case, missiles were found to have their fuel compartments filled with water rather than the rocket fuel they were expected to be carrying. In another case, not just one, not just a handful, but entire fields of missile silos in China’s western provinces were found to be fitted with malfunctioning or improper lids, meaning that if a launch order ever came to activate those missiles, they would be unable to escape their silos at all.

These would be devastating problems for any modern military, but for a military with China’s ambitions to be a global superpower, they are cataclysmic. Xi has long made it his mission to root out corruption across the Chinese government, including in the military, where he led prior purges to oust corrupt senior generals ever since he began his tenure in 2012. He has pledged that the Chinese military will be fully modernized by 2035 and stand among the best as a “world-class military” by the middle of the 21st century.

That would mean, among other things, uncontested dominance in East Asia, the ability to rival or shout down Russia in Central Asia and the Middle East, and the ability to operate without military concern for the United States’ ability to intervene in what Xi sees as his own part of the world. But it does not matter whether China has more warships than the US, whether they have hundreds of nuclear warheads, or whether their expanding fleet of aircraft carriers could eventually rival the US — if after a decade or more of crackdowns, China’s feared missiles are still powered by tap water.

Historical Context: Years of Endemic Corruption and Burning Missile Fuel for Hot Pot

Amidst the Bloomberg revelations, other sources have suggested that similar acts of official graft within the military have been commonplace for years. According to an article published by Radio Free Asia, one former Lieutenant Colonel of the Chinese Navy, Yao Cheng, described instances in which Air Force personnel had taken chunks of solid missile fuel and burned the stuff in order to cook traditional Chinese hot-pot food. Said Yao Cheng to Radio Free Asia: “When I was in the military, we would drain fuel from aircraft fuel tanks for cooking, which burns green and has no smell at all.

When we would eat hotpot, we would take out the solid fuel in the missiles piece by piece, because there were insufficient supplies.” Notably, Yao Cheng himself fled to the United States in 2016, with his testimony thus indicating that acts like this have been commonplace for quite a while. The idea that China’s military could be corrupt is certainly not a new one.

For years, Western analysts have raised suspicions that the country’s military officers have little incentive not to exploit the system, where oversight has been limited and rules enforcement has been toothless at best when an officer believes their own higher-ups will protect them from repercussions. But the corruption referenced goes well beyond what most experts assumed China’s military deals with on a daily basis. There is a massive difference between officials choosing to skim off the top of their budgets and officials taking actions that fundamentally disrupt China’s ability to use its military capabilities in the first place.

One is an inconvenience; one is catastrophic.

The Fallout: Xi’s Hold on Power and the Rocket Force Crisis

Xi Jinping has a problem — but what happens now. On the one hand, the United States and other Western nations have kept a close eye on Xi’s standing within the CCP as his purges continue, and for the most part, the verdict seems to be that he will not personally suffer as a result. If anything, the purges have only cemented Xi’s hold on the government, indicating implicitly that both he and the rest of the CCP believe he has a firm enough command on the Party that these actions will not set off any retaliation against him.

The willingness of other Chinese officials to stand by and allow these corruption investigations to take place suggests widespread support of Xi’s focus on enhancing China’s military capabilities in the long run. On the other hand, these revelations are a critical blow to China’s military readiness overall. The examples shared by Bloomberg are unlikely to be the only instances of corruption across the entire Chinese military, or even the only ones that Xi and the CCP have now learned about.

Whatever other problems may have been uncovered, they will and should lead China to significantly lower its confidence in its own military readiness. In particular, confidence in the Rocket Force is most likely down the drain, in what constitutes a major personal defeat for Xi himself. The Rocket Force has been a cornerstone of Xi’s efforts to upgrade the Chinese military and has received substantial investment of both time and resources to ensure that it is on the cutting edge.

The Rocket Force is also critical for one other reason: it is this branch of the Chinese military that would almost certainly be pivotal in any Chinese attack on Taiwan. The Rocket Force manages the world’s largest land-based missile arsenal, including hypersonic missiles, glide vehicles, ICBMs, and extremely accurate cruise and ballistic missiles that would be expected to devastate Taiwan in advance of a naval invasion. Taiwan relies on its ability to leverage serious firepower in a quick, make-or-break, all-out defense against a potential Chinese attack.

If the Rocket Force turns out to be incapable of crippling that Taiwanese defensive capability before open combat begins, then the chances of a successful Taiwanese defense increase exponentially. The CCP is, by now, well aware of just how devastating this failure would be; they need only look at their neighbor Russia, where the extent of its large-scale military corruption was revealed only after the Russian military proved vastly less capable than expected in its initial invasion of Ukraine. With the Rocket Force thoroughly compromised, China would have little hope of avoiding that same fate — meaning that any decision to invade Taiwan would now result in a far bloodier and more protracted invasion than China would have previously expected.

Deep-Rooted Problems: Why Fixing the Corruption Will Take Years

Fixing this problem is not so simple as draining out the fuel compartments of the impacted missiles and refilling them. Instead, the problem China now faces is one of endemic, deep-rooted corruption that will take years to come back from. The widespread problem with China’s missile silos that would prevent its missiles from launching will take a while to fix no matter what.

Tack on the time it will take to manufacture and ship large, complicated replacement parts, even before installing them, and China is looking at a seriously long timeline before those silos become dependable. Most importantly, these are just the problems the West now knows about. How many other problem situations there might be is simply unknown, but Xi certainly knows.

He and his government are under no obligation to report their corruption investigations, and in fact, they usually do not. However, in the last few months, government probes within China have said they are investigating additional issues, from intelligence leaks to officials illegally helping companies secure government contracts. The first 2024 publication of the Chinese military’s official newspaper signaled that the year will be a “war on graft,” thus indicating that there is enough graft to declare war on it.

However deep this corruption really goes within the Chinese military, it will not be easy to fight. Status is everything within the CCP’s deeply intertwined military and political systems, and powerful officials who are still wrapped up in corrupt dealings will have every incentive to use that status to protect themselves and their underlings. Now that these officials know that more widespread investigations are coming, they will do anything in their power to stop it.

Regime change is likely far beyond their power to achieve, but obstruction, delays, and misdirection all risk prolonging this process longer and longer, or leaving other fundamental issues hidden entirely. More obstruction means that Xi Jinping’s clock keeps ticking, counting away hours, days, months, and eventually years in which both Xi and the rest of the world know that China is in no state to threaten Taiwan or anybody else.

Global Repercussions: A Seismic Shift in East Asian Geopolitics

These allegations are exactly the information that is most important to pay attention to — the small, forgettable, even silly-sounding claims that go on to produce a seismic shift in geopolitics, with implications not just in China but around the world. A wide range of factors in China — from an economic plateau to increasing diplomatic isolation to a looming crisis of demographics — are coming together to make a full-scale invasion of Taiwan less and less likely by the day. While that invasion is not too terribly likely anyhow, given the major and growing deterrent value of militarily aligned America, Japan, South Korea, and others, at some point in the future China will cross a threshold in which an invasion of Taiwan simply stops making any level of strategic sense.

Cross that reality with the most recent corruption reports, which indicate that China probably should not be confident in its ability to launch a military invasion for at least the next several years, and now a much bigger question has to be asked: Is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan now completely off the table? Certainly, it would appear that China now has every reason not to rush toward an invasion anytime soon. The CCP is believed to have spent the last nearly two years watching Russia’s invasion of Ukraine very closely, analyzing all the reasons why Russia’s offensive fell apart, and now it would take a certain level of delusion to avoid drawing parallels between Russia and China’s own stunning corruption issues.

This corruption in a national military is not unusual around the globe, but there is a massive difference between a military that exists mostly to help a third-world dictator in a show of force and one that intends to overwhelm a regional military powerhouse like Taiwan in a shock-and-awe lightning offensive. That latter option simply is not going to happen. With both Xi and the entire CCP known to be far more cautious about military action than Vladimir Putin’s Russia has ever been, it is very unlikely that China is going to try to launch an invasion before fixing its myriad issues.

But if that invasion cannot happen, then the CCP is immediately in a position where it must do some major rethinking of its long-term plans. There are a variety of elements of China’s global ambitions that, by current thinking, cannot happen unless preceded by a successful Taiwan invasion, up to and including the ability to assert dominance even in the South China Sea. China’s implicit threat of large-scale violence against its maritime neighbors becomes a whole lot less believable; even if some of China’s missiles are locked, loaded, and ready to go, the broader issues in the military are such that China cannot risk any escalation that could put it on a path to major war.

The Shifting Balance: Allied Unity and China’s Diminishing Foreign-Policy Toolkit

Without that threat of escalation, without a credible claim that a Taiwan invasion is on its way, Beijing is at serious risk of losing a large portion of its foreign-policy toolkit. It gets a lot harder to get the United States to spend increasingly large sums on its own defense apparatus to deter China, if China stops looking like an adversary who needs to be deterred. It gets a lot harder to look menacing in front of Japan or South Korea, if the missiles, airplanes, and ships that are supposed to devastate those nations in times of war instead do not seem to be functioning.

And with that change, China’s adversaries in East Asia and across the global West now have an opportunity to either take some breathing room on defense or otherwise shore up global pacts, alliances, and military capabilities in a way that sees China hemmed in for good. Indeed, that latter option may be precisely what is happening now. The United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia have all been presenting an increasingly unified front in recent months, broadening their patchwork of defense treaties and collaborative military relationships.

South Korea has firmed up its ties with both NATO and non-NATO nations as a growing global arms supplier, while both South Korea and Japan have increasingly enmeshed themselves into the Five Eyes intelligence network between Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. Meanwhile, China has been alienated from many of its global partners around the world, as its policy of debt-trap diplomacy continues to lose steam and Russia remains persistent in attempting to chart its own independent course. Putting aside China’s short-term expansion in the South China Sea, the broader momentum in the region appears to be a slow, steady shift toward the global West, at exactly the wrong time for the news to come out that China’s prodigious military power is not in any state to pose a threat.

No matter how inconsequential this scandal might initially seem, its repercussions are going to have a long-lasting impact on China’s global aspirations and its relationship with the rest of the world. The allegation that China’s missiles are filled with water is an eye-catching news story — but it is not the story. The real story is one of widespread, pervasive corruption, where fuel-drained missiles and malfunctioning silos are just the tip of the iceberg.

This particular headline may quickly be forgotten by most of the world, but it should not be. Sometimes it is the small, forgettable moments like these that set off a much larger cascade of geopolitical change.

Sources

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