China’s military upheaval could indicate Xi is preparing for World War III: experts

Chinese President Xi Jinping is “trying to gain control of the military” – indicating he could be gearing up for World War III, experts warn.

The 70-year-old Communist Party leader “is thinking that he needs officers who are prepared to actually fight,” Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang told Business Insider in a report published Monday.

“There is a sense that many of China’s general officers don’t want to fight. And so we really have a force led by an officer corps that is ambivalent about going to war,” the “China is Going to War” author explained.

Xi has been revamping China’s military since taking power in 2012 — and embraced a particularly belligerent stance on Taiwan in his latest New Year’s speech, the outlet noted.

“China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Xi declared, according to the official translation of his address.

He also reportedly told President Biden at the APEC Summit in November that China fully intended to seize control of Taiwan.

Then Dec. 29, 2023, Xi suddenly dismissed nine high-ranking officers from the Chinese military.

Reports that Xi’s military purge has been to root out officers linked to corruption only explains so much, Chang told BI.

“Because if that were the case, all of them would be sacked,” he insisted of China’s military brass.

Chang suggested instead that Xi is targeting those who are reluctant to go to war.

For example, Chinese Air Force General Liu Yazhou warned against a potential invasion of Taiwan — and then received a suspended death sentence in February 2022, Chang noted.

Joel Wuthnow – a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington, DC – argued that preparing China for war and trimming corruptive influences were closely aligned. 

“The removals indicate that Xi should be concerned about the quality of people and equipment he has invested in over the last decade,” Wuthnow reasoned.

The nine axed commanders were tied to China’s Rocket Force, which would play a key part in a potential military campaign, he added.

“If that equipment malfunctions or can’t be relied on, how confident can Xi and his colleagues be that the PLA will prevail?” Wuthnow suggested.

China has engaged in so many conflicts in recent years – from its incursions into Taiwan’s air-defense zone to butting heads with Japan in the East China Sea – that it is impossible to predict where a major blow-up could occur, the expert said.

“I don’t think that we can say, ‘Oh, it’s Taiwan or whatever,’ ” Chang told the outlet.

But Xi’s statements about Taiwan – including his 2021 warning that Biden was “playing with fire” over the issue – sound like he could be “talking himself and China into war,” he concluded.

“Remember, in the 1930s, there were separate wars that merged into what we now call World War II,” Chang continued, referring to the spate of conflicts from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East. 

“The same dynamics exist today, and it’s entirely possible and some people can even argue that it’s probable that these will merge into a global conflict,” he added.

But Wuthnow suggested that Xi’s military ambitions may be stymied by Russia’s disastrous example in Ukraine.

“Russia has paid an enormous price for its misadventure, and China would as well. Moreover, a failed invasion would be worse for Xi politically than not trying at all,” he said.

Chang said a Chinese invasion in East Asia would almost definitely push Western countries into a larger conflict.

“I think that Xi Jinping is taking two pages out of Mao’s Peasant Revolution playbook. One of them was to encircle the cities from the countryside. And in this, I think that Xi Jinping views Ukraine, north Africa, Israel as the countryside, and the United States as the city,” he explained.