cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/49758241

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purge that raises concerns about the country’s stability. President Xi has sacked his most senior general and political confidant, Zhang Youxia, apparently in connection with corruption allegations and, according to some reports, for betraying nuclear secrets to the United States.

As a result of the clean-out, China’s central military commission, the body that controls its armed forces on behalf of the Communist party, now has only two out of seven of its original ­members still in place: Mr Xi himself and a general who has ­overseen the purges.

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The official explanation in most of the cases is a crackdown on corruption in the procurement of weapons, or profiting from the sale of commissions to ambitious young officers. But in closed authoritarian societies, corruption charges are ­often used by nervous leaders to neutralise rivals.

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Certainly the timing of the move, coming hard on the heels of the Davos gathering of business and political leaders, is striking. The divisions between the US and Europe, exposed in public and private, suggested that a significant number of western participants anticipate a future rupture in Nato. While the immediate prospect of a hostile takeover of Greenland by the Trump administration appears to have been set aside for now, there is nonetheless deep scepticism in Europe and ­elsewhere about the reliability of the US as the ­primary guarantor of western security. The point was made most clearly in Davos by Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, who had just flown in to the Swiss ski resort from China.

Much of this thinking leans heavily on the imagined stability and reliability of China in comparison with the unpredictability of Mr Trump and his lieutenants. But western powers should be aware that the more they distance themselves from Washington, the more they risk creeping subordination to China. When European elites talk in glowing terms about China’s environmental policies and technological prowess, they are making false assumptions about its political robustness.

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The friction within China’s elites reflects tensions nationally, caused by relatively low growth, a weak property market, pressures on wages, lay-offs and high youth unemployment. The corruption in the military top brass also mirrors systemic corruption in wider society.

China’s dictatorship is not a satisfactory haven for Trump sceptics.

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#world