During our tense national crisis it’s easy to become insensible to events overseas, even those as important as this:
Gen. Zhang Youxia no longer is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top military general after being ousted, along with another high-ranking general, amid an investigation into alleged legal and disciplinary violations.
Youxia is the vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, a member of the Politburo and second only to Xi as the leader of China’s military, The New York Times reported.
Also facing an ouster is Gen. Liu Zhenli, who is the chief of staff of the Joint Staff of the Central Military Commission and a member of the Central Military Commission.
“This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents a total annihilation of the high command,” former CIA analyst Christopher Johnson told The New York Times. [UPI via MSN]
I don’t pay a great deal of attention to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), although I do tend to agree with the opinion that it’ll be an important mover in the future. However, I think sometimes that pundits assign too much potential to a society built to step on the highly talented, or at least highly ambitious, and not by accident, but by design. It blunts the impact of Chinese society, and unhappy students are not productive students, by and large.
In the last few years they experienced a real-estate economic bubble, both inflation and deflation. I can sort of visualize these senior Chinese generals blaming Xi Jinping for this and other missteps, and considering forcefully removing him; perhaps Jinping beat them to the punch.
It’ll be worth keeping half an eye on China, now.
[h/t Irontortoise@Daily Kos]
