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The Immediacy of the PRC Threat: The Change from Land Power to Maritime Power

January 8, 2024

The PRC is using threat deflation strategically to misdirect, to create false impressions, and to deceive adversaries into thinking they are not ready to attack.

One of the biggest news stories coming out of Asia for the New Year was the alleged purge of senior People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers, most notably the former PRC Minister of Defense Li Shangfu who went missing in late August 2023 and was formally removed from his position in October. This so-called purge, which also included three senior defense industry officials, was in fact the result of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) annual announcement of the new slate of delegates for the upcoming Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body of the PRC’s annual National People’s Congress (NPC), that is held each year, usually in early March.

Despite some of these officials having not served in uniform for several years or the fact that General Li Shangfu and two senior PLA Strategic Rocket Force Generals were announced two months earlier as having been removed, the New Year’s headlines from venerable news organizations like the Wall Street Journal and Reuters exclaimed, “China’s Military Shake-Up Raises Questions About Combat Readiness” and “Sweeping Chinese military purge exposes weakness, could widen.” Interestingly, these organizations appear to have bought into a CCP propaganda line that was first originated by the pro-PRC South China Morning Post whose December 30 headline stated, “China removes 9 PLA generals from top legislature in sign of wider purge.” Another example is the recent Bloomberg article “US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi to Purge Army,” which quotes “people familiar with the assessments” who assert “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 major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case.”

All of which is to point out that the practice of what the authors’ term in their forthcoming book (Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure) is “threat deflation.” This pernicious practice of underestimating the PRC threat year-after-year while it continues to grow—one year after the next without interruption—has been perfected by the pro-PRC engagement community despite the prodigious growth in the PRC’s military capabilities. In this instance, threat deflation centers on the notion that CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping had been forced to purge scores of officers because of either rampant corruption or, worse, that he was in jeopardy of losing control over the regime.