Is China’s Military Ready for War?

China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by M. Taylor Fravel, Arthur and Ruth Sloan, Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT Security Studies program. Taylor recently published a fantastic article in Foreign Affairs titled, Is China's Military Ready for War? What She's Purges Do and Don't mean for Beijing's ambitions? Taylor, it is great to see you. Thanks so much for having me. Delighted to be here. We like to start all of our episodes with a personal question. So how did you become interested in China and its strategic ambitions? Sure. So when I was 16, my father, who worked for a large American construction company, was transferred by his employer to Taipei, Taiwan. And so I ended up, a whole family moved to Taiwan and I lived in Taiwan for the last two years of high school, a proud graduate of the Taipei American School. And it was my first time living overseas, first time in Asia, and it left quite an impression. So by the time I got to college, I wanted to major in history, focusing on Chinese history. And one thing led to another, I ended up in a PhD program in political science, focusing on Chinese foreign policy. But had it not been for that life experience in the late 1980s, I don't think I would be sitting here with you today, at least talking about an article that I've written on China's armed forces and associated issues. That's great. Well, turning to that article, I'm hoping we can dive into the purges within the People's Liberation Army, especially at senior levels. You've highlighted in the piece that an incredible three of six uniformed positions on the CMC, on the Central Military Commission, are currently vacant. And more than 20 senior PLA officers have disappeared or been removed from their positions just since the 20th party congress in 2022. Why is this happening and why now? Well, it's a trigger question. And what I'm not sure we can satisfactorily answer. I think the first thing we have to say, or I have to say, anyone who's looking at corruption, the people I asked to say, we don't have a lot of information, right? And so the party itself releases very few details regarding individual cases, the details that they do release may or may not reflect the underlying reason for their dismissal or removal and so on and so forth. So we really are in some ways trying to nail Jell-O to a wall, right? This is just a very challenging topic to understand. But I think in general, there are probably three or four reasons why senior military officers would be purged. The first would be graft, particularly related to weapons development programs and sort of construction projects. This clearly was an issue for the defense minister, Li Shanfu, and related investigations of the Weapons Development Department and the CMC that he directed for becoming a defense minister. China's undergone just a massive modernization of its armed forces where it spends increasingly large amounts of money on arming and equipping and sort of preparing the PLA to fight, and that creates opportunities to skim off the top, to use inferior materials and so on and so forth, right? And this is a classic problem in China, more general. That's not at all probably unique to the PLA. The second reason would be engaging in bribery, especially related to promotions. This has also been sort of a longstanding issue and why it is probably also relevant today, given that one of the CMC members who was removed oversaw the political work department under the CMC, this basically refers to kind of a play-the-pay scheme where officers will pay to get promoted and then in turn expect to be paid when they promote people sort of below them. This of course raises questions about whether or not the most qualified people are being promoted or simply the wealthiest or best connected. The third would have to do with politics within the PLA, especially whether or not individuals were trying to create kind of their own power centers and jockey for influence, especially within the CMC, such that it would actually disrupt the functioning of the CMC and the PLA more generally. And so this also seems quite plausible with respect to Miao Hua and perhaps Huoidong as well. Huoidong was vice chairman who has not been seen publicly since the end of the National People's Congress back in March. And then the last reason might be simply the fact that senior officers were not performing as Xi had hoped they would perform, right? So a question of competence. And this of course is also hard to assess because we don't have very specific details on what Xi is expecting the PLA to do. We don't have full spectrum assessments of how they're performing against his criteria, but I think suffice to say he probably also believes that at least some of the officers are not living up to his expectations and simply wants to sort of try to clean house. A related issue here would be the ongoing kind of reform of the PLA that started in the end of 2015, right, when the four general departments were sort of replaced by 15 subordinate departments under the CMC with the aim of improving the PLA's ability to conduct joint operations. And this was a massive sweeping overhaul, probably the largest organizational change to the PLA since the late 1950s. And it simply may be that it's not working as well as he had hoped, or as maybe as well as he had expected. And therefore changes at the top were also needed. We're about 10 years in from these reforms, more or less. And so it's sort of an opportunity, perhaps to take stock, assess whether or not sort of the objectives behind those reforms are being met. And if not seek to bring in a new personnel, maybe more able to carry them out. So that's just one area where we could see, you know, questions of competence. There could be other ones as well that would be more specific to individual services or programs, what have you. There may be a larger concern that the PLA is still really not ready to do, but it has to do, which is to sort of fight and win. Informatized and intelligentized, these are the Chinese terms, but my terms, local conflicts. And in contrast to purges that we may have seen prior to 2022, and she has had personally selected all of the CMC officials who've now been purged more recently. And what do you make of she turning on his chosen lieutenants? Thanks so much for mentioning that. In fact, I forgot to mention the fifth reason why purges happened, which is that you're part of a riot of action. And so this is essentially what accounts for the first frame of purges of the PLA when she first took office between 2012 and 2015, particularly going after the two former vice chairman, Xu Tse-ho and Huo Bo-sheng. These were John's and Man's generals, and so she really needed to eradicate John's influence from sort of the PLA leadership. So that's a fifth possible reason, but it bears upon your question, because of course, all of the individuals who've been removed have been promoted by Xi. They've been placed on the CMC at different party congresses, overseen by Xi and so on and so forth. Couple points to make here. First, I think it demonstrates that Xi is still very much in charge of the PLA, right? If he can turn against those people he promoted. Second, he may have to punish them even more severely than perhaps other people, because they were individuals that he selected, right? In order to show that even if you are perceived to have had a close tie with Xi, or in fact, you may have had a close tie with Xi, that does not sort of absolve you from not carrying out your duties in whatever way is deemed to be most important, whether it's not being too corrupt, not skimming too much money, not building an alternative power center and so on. Right? And so if people are of officers close to Xi, thought they had some protection, right, to engage in these other kinds of long-standing practices that have always bedeviled the PLA sort of officer corps in my command, I think Xi's willingness to go after them indicates that I wanted to say no one is above the law, but there's no law here that's particularly relevant. So no one is basically above Xi, so to speak, right, that you still have to fundamentally carry out your duty as he hopes that you would. So, you know, in thinking about these factors, you've described excessive graft, because of course everyone's corrupt, but excessive graft bribery related to promotions, the politics of the PLA, competence concerns, and then the implications of the PLA reform process and potential assessments of its success. In thinking about all of that, what does the current situation and these removals say in your view about President Xi's overall confidence in the PLA at this stage? The short answer has to be not great. Normally, one does not replace a large section of the leadership of an organization if they are confident or pleased with how it's performed. Because it's going so well. Right, because it's going well. That's usually not a reason why one is removed. So clearly, he in a very general sense presumably, I mean, I've never met Xi, I can't really say what he thinks, but probably believes that it's not living up to his expectations. There's certainly evidence of this in sort of a roundabout way. If we look at the goals that Xi has set for the PLA to make great progress in its modernization by its 100th anniversary of the PLA in 2027, this year also coincides with information released by sort of Bill Burns that this is the year in which Xi called upon the PLA to be ready to carry out a successful invasion of Taiwan and so forth. Right, and so beyond that, there's the 2035 benchmark for the PLA itself to be basically modernized and then the mid-century benchmark of being world-class. But obviously 2035 is only 10 years from now, 2027 is only two years from now. And I think if Xi believed things were on track, he might not have decided to replace so many senior officers and essentially remove now, as you mentioned in the beginning, right? Half of the uniformed officers on the CMC are no longer holding their positions and they have not been replaced. Historically, he has actually quite rare to see such a vacuum in sort of the highest levels of leadership of the PLA. So presumably, things are not going well from his standpoint, and that probably reduces his confidence in the PLA to perform as he would want to perform along the timeframe that he has set for the PLA to be able to carry out those missions. And with these many senior vacancies across the PLA and in the CMC, especially the Central Military Commission, how do these vacancies in your view affect Beijing's decision-making on strategic and military issues? What does it mean in practice for these seats to be empty? And what would it mean in a crisis? Let me pull the crisis question for a minute, come back to that. I think on managing the day-to-day affairs of the PLA, I think it has a number of important implications. The most important of which might be simply that it will induce greater caution at lower levels, force more decisions up the system, and slow decision making more generally. So what do I mean by this? I think at lower levels, individual officers are probably quite worried about getting ensnared, and whatever might have ensnared these very senior officers, that probably induces much more cautious and conservative decision-making based upon the lowest common denominator, what might be acceptable in the particular domain, and so forth. It might also mean that decisions are going to be pushed up the system, because no one really wants to be responsible for making a critical decision. So say if it goes from the service headquarters up to the joint staff department, it could even then go up to the CMC, because of these kinds of conditions. But then the CMC itself is sort of handicapped by the absence of key personnel, and those in the general office may also be more reluctant to make very important decisions. So I think it really has the potential to slow the pace of activity across a wide variety of spheres, from weapons development to exercises to training. I don't think this necessarily means that we will see fewer Chinese ships and aircraft around Taiwan, or in some cases the tempo of operations in areas where the PLA has been operating quite frequently will probably continue. But I do think if we could sort of really have great access to what the PLA is doing, and again, we have to remember we don't have great access to what the PLA is doing, we probably see decision-making being slowed in general, and then key decisions being forced up to the highest levels of the system, where again, perhaps the lowest combatant nominee might also prevail there. This is not unlike what would happen in any Chinese ministry or party organization that was undergoing significant leadership of people. So the PLA is very much a party army, which means that its sort of politics in many ways are similar to those of other party organizations. Of course, the PLA is different because it's duty for the party, or its mission is to engage in pairing, to use military power to achieve party objectives, whether that's saving the party at home or prevailing in the conference abroad. But it is still very much a party organization. It's run by a committee the way in which everything in the party is run by a committee. I think this is sort of a long answer to your question that is somewhat abstract and perhaps unsatisfying. But I think this is very general and dynamically off to expect. I mean, there are other issues like decreased morale, perhaps increased infighting at lower levels again for people to protect themselves and push blame for what might be viewed as a bad decision or as a mistake onto other people. Clearly, we've seen reports, some apocryphal about flaws in kind of China's advanced weapons systems, reports that some missiles may have been filled with water, not fuel. I'm not sure I entirely believe that, but the US intelligence community didn't report that and Bloomberg covered it and so forth. And so it's out there, silo doors that needed to be replaced or blast doors on silos that needed to be replaced and so forth. And we know earlier, corruption challenges within the aircraft carrier program, the J-15 program and so on. This is like completely not unexpected. So I think that also feeds into concerns about how ready it's for the PLA is. Now in a crisis, I think there's two dimensions. There's the military dimension, like will your equipment and personnel and forces her to perform as expected. And then there's the political dimension of how to sort of handle a crisis. Now, I think in any major crisis that China find itself in will fundamentally be managed right at the political level by Xi and the standing committee of the Politburo. And that would not be inconsistent with sort of the history of crisis decision making in China. The PLA has never really played an outsized role in managing the crisis, has always played sort of a subordinate role. However, with the purges, one has to ask, would Xi be confident that he was getting accurate information from the military in a crisis? For better or for worse, I'm old enough to remember the EP3 crisis when the PLA did not give John's emigrated information and withheld information for a significant period of time and so forth. And so one has to ask, I mean, even though Xi is much stronger, more powerful leader in many ways than John, has been, would he believe necessarily all of the information that he'd be getting from the PLA and that we wouldn't know exactly given the specifics of the crisis, but this is a sort of hypothetical sort of answer to your question. But I think the PLA might send up information that Xi wants to hear. They might not send other information that perhaps does not make them look good or raises other questions. I mean, we don't really know what happened in kind of very specific cases, but it certainly is the case that this has happened before and could very easily happen again in a way that would have a significant impact on then on how Xi and the other Chinese top leaders decide to manage the crisis. So I think it could have a very significant impact in the future in that context. So you've highlighted some of the ways in which the PLA potentially failing to meet Xi's expectations when it comes to military modernization and capability development may have been a contributing factor to these purges. But could you go a little deeper on how the purges could then themselves affect PLA capabilities, kind of putting the decision-making piece aside when it comes to modernization? What kind of impact will this have? I mean, there are two ways to think about this. One would be the pace of weapons development. Not clearly it's been quite rapid in China and I suspect it will continue to be quite rapid, but it might not be as fast as it otherwise would have been in the absence of these cases that have come to light about corruption in the weapons equipment development department and so forth. So this would presumably lead to more intense scrutiny of certain weapons programs, especially those that are linked to companies or individuals who've been implicated in corruption. It could lead to even more general efforts to recertify systems and really make sure that everything is going to perform as expected. That can take a lot of time away from training and other kinds of activities. I mean, in the end, you can complete that process and be more confident, but I suspect it could have an impact in the short term. I think the broader impact is one that's much harder to uncover, which is to say what does it mean for the successful conduct of joint operations? Joint operations, especially given modern military technology, essentially require decentralizing decision-making to very low levels within a military organization. And this has always been a big challenge for the PLA because, again, as a party institution, it has a tendency towards centralization in decision-making and to ensure that the PLA performs as expected. There's also strong and set to decentralize decision-making. And so, going back to my previous point, if this is true, then you're going to see probably less delegation to lower levels and then perhaps we're caution at lower levels, such that it's going to be much harder to carry out the kinds of joint operations that the PLA has at least said that it wants to carry out. And so, this would manifest itself in not just the invasion scenario that's often talked about, but also in a quarantine operation or a blockade operation, and anything that really requires kind of sustained coordination among many different units. We see glimpses in the exercises since 2022 around Thailand about how the PLA is thinking about doing this, but those exercises, they only really tell us so much. And some of them, there wasn't necessarily that much jointness in the first place. And so, in part, this really is what the PLA needs. What it says it wants to do to be able to fight and win future wars is the sort of decision paralysis that I talked about earlier is going to have a pretty significant impact on that kind of performance, at least for a period of time to come. I don't think any of these effects are permanent. I think they will have the greatest impact in the short to medium term. Clearly, having a modern effective military is an important goal for Xi Jinping. And if these purges can help overcome some of the impediments to that, I think over time, we will revert back to seeing a PLA on the steeper trajectory that we've witnessed over the last two decades. But when you have such a people at the top in a centralized system where a lot of decisions are going to get pushed at the top, it suggests that it's not going to be able to perform as perhaps envisioned in all of PLA military writings on what it means to carry out effective joint operations under conditions of informatization and intelligentization. Again, not my words, those are the PLA words with the talkbook, essentially fighting and winning wars characterized by widespread use of information technology and intelligent systems. In your foreign affairs piece on this topic, you have some interesting thoughts on how the purges affect or don't affect the risk of Beijing deciding to pursue a significant conflict. And in your piece, there's a conclusion that based on Beijing's decisions to go to war historically in Korea, in India, and in Vietnam, looking back at the 50s, 60s, and 70s, you conclude that Chinese leaders' confidence in the PLA's abilities probably will not be a decisive factor in the ultimate choice to choose war or not. And so historically, what are the factors that have trumped readiness in the CCP's military decision making? I think if I had to pick one factor, it would be the perception of the threat that China faced. In Korea, the notion that you'd have US forces adjacent to China's border along the Albu River was seen as unacceptable at the time. And so something had to be done. If the US had not crossed the 38th parallel, just hypothetically, it's not clear China would have intervened. If North Korean forces had performed better, it's not clear that China would have intervened. So in many ways, that decision unfolded very rapidly. North Korea did not request Chinese support, I believe, October 1st. Even though it's clear that they would need Chinese support earlier, they didn't make the formal request. China then very quickly tries to make a decision. You know, the Politburo convenes for the standing committee of the Politburo and I think the Central Committee were meeting at that time to decide what to do. It was a very contentious decision, less perhaps because of, in that case, PLA readiness itself, but the country's readiness in terms of the need to focus on economic reconstruction after four years of really punishing fighting the civil war, the fact that the PLA had not yet fully controlled the rest of the country. It was engaging what we're called bandit suppression campaigns to root out all the remnant KMT forces really through 1951 and so on and so forth. It's just not seen as the moment when China was ready to stand up to what was then the largest and most industrialized and most powerful military in the world out of the United States. At the same time, the threat of having that military on China's border, thus posing a threat to the industrial heartland in the Northeast, was also seen as unacceptable. That was the prevailing threat calculus in Korea. In India, a lot of it had to do with the dynamics of the border dispute, but also Chinese concerns at the time, like that India was seeking to take advantage of Chinese weakness with the famine of the Great League forward, the revolt and Tibetan areas that had occurred in years preceding the war as well as Indian policy. And so, although they had tried to bring about a negotiated settlement with India, it failed, including Joe and Lai's visit to New Delhi in April of 1960, other diplomatic efforts in the summer of 1962. And so, I think ultimately when there was a crisis in a particular part of the border, China decided that the only way that they would be able to bring about stability and reduce Indian pressure was to destroy the Indian forces that had been from their standpoint, right? The view is sort of the source of the problem along with India's broader reluctance, again, from their standpoint to enter into some kind of negotiations. And so, I think, again, if you roll back the clock and ask what might be different and how that would change a Chinese calculus with respect to India, one could sort of go through a number of factors related to Indian policy, China's economic conditions and so forth. And in this case, there had been a significant purge of PLA leadership in 1959 after the Lushan meeting when Pung De Hoi had the temerity to question some of Mao's policies that was sort of very quickly cashiered along with his lieutenants, and Pung De Hoi at that point had an outsize role in the PLA where he was responsible for all of the PLA's daily affairs. And so, then the Central Militia Commission was really probably much less important in terms of the PLA's operations and functions. So, that was like a really big deal. In the Indian case, China had amassed a superiority of forces along the border. And thus, even though the PLA had undergone this upheaval at the highest levels, only a few years earlier, the final military outcome perhaps was not in doubt, just given what China was able to bring to there. Then in 1979, this is a moment when China-Soviet relations are really poor. China has in fears of encirclement from the north and the south. The Soviet Union forms a military alliance with Vietnam. Vietnam then invades Cambodia, which China had been supporting. And so, there seemed to be a very strong imperative to take action to counter what was perceived to be the Soviet threat by attacking Vietnam. You can see how the Chinese leadership identified threats in these different situations that essentially created pressures to act sooner rather than later to reverse what they saw as negative trends. So, to keep the US away from its northern border, to reduce what was perceived to be going to pressure in its very vulnerable southeastern flank in 1960. And then lastly, to counter what were viewed as efforts at encirclement by the Soviet Union in 1979. And recognizing these historical decision-making processes remain quite opaque in your review of these cases, I'm curious if you saw evidence that in any of these scenarios with Korea, India, or Vietnam, there was consideration or acknowledgement on the part of Mao or Deng's, CCP leaders, that the PLA was not in an optimal shape, that the PLA readiness was not where they wanted it to be, but that they needed to move anyway because of the immediacy of the threat they perceived. Or was readiness not even in those deliberations? Was it all about the external environment? Great question. So, in Korea, the debate really is whether the country is ready. Most Chinese leaders would hope to be an opportunity to rebuild the country after the Civil War. And we tend to forget just how militarily devastating the Chinese Civil War was. Side note, any political scientist out there, you should study the Chinese Civil War because it's like the great understudied case in the political science literature. This was a massive set of military campaigns over much of the country that were hugely devastating to the economy, to human life, and so forth. There's very clear evidence in the deliberations as to why not China was ready. So, it's a little bit less about PLA readiness, narrowly defined, but more about national readiness, broadly defined. In many cases, the PLA probably had some advantages, at least in terms of having all those years of experience in the Civil War to be able to conduct effective operations. But then again, light infantry versus the mechanized power of the US Army is also very, very different. And by light infantry, I mean, like they had no vehicles, right? This was simply foot soldiers. And so, even if you had a lot of hard and kind of battle experience, you would still have to ask yourself if you were like kind of ready to do that. The best evidence that comes from 1979. Zhang Zhang in his memoir talks about going and inspecting troops who have been very sort of pasteively immobilized. I believe his trip was in late December, maybe early January, to check my notes. A buddy comes back and tells Doug that, you know, they're really not ready. Like, we have to wait. And that led to waiting a month, but lo and behold, when you look at how the PLA performed in 1979, they were very much not ready. They had limited war aims. It was sort of described as a pedagogical war. They had to quote teach Vietnam a lesson. So there was never a desire to season hold large pieces of Vietnamese territory, but they did want to demonstrate that they could threaten the capital. After a month of fighting, they had made decent progress, but at an acceptable high price relative to what I think they had thought they would pay going in. That was the kind of where they knew they weren't ready for two reasons. One, the Cultural Revolution had been incredibly harmful in terms of military readiness within the PLA. They did not do a lot of military training in the Cultural Revolution. They engaged in a lot of political campaigns. Also, the recruitment cycle had just begun, and so they had lots of new troops who had received little or no training who were involved in the fight. And so it's not surprising how they performed and sort of the high price that they paid on the battle, but Chinese leaders knew that. And so that's probably the single best case in terms of readiness, acknowledgement of lack of readiness in a decision to fight nevertheless. And in each of these cases, you have pointed out that regardless of this apparently demonstrated lack of readiness, the CCP leadership saw these operations as conflicts of necessity, not choice or opportunities. I'll you phrase it in the piece. And I think that's a really important perspective to highlight in part because to an American ear or a Vietnamese ear, I think that is a difficult perspective to understand. I mean, you mentioned Deng famously describing the 1979 invasion of Vietnam as necessary to teach Vietnam a lesson. And I mean, that sounds like a choice more than a necessity. And so can you help us understand the CCP's view of this idea of military necessity? I'm not sure the CCP has a particular view, but I'll go back to what we talked about a minute ago in terms of their threat perceptions at the time, right? And so in all three cases, I think they believe they faced severe significant and growing threats that left them from their assessment of the implication of these threats with no choice other than to fight. Now, the way in which they particularly in Korea and Vietnam fighting here was less about, again, seizing large amounts of territory and creating new facts on the ground than it was signaling kind of resolve and trying to shape the political calculus of its opponents, right? So to keep India from placing pressure on the southwestern frontier, weaken the Soviet encirclement attempt, the success of these operations, primarily another discussion is probably pretty successful in the case of India, less successful in the case of Vietnam because Vietnam stayed in Cambodia for quite a period of time, but then Soviet-Chinese relations began to change around 1982, such that it's a lot harder to assess the success of the 1979 campaign. Also, in all three of these cases, as I think I mentioned, right, the Chinese leadership felt it was essentially facing a growing window of vulnerability, such that if they didn't act, their situation would only get worse. And so they're trying to arrest negative trends as they saw it in their relationship with key adversarial states. And so in that sense, war is always a choice, so maybe I didn't use the best choice of words in trying to set up this distinction. But what I had in the back of my mind was discussions about China's calculus today with respect to Taiwan, and there's members of the US kind of China watching or analytic community who believe that China will attack as soon as it believes it is ready. And this sort of builds on the idea that states can engage in discretionary uses of force once they're strong enough. And I think what I was at least trying to underscore was that the most significant historical instances when China has used force in the past, they have not been discretionary uses of force. They have not occurred at moments when the PLA and the China's leadership felt it was strong enough to prevail in any number of scenarios, and thus decided it would just be better to get whatever they wanted through military means rather than through diplomatic reasons or other means. And so that's really what I sort of had in mind, which is to say the PLA is undergoing a tough period at the moment. If its readiness has been harmed to some degree, we should not be sanguine about what that means in terms of how China might view its threat environment and when it might believe, again, force from its standpoint would be necessary to protect what it sees as its core or vital interest. In looking at these case studies, we've been discussing whether the CCP will make a clear yes or no decision to go to war. I mean, something that today seems perhaps most relevant to a Taiwan scenario. But I'm wondering how these purges and overall PLA readiness could affect Beijing's decision making when it comes to military activity short of war that still carries some significant risk of escalation, for example, gray zone coercion in the South China Sea against Southeast Asian ships. I wouldn't expect to see a significant change in gray zone activities that are sort of well underway. So what we see around Taiwan or what we see in the South China Sea, particularly in the South China Sea, where these have been ongoing for quite some period of time, despite the most recent episode involving a Chinese destroyer ramming a Chinese coast card vessel, mistakenly, presumably, there seem to have been barely stable in rules of engagement at Ebsen flows, of course, with the tactical situation on the water. So I wouldn't expect necessarily like a major reduction in gray zone activity. I might expect, and it would be very hard to know, and maybe we'll find out soon, instructions or orders, right, to really make sure that there's no incident that could in turn precipitate a crisis. You already see this in the South China Sea where at least they try to very much to keep gray zone activities in the gray zone. So what was notable about this most recent episode around Scarborough Shoal is the fact that a destroyer was involved in chasing a Philippine coast guard vessel, which was quite unusual for probably normally operate most of the time. PLA vessels will stay over the horizon and let Chinese coast guard vessels sort of engage in the direct instances of coercion. If all of my other sort of speculations are true, right, that the Correction has hurt readiness, that's probably not a great time to have a military crisis all else equal. You might expect there to be a little bit more discipline in how these gray zone activities are carried out. I wouldn't expect them to stop either because, of course, China pursues them because it believes there's value in doing so and still wants to sort of maintain that value. So I think that would be one way to think about it. Of course, the gray zone involves lots of actors who are not military actors and have their own chains of command and so forth. And so it's a much larger issue than just viewing it in terms of PLA operations. And so sitting here at CSIS in Washington, I have to ask about the US-China relationship as well. So hoping you can speak to what the purges mean for the US-China military to military relationship and what advice would you give to President Trump or Secretary Hegzeff on communications with the PLA, especially now? There's not a robust military to military relationship at the moment. There have been some working-level talks. I believe in April there was a meeting of the MMCA that discussed maritime issues. China did not send its defense minister to the Shangri-La Dialogue, so there's no opportunity for any kind of interaction between the US defense secretary and the Chinese defense minister, which has happened to her before. It's unclear how significant an impact the purges would be. I think all else equal, it would probably create a bit of reluctance on the part of the senior Chinese military leadership to engage in high-level discussions. There's already lots of other reasons why they would be reluctant to do so, but even more now, given the risks that would be involved for not handling them well in the case of the purges, and presumably they have also not been instructed by Xi Jinping to engage in high-level diplomacy with the United States. We'll just have to watch this space and see how it evolves. I mean, US-China relations are not as tense in some ways as they were a year ago, or at least there are these ongoing trade negotiations that keep getting extended, so maybe it's a journey and not a destination, but it seems to create an environment in which Xi and Trump can meet in late October or early November. In that context, one could see, perhaps, depending upon how the November meeting goes and what the underlying trade settlement is and how that relates to all of the other questions between the United States and China that are a little outstanding, that there may be some greater exchanges through very high levels of the two countries' militaries after Xi and Trump meet. If they don't meet, or if it doesn't go well, then perhaps we will see a continuation of the status quo, which I think is probably partly influenced by the purges, but also partly influenced by the PLA's overall general reluctance to engage in these kinds of dialogues, especially absent very clear guidance from their senior party leadership. Well, I wish we had more time, but I think we'll have to wrap there. Taylor, thank you so much for coming on the show. To learn more about Taylor's thinking on PLA readiness and Chinese military decision-making, I hope you'll read his recent Foreign Affairs piece. 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