Comment
Xi Jinping: putting down an attempted coup? Feng Li/Getty
Has Xi just seen off a coup?
In 1757, a firing squad executed Admiral John Byng on the deck of a Royal Navy warship for “failing to do his utmost” in chasing down an enemy vessel during a battle in the Seven Years’ War. The English shot one admiral, as Voltaire famously put it, “pour encourager les autres”. Military officers across China will be feeling “highly encouraged”, says Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, by the news that Xi Jinping’s recent wave of purges has reached the “untouchable” Zhang Youxia, the country’s top general and a close Xi ally. According to the army newspaper PLA Daily, the general had spilled nuclear secrets to the Americans, fuelled corruption and had a “vile influence on the Party, the state, and the military”. In other words: zaijian, general.
Whether this is about corruption, whether those at the very top of the party have such misgivings about Xi that they’re plotting against him, or whether it’s just the paranoia of an over-mighty autocrat, we don’t know. But at a time when the unpredictability of the US president, the incompetence of many other Western leaders and the political unrest in many democracies are raising widespread doubts about the viability of liberal democracy, the Chinese purges are a healthy reminder that the alternatives are worse. When Donald Trump threatens to invade Greenland, Republican senators can threaten impeachment. When poorly trained, badly led immigration officers kill protesters, the whole country knows and the White House can’t “mute the resulting clamour”. In systems like China’s, none of these “healthy self-corrective measures” can function. Autocracy can work for a while – Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin all had “some good years”. But in the end, “authoritarian decadence” brought ruin and defeat.
🇨🇳🔫 What actually goes on inside Xi’s court is “notoriously hard to read”, says Tom Newton Dunn in War & Peace. Perhaps the “wildest rumour” is that Zhang’s troops and Xi’s bodyguards opened fire on each other at the Jingxi Hotel in Beijing, as each tried to arrest the other’s principal. In other words: Xi has seen off an attempted coup.
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🇩🇪 What Donald Trump has in common with Kaiser Wilhelm II
🤯 A bonkers stat about Liz Truss’s cabinet
☢️ When film props almost sparked a nuclear crisis
🤖 The world’s smallest robot
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🪖 Mark Carney’s delusional thinking
🤣 How John Cleese got his revenge on a snooty critic
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