Leadership hanging by a string
On bribery, The Death of Stalin, and why there should be some wider alarm about the purges inside the upper echelons of China's military
It is entirely possible that the two former Chinese defense ministers who were sentenced to death were in fact guilty of accepting bribes and other acts of corruption. It is also entirely possible that they were not -- especially given that a full-scale purge of China’s military leadership seems to be well underway. It’s also possible that there could be a grain of truth to the charges, but that the charges themselves have been exaggerated.
■ What is certain is that nobody is ever really secure when a strongman is in charge. The solitary reliable weapon of the strongman is fear, and fear is amplified most by uncertainty. As humans, we’re able to face true surprise with adrenaline, and we’re able to face known peril with courage. But we’re just not wired to live in a state where we could go in an instant from the most elite heights of success to a death sentence overnight, on no more than the impulses of another person.
■ The technique usually works for the strongman -- for a while. If you fear that you could be purged at any moment, that’s a fairly strong inducement to show slobbering fealty to the strongman. But no strongman lives forever (see: “The Death of Stalin“), and a life lived long enough in fear sometimes finds that fear metamorphosing into the courage of one facing certain peril.
■ The rest of us looking in from the outside should be alarmed by the apparent fragility of China’s state leadership, especially because of the peculiar relationship between party and state: The People’s Liberation Army belongs to the Communist Party, not to the people. A system that rigid is also inherently brittle: It’s not built for delegation and adherence to the law, it’s built for personal loyalty.
■ Public corruption is very bad, but it’s also easy to fabricate -- especially when the authorities charged with proving the case have a lot of their own personal security riding on the outcome. What’s happening shouldn’t be overlooked for the risks it poses to the rest of us. A military full of bribe-hungry general officers is bad for China; a strongman regime with a nuclear-armed command structure falling to pieces in real time is bad for everyone.