China Coup Rumors
Black swan or black humor?
Washington DC 25 Sept 2022
Last night I noticed China coup “rumors” on twitter. Indian media were claiming Xi was under house arrest, flights cancelled, and troops on the move. No other sources were carrying the story. This morning Newsweek explained that the origin of the story appears to be “fueled by Indian politician Subramanian Swamy, who tweeted to his 10 million followers on Saturday: "New rumour to be checked out: Is Xi Jingping [sic] under house arrest in Beijing ?”
The same source quoted Drew Thompson, a former Department of Defense official for NE Asia, as declaring the rumors a "complete falsehood." Thompson continued
"The rumor that Xi Jinping has been arrested has legs because it is such a sensitive political moment in China, and the recent trials (and convictions) of long-serving senior officials creates a hothouse atmosphere," Thompson wrote.
"Open discussion of opposition to Xi makes the rumors plausible. Despite the lack of evidence that Xi faces internal opposition, speculation persists. This enhances plausibility of the rumor, or hope for some, that Xi gets arrested."
Another explanation circulating in some circles is this might be a Xi psyop to create an artificial security crisis to consolidate his power. Following the same lines as the Putin apartment bombing plot. In the absence of strong internal opposition to Xi this does not seem at all likely nor does its along with Indian interests.
Third Offset assesses that the coup rumors are just that for a few reasons:
The unreliable Indian press who always have an agenda and are prone to over excitement
The absence of coup information in credible sources, and most importantly,
Direct refutation of rumors by credible journalists in Beijing, particularly the amusingly snarky debunking done by Georg Fahrion the China correspondent for Der Speigel
The curious episode does act as a reminder of the fact that China is not a monolith and there is likely internal concerns about Xi’s immanent coronation at the coming party congress. The remainder of this note will explore Xi’s record and what it means for China and the world.
As Americans have discovered, transitions can be tense times. China has been known to have surprise turns in the past. The plausibility of the rumor might have been aided by a sense of instability in aligned despotic regimes. Genuine internal turmoil seems to be unfolding in Iran and to a lesser extent Russia. The concept that all three could be undergoing sudden unexpected rapid change all at once, on a similar scale to the end of the Cold War or the bolt from the blue Arab Spring, is alarming from an allied point of view. Managing the ensuing turmoil would test the West to the absolute limit. However, while this kind of black swan event is not impossible, all of this is highly unlikely based on current sources. A few videos on twitter does not a revolution make. The power of social media to spread dis/mis-information however, remains tremendous.
In the Chinese case, some of the rumors claimed that the old guard under Jiang Zemin made a move while Xi was out of the country at the SCO summit. Certainly there is a fast closing window of opportunity before Xi’s president for life status is confirmed, breaking the tradition of planned and orderly succession observed by Jiang and others. The problem with this rumor is the summit was held on the 15-16th - ten days ago. So the timing is simply wrong.
Xi’s helmsmanship of China has not been an unadulterated success. The economy has been struggling against various pressures. The Washington Post reported yesterday that
Economic growth in China is projected to come in at just over 3 percent this year. That is much lower than the official target of 5.5 percent; it is positively humiliating relative to China’s performance of a decade ago, when annual growth was around 8 percent.
The same article notes that Covid has been a disaster for the country with “draconian lockdowns” fueling anger and disrupting global supply chains.
However, it may well be that foreign policy is Xi’s greatest weakness. For a generation that observed “hide your strength, bide your time”, Xi’s impatience to assert an aggressive, if not belligerent, role in the world might be viewed as too much too soon, awakening the world to China’s long term plans.
Xi has miscalculated in a number of key areas. The “limitless friendship” with Putin announced just before the invasion of Ukraine and discussed here on Third Offset in a number of posts, started cautiously under strict limits on the Chinese side, and has degraded in line with Russian operational failures. Recently both Xi and Modi publicly pushed back against Putin’s failing war.
The FT reports Modi told Putin that
“today’s era is not an era of war”. The Russian leader told his counterpart: “We will do our best to stop this as soon as possible,” citing “concerns that you constantly express”.
On Sept 15 Putin was reported by Reuters admitting
“he understood China's Xi Jinping had concerns about the situation in Ukraine”, a surprise acknowledgement of friction with Beijing over the war after a week of stunning Russian losses on the ground.
Russia needs both major economies to continue to buy its sanctioned energy products to fund the war. These developments occurring in the public domain are a strong rebuke of Putin and must cause him considerable consternation. The fact he doubled down on the mobilization order when he returned to Russia will likely come to be seen as yet another miscalculation especially in the context of dwindling support from his partners.
Longer term, in the future Xi’s other major mistake might be viewed as awakening the sleeping American giant to action. All the wolf-warrior ‘diplomacy’, mercantilism of the BRI, arms build up, land grabs (island forts and now basing in the South Pacific), and blatant saber rattling has alienated the region from China and provoked the US to completely reassess its grand strategy, from relationships, diplomacy, to war plans and concepts of operations. China was the forcing function behind the creation of the Quad, President Biden’s overt and repeated commitments to the defense of Taiwan, and the AUKUS advanced military technology sharing agreement (it goes so much further than nuclear submarines - hyper and cruise missiles, AI, radar, and other tech Australia would have never dreamt of having access to a decade ago).
For far too long America did not assert itself as China slowly gobbled up the SCS reefs and turned them into sea forts. Having established an A2AD blanket across the region and potentially deep into the Pacific (if it moves systems to say, the Solomons), the DOD is completely reevaluating its operational plans to operate in a complex, denied and austere environment. The Marine Force Design 2030 program represents a complete rethink about expeditionary littoral amphibious operations.
A snapshot is the defense of Guam. It is basically a sitting duck with Chinese missiles sighted in on fixed targets. A first strike dream. However, as the update to a Third Offset note reports (scroll to bottom), the Pentagon is getting serious about a distributed, layered defense of the island. Eventually, America might get to the point of working with regional allies to impose an allied A2AD in the SCS to deter or at least complicate Xi’s increasingly overt militarism.
Update
Australian ABC Media Matters program carried the story