“>Beijing’s recent purge of top defense officials signals that its military is grappling with a sort of corruption different from typical graft in China, and that could undermine its capacity for war, a senior US official said.
“I think it should give China’s leadership pause about how deep and how systemic that corruption runs,” Ely Ratner, US assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, said on Tuesday. “And to what degree this very advanced military is going to work when they need, and frankly are they ready?”
Speaking to “War on the Rocks” podcast host Ryan Evans, Ratner said the corruption observed within the People’s Liberation Army typically involves top officers getting rich or people buying jobs.
“There’s a lot of graft, there’s a lot of sloshing around in a very opaque system, a lot of people lining their pockets,” Ratner said.
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Bugs Marlowe