Alice Han

at the CMC.

The CMC is a central military commission.

Just for context, it is both a state and a party organ that oversees both the PLA as well as the police, the People's Armed Police and the militia.

So this is an extremely important decision-making body that has the powers to decide the military operations, procurement campaigns, and would be completely germane in a Taiwan context, which I'll get to in just a bit.

My reading of this, James, and I wonder if you had similar theories, is a factional reading, which is when I look at the configuration of the seven members of the CMC, five of them have been purged.

The only two remaining are Xi, who is the chairman.

Xi Jinping remains as the chairman, as well as his number two now, who was the anti-gruft leader.

guy at the CMC.

And this guy, Zhang Shengmin, he's still around.

The other five have been eliminated.

And the other five were largely, I think, evenly divided between two factions.

There was on the one hand, the Fujian faction of generals who largely came from the Fujian region.

So He Weidong, who was ousted a couple months ago back in October from the party, as well as the PLA, he was also a vice chairman of the CMC.

He was in a rival faction to Zhang Youxia, who was a Shaanxi faction leader and potentially led the Shaanxi faction within the CMC and the PLA.

All this is to suggest, I think, there was a balance of power.

Xi Jinping decided to get rid of one of these rival factions, the Fujian faction, by getting rid of a lot of these generals.

He then realized that his longtime friend Zhang was way too powerful.

because he was effectively the only general left standing of weight and standing in the CMC, and decided to take him down as well after he must have crossed him personally.

Hence the wording of the PLA party readout as well as the People's Daily readout about the investigation.

So we don't know the details, but I'm very skeptical that the Wall Street Journal is correct in their line that speculating, for instance, that it could be secrets leaked to the U.S., nuclear secrets.