DeepSeek distilling Open AI?; Japan seizes PRC fishing boat; US-China; CIA video targets PLA; Spring Festival Internet cleanup

The newsletter will be off next week as all of China is on vacation for the long Spring Festival holiday. But if anything particularly interesting happens I will be back in your inbox, and of course you can always check in on the Sinocism chat. Happy Year of the Horse! 马年大吉!

I did an interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker magazine to discuss “Xi Jinping’s Purge and What Trump’s Foreign Policy Means for China“. It is behind the paywall, but here is an excerpt:

Q: Does the purging of Zhang Youxia make sense within this strategy, or does it seem like something new?

Zhang was promoted and thrived during the incredibly corrupt era of Hu’s leadership. He oversaw, for a period of time, the P.L.A.’s equipment department and its weapons-development and -acquisition programs, which, given how much the P.L.A.’s budget has increased over the past several decades, had massive graft opportunities. And, since that Gutian meeting, the C.C.P. has been rooting through the top ranks of the P.L.A. Now, the Central Military Commission has been reduced from seven members to Xi and one vice-chairman: Zhang Shengmin.

But why now, and why so quickly? That is something that I don’t have a great answer for. And I have not found anybody who has a great answer. Some people argue that, in order to make an accusation like this, you have to work up the vine, and you have to build cases, which becomes harder and harder the more senior they are. There are rumors that Zhang was building a putsch against Xi. But I think that’s bullshit, and ultimately we really don’t know. It is such a black box.

One theory behind Xi’s military purges you did not bring up was that he wants people who are in line with his foreign-policy priorities.

I talked about how he needed to clean out corruption because he wanted to build a professional fighting force. That is absolutely one of the reasons. It’s about the combination of control over the P.L.A. and ensuring the P.L.A. leadership has the right political standing or political positioning, but it is also about having an actually competent P.L.A. that has good weapons, and can fight. The leadership is constantly talking about fighting and winning. Xi’s stated goals for the P.L.A. are all about actually being able to fight and win wars and becoming

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