Thursday Essay: What in the Actual Hell Is Going on in China?

If you ever thought you had a handle on what in the actual hell is going on in China, it was probably interrupted by a story like the recent disappearance of Yang Wei, the 62-year-old designer of China's top-of-the-line stealth fighter. The South China Morning Post — which in recent years largely serves as a mouthpiece for the CCP — reported in March that Yang's name is now scrubbed from the Chinese Academy of Sciences "amid a sweeping campaign to stamp out corruption in the defence sector." "

Corrupt" is how CCP mouthpieces describe people who displease or might someday prove a threat to Communist Party boss Xi Jinping. Some reports claim Yang is dead, but that's unconfirmed — so for now, treat his death as a rumor at best, mere X clickbait. The paper also noted that ”

Yang has not appeared in public for more than a year," and that "no explanation has been given for his absence, or for the removal of his name from the site." Yang seems to be an unperson — and he isn't the only recent disappearance from China's defense sector. Beijing has spent the last two years purging senior officers from its missile forces and investigating executives at its top aerospace firms.

What’s far less clear — but increasingly hard to ignore — is whether that same pressure extends to the engineers responsible for making those systems actually work. The SCMP also reported just two days after Yang's memory-holing that "controversy haunts" the "likely death of China’s hypersonic weapons expert Fang Daining." One week later, former Chinese aerospace executive Tan Ruisong was given a suspended death sentence over corruption and insider trading.

Maybe he was genuinely too corrupt for even Beijing to tolerate, or maybe Xi was just frustrated by his company's continued failures and delays in producing the kind of world-class jet engines demanded by Yang's J-20 stealth fighter. Thinly documented but still worth noting are recent and consistent social media reports of lower-level aerospace engineers vanishing from conference circuits, losing their institutional affiliations (vital in a communist hierarchy), and their publications disappearing down the old memory hole. Historically, Xi goes after "corrupt" generals and high-ranking executives, but he may now have widened the net to include engineers and scientists.

What does all of this say about the efficacy of China's best military gear? Don't get me wrong. I don't at all mean to imply that Communist China's People's Liberation Army is a paper dragon.

In fact, China shows more than a few indications of being — or at least trying to be — as imaginative as the Japanese were during World War II, or as the Soviets were in Tom Clancy's (still) excellent Red Storm Rising. But the poor performance of Chinese air defense systems — and by "poor," I mean, "they blowed up real good" — has even China-friendly nations rethinking their commitments. The National Interest last December reported on "the real reason" that Thailand chose Israel's Barak MX system for its air defense needs, following clashes with neighboring Cambodia.

As the magazine noted: "

It is more than likely that the Royal Thai Air Force, which is purchasing these Israeli systems, wants to overmatch whatever the Cambodians can threaten Thailand’s border regions with." Cambodia, of course, buys Chinese. Thailand made its decision weeks before Operation Absolute Resolve, and shortly after the Israeli Air Force made short work of Iran’s Chinese and Russian air defenses during the 12-Day War.

Both likely gave China’s usual export customers at least one second thought about their supplier. These are eye-opening developments for those of us concerned by how much China appears to have caught up with Western technology — particularly the high-tech aircraft and warships whose pilots and sailors would decide a Great Pacific War. My mistake — if I was wrong — was treating China's space program as a rough barometer for the country's military development. "

Space is hard," as you well know, and China's achievements took them, if not from 0-60, then at least from 0-50 in almost nothing flat. China didn't put a man into space until 2003, when taikonaut Yang Liwei boarded the Shenzhou 5 space capsule atop a Long March 2F rocket, and completed 14 orbits before returning safely to Earth. Beijing launched its first space lab, Tiangong-1, just eight years later, and used it to practice rendezvous, docking, and short stays until 2018.

In orbit from 2016-2019, Tiangong-2 was a more ambitious effort, proving that China could resupply a space lab and maintain crews for much longer stays. For the last five years, China has operated and continuously manned the Tianhe, a full-fledged modular space station. Just like on the West's larger International Space Station, crews work on six-month rotations, and perform space walks, research, robotic arm operations, and gain insight into long-term space habitation.

China is the only country to return samples from the far side of the moon, and these days it seems possible that a taikonaut will set foot on Luna before another American astronaut does. It might be difficult for a Westerner to admit, but China's space program so far proves that the country has mastered extremely difficult arts and sciences with clear military applications. There's rocketry (missiles), materials science (stealth applications), precision (targeting), high-risk logistics (amphibious invasions), autonomous systems (AI and military robotics), and the kind of reliability required for sustained military operations.

Surely, the country that can do all that can build a "good enough" stealth fighter like the Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon. Well, maybe not, if Yang Wei's demotion to "unperson" is any indication. But before I get all the way into that, let's look at what I mean by "good enough."

Every new type of fighter jet is engineered with a series of necessary compromises, even gold-plated miracle platforms like the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II. One compromise similar to both American fighters is that they were given "short legs," that is, a short combat radius. The Pentagon's assumption was that they'd most likely be used in Europe or the Middle East, and with access to nearby friendly airbases.

The fact that the Pacific is fricken yuge and that China was a rising world power was either forgotten or ignored by the people in charge of both projects. For needed perspective, here's a map of the Pacific Ocean with its vast stretches of zero friendly airbases, and where China may one day contest our very presence. Don't even get me started.

China, on the other hand, seems to have designed its premier stealth fighter, the J-20, with the size of the Pacific Ocean — and our jets' short legs — firmly in mind. The Mighty Dragon is optimized for frontal stealth, likely in part due to its sheer size, materials, and manufacturing constraints, and known weaknesses in the country's jet engine technology. Even then, the J-20's frontal stealth is compromised when its large canard wings rotate out of the neutral position during rapid maneuvers.

But the jet has a couple of things going for it.