The CCP maintains absolute control over the military. Frankly I don't buy the idea that the Party leadership did not know about the shootdown. There are factions and politics within the Party leadership, with corresponding factions within the Army. Some are more aggressive than others in the foreign policy realm. There may have been some disagreement between one faction with another over whether the shootdown was the right thing to do, but overall the shootdown fits with a broader CCP move towards reminding the U.S. that China maintains an aggressive deterrence capability.Tequila, I've never been to China, but can we really gauge their military by analyzing the CCP? Doesn't their military have more of a free hand vis-a-vis political control than ours? The weather satellite shoot-down comes to mind; the pols over their seemed caught off guard. Can we afford to be wrong?
That the CCP could force the military to divest itself from its enormous Egypt-like economic empire in the 1990s and early 2000's shows, IMO, who still has control. I agree that the professionalization of the PLA has distanced it from civil society and the CCP to an extent, but they still are under the full control of the Party.
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