I'm a little skeptical of the claim in this @WSJ piece that top PLA general Zhang Youxia "leaked core technical data on China's nuclear weapons to the U.S."

I could be wrong and the "people familiar with a high-level briefing" could be right, but here are some questions and thoughts:

1. How would Zhang even do this? He would have to get these secrets from the China National Nuclear Corporation and transmit/hand them to an agent. But his communications are monitored and he rarely (if ever?) meets anyone unaccompanied. Would require a pretty vast conspiracy to go undetected for a long time. And for battle-hardened general to betray everything that gave his life meaning for last few decades. Possible, but very difficult. Unbelievable work by U.S. intelligence agencies, if true. (To be clear, I think the journalists believed their source in Beijing was telling the truth, what I'm curious about is whether the source actually knew the full extent of the truth.)

2. Some suggestions out there that this story is made credible by reports in 2023 that a Russian deputy defense minister told Xi that former foreign minister Qin Gang helped pass nuclear secrets to the West. Back then I found these reports highly questionable: how would Qin get anywhere close to nuclear secrets, given MOFA and the PLA are so stovepiped? And if this were true and known by Beijing, surely Qin would be purged rather than allowed to just resign from the Central Committee? Moreover, if I were Russian and had the info, I would keep it and use it to recruit Qin as a source.

3. Perhaps the nuclear accusations really were made at a briefing on Saturday! As the piece notes, internal accounts are not always true, and perhaps the really very incredible nature of purging Zhang meant that Beijing felt it needed to come up with the most serious story possible to justify his detention, even for serious but less sensational corruption and disloyalty. Maybe it's a justification. It would be a little extreme, even for Xi, but I think this is more believable.

4. A somewhat more plausible claim in the story is that Zhang accepted huge bribes to help Li Shangfu get promoted to the CMC in 2022. Still, this would require a shocking level of ignorance or bravado from both Zhang and Li given how politics has changed since 2012. It sounds exactly like so many of the pre-Xi corruption cases. I believe it's most likely that Zhang got caught up in the corruption scandals that have rocked the procurement bureaucracy over the last few years and which took down Li. His political sin would be corruption, covering for others in a corrupt conspiracy (already political-clique-type behavior), and betraying Xi's loyalty and trust by not implementing his vision for a cleaner and more capable fighting force.

5. The rest of the story is good! But the most scandalous details are consistent with rumors flying around financial circles in Beijing. These folks could be right, but they could just be spreading great stories. Not sure what, if anything, military/political elites are saying...

I welcome rebuttals to my doubts! I am am avid reader of both journalists who wrote this story, I'm just sharing these thoughts because studying Chinese elite politics is really difficult and I believe that debate helps us to get closer to confidence about the truth.

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