Interview | Japan’s Top PLA Watcher: Xi Has No One Left to Tell Him No

Yusuke Anami (阿南友亮) is a professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Law, born in 1972, and holds a doctorate from Keio University's Graduate School of Law. His research focuses on Chinese politics and diplomacy. He is the author of《中国はなぜ軍拡を続けるのか》(Why China Continues to Expand Its Military), which received the 40th Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities and a special award at the 30th Asia Pacific Prize. He is widely regarded as a leading empirical scholar of contemporary China.

Anami spoke with Storm Media in an exclusive interview, drawing on his years of research into the People's Liberation Army to assess the evolving situation in the Taiwan Strait, the shifting dynamics of military governance under Xi Jinping, and the expectations many in Taiwanese society hold that Japan would come to Taiwan's defense in a crisis.

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Japan Accepts the Logic of Taiwan's Crisis. Dying for It Is Another Matter.

Anami notes that in the 2025 Liberal Democratic Party leadership election, Sanae Takaichi (高市早苗) won considerable support. He reads this as evidence that the concept promoted by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — that “a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency” — has gradually become a baseline consensus in Japanese security policy.

Should China's current pressure continue, Anami argues, Japan will move more formally toward strengthening its defense capabilities. But standing in the way is the constraint of Japan's constitution. Under current security legislation, Japan may exercise collective self-defense jointly with the United States — but the legal and political conditions for Japan to intervene independently in a Taiwan contingency, without U.S. involvement, do not yet exist.

For Taiwan, Anami says, playing the “Japan card” unilaterally is extremely difficult. The Japan Self-Defense Forces would participate in a Taiwan contingency only in support of U.S. forces, and only after Washington had effectively forced Tokyo to choose between joining the operation or risking the alliance itself.

He understands the emotional expectations many Taiwanese hold toward Japan, but is direct about the reality: Japan's involvement in any Taiwan scenario remains inseparable from the U.S.-Japan alliance framework. An independent Japanese intervention is, for now, essentially inconceivable.

At the same time, Anami notes that if Takaichi — who presents herself as heir to the Abe line — achieves a historic result in the 2026 lower house elections, it would reflect the depth of security anxiety China has generated in Japan, and could not rule out downstream effects on past diplomatic policies and legal frameworks.

Japan's postwar pacifism remains deeply rooted, Anami observes, but public consciousness is shifting toward a realism that acknowledges the previously unthinkable can happen — driven by the war in Ukraine and China's coercive attempts to alter the status quo by force.

Japanese society harbors no ambition to recolonize Taiwan, he says, but building consensus around shedding blood for another country will take time. Those who argue a Taiwan contingency has nothing to do with Japan are becoming a minority. Behind this unstable international environment, Anami adds, China is experiencing internal power shifts of a magnitude comparable to the 1971 Lin Biao incident.

The Last Man Who Could Tell Xi No Is Gone

Anami is unequivocal: the effective removal of Zhang Youxia (張又俠), vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, marks a historical turning point. Zhang should by all accounts have been among Xi Jinping's most trusted lieutenants.

He explains that the relationship between Xi and Zhang was grounded in the distinctive bond of the “red second generation” — their fathers, Xi Zhongxun (習仲勳) and Zhang Zongxun (張宗遂), had fought together in the Northwest as part of the First Field Army. It was through cultivating this officer, bound to him by rare genealogical loyalty, that Xi pushed through sweeping military reforms after 2015 and dismantled collective leadership norms and age-based retirement conventions that had previously constrained personal rule.

Anami notes that the First Field Army circle also included former Defense Minister Li Shangfu (李尚福), who alongside Zhang helped anchor Xi's position at the CMC. Zhang in particular was regarded as someone capable not merely of advising Xi, but of offering frank counsel that pushed back on the chairman's inclinations. （Related： Exclusive | The Iran Strikes Bought Taiwan Time. A Japanese General Says Use It ｜ Latest ）

With Zhang's removal, Anami warns, the institutional brake on Xi's decision-making has effectively failed. The PLA has lost one of the rare figures capable of providing dispassionate, technically grounded military advice while also commanding operations effectively. His analogy: the military is now like a team that has taken the field without a head coach.

​Xi Fired the Coaches. Now the Team Can't Play.

Among active military figures at the CMC, Anami argues, only Zhang Shengmin (張升民) — an official whose background is in the discipline inspection system — remains functionally active. This has created what he describes as an abnormal “two-man CMC,” a condition that reveals how severely military professionalism has been subordinated to political loyalty.

Anami frames the situation as analogous to a team preparing for the Olympics — in this case, a Taiwan contingency — that has dismissed all its experienced coaches and trainers, leaving the squad temporarily unable to compete.

Looking further ahead, Anami expresses deeper concern. With the removal of figures capable of applying institutional brakes on Xi's judgment, the chairman's subjective inclinations, personal ambitions, and potential misperceptions born of inadequate intelligence will find far less resistance before translating into military action. The risk of irrational escalation has reached an unprecedented level, he argues. （Related： Exclusive | The Iran Strikes Bought Taiwan Time. A Japanese General Says Use It ｜ Latest ）

On the successive purges of Li Shangfu and senior Rocket Force officers, Anami offers a specific interpretation: he believes the triggering factor was the leakage of classified information — including details about China's nuclear force development and the extent of corruption at its core — to the United States, producing what he describes as a profound sense of “humiliation.”

While outside commentary has largely framed the Li Shangfu case as a procurement corruption scandal, Anami suggests Xi's psychological response was far larger in scale. Officers he had personally elevated, men he trusted on the basis of shared revolutionary lineage, had allowed an adversary to obtain sensitive intelligence — undermining both Xi's authority and the credibility of China's nuclear deterrent.

Anami's assessment is that Xi likely moved to purge them with the emotional calculus of someone who, in the Chinese historical idiom, “weeps while executing a trusted general” — acting ruthlessly precisely because of the depth of the relationship betrayed.

China Counts Ships. America Counts Experience.

To understand why corruption within the PLA cannot be eliminated, Anami draws on the framework of prominent China scholar Minxin Pei (裴敏欣), arguing that the military's political commissar system is structurally the source of the problem. （Related： Exclusive | The Iran Strikes Bought Taiwan Time. A Japanese General Says Use It ｜ Latest ）

The PLA is not a national military but a party army, he explains. It operates with political commissars whose function is to monitor and evaluate loyalty to the Party rather than military competence. Advancement requires positive political assessments from commissars, but inner conviction cannot be quantified — and so the system has calcified around a transactional logic in which promotions are effectively purchased through gifts and bribes.

Anami describes the resulting cycle — paying commissars for favorable ratings to secure promotion — as the price the Communist Party has embedded into the system to maintain its grip on the military. No matter how loudly Xi calls for anti-corruption, as long as the commissar system remains intact, the structural advantage enjoyed by the pliable over the professionally competent will not change.

On aggregate measures of military balance, Anami urges considerable caution. China may claim numerical superiority in ships and aircraft, but whether those assets can be employed simultaneously in coordinated tri-service “joint operations” is an entirely separate question. The U.S. military accumulated more than 80 years of combat experience building that capacity; China only began reforming toward it in 2015 and remains, in Anami's characterization, a beginner.

30% of Every Soldier's Time Goes to Politics. The Rest Goes to Catching Up. （Related： Exclusive | The Iran Strikes Bought Taiwan Time. A Japanese General Says Use It ｜ Latest ）

The operational gap between U.S. and Chinese forces remains vast, Anami argues. American dominance is grounded in the sheer number of combat veterans within its ranks, continuous weapons and tactical refinement driven by battlefield experience, and a training system for officers, NCOs, and enlisted personnel that reflects actual combat conditions.

There is a tendency in Japan to assume that weapons determine the outcome of wars, he notes, but Anami insists the decisive variable — then as now — is people. PLA officers and soldiers, as members of a party army required to demonstrate loyalty to the Communist Party, devote roughly 30 percent of their time to political study. That structural drain prevents the force from approaching U.S. standards of military effectiveness.

On the technology side, Anami points out that a significant portion of China's weapons inventory remains derived from Russian designs. The vulnerabilities exposed by Russian-made systems in Ukraine — including communication fragility and low precision — may transfer directly to the PLA as weaknesses. In a modern, highly information-intensive conflict, he argues, numerical superiority does not translate automatically into victory. （Related： Exclusive | The Iran Strikes Bought Taiwan Time. A Japanese General Says Use It ｜ Latest ）

The Danger Isn't That Xi Wants War. It's That He Might Stumble Into One.

Anami argues that the Xi Jinping government has, in part, sought to redirect domestic discontent by pointing the military's gaze toward external adversaries — Taiwan, India, Japan. Yet that same military is caught in the dysfunctions produced by the personnel turmoil and corruption described above.

The current Chinese system, he says, is showing the limits of a Communist Party apparatus that still runs primarily on pre-modern patronage networks and financial relationships, without functioning mechanisms for objective personnel assessment. What demands the closest attention is not China's declared intentions but a structural reality: Xi's subjective judgment and personal emotions can translate directly into military action, with little rational institutional resistance.

Xi Jinping has voluntarily abandoned what Anami describes as the historically prudent strategy of “pursuing peaceful unification through economic interdependence,” choosing instead the extremely high-risk and strategically unintelligent path of military coercion — even at the cost of confrontation with the broader international community.

This irrationality, he argues, is the single greatest source of instability in the Taiwan Strait. As 2027 approaches as a strategic benchmark, Anami says, the appropriate posture is to prepare for contingencies triggered not by rational calculation but by an autocrat's unrealistic judgment.

He closes with a pointed note for Taiwan: it is important to continue watching Japanese political developments and changes in the U.S.-Japan alliance, but that attention should be grounded in cool-headed analysis of institutions and organizations — not emotional expectation.

​Original Article in Chinese

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