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Dante80 said:

Because corruption, grift and incompetence is endemic in the military and military industrial complex apparatuses of all nations. China is not a special snowflake on this one. Far from it. China's shit don't smell better.

There are two pretty big distinctions though.

1. In China, you will not get actual details and specifics about said corruption. grift or incompetence. The flow of information is strictly controlled by the state, and even when you do have something leak out, the state actively tries to suppress, misdirect or discredit for national security purposes. You won't get in China the equivalent of a deep dive investigative journalist crew like

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, for example. It is what it is.

2. In China, corruption, grift or incompetence actually result in material consequences for those involved. Sooner, or later. And heads roll, instead of getting rewarded for their crimes against the people.

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Point one is really irrelevant at best and part of the whole corruption in reality when in the west. The kind of western propaganda-poster brave independent investigative reporter doesn’t actually exist in real life other than literal 1 in a million unicorn flukes. The regular reporter just report what they are ordered/allowed to report, most are more than happy to bend the truth or outright lie to do it. Case in point, I have yet to see any such piece on the blindingly obvious corruption and incompetence within basically all of the Pentagon’s major procurement programmes.

Almost every project is delayed, vastly overpriced and usually not meeting core performance requirements, and not one single vaunted brave independent western investigative journalist can do one single piece on it?

Relying on reporters to protect you from systematic corruption and graft is like relying on wild foxes to guard your henhouse.

There is also a fundamental difference in how corruption and graft is handled in China compared to the west that goes a long way to explaining both how so many high rankers are usually swept up in such scandals, as well as how Chinese defence procurement can deliver the kind of undreamt of real world deliveries despite all the corruption cases.

In China, especially when it comes to government and defence related procurements, you won’t be allowed to weasel and fineprint your way out of trouble on some technicalities. You can have a bulletproof defence by western standards, but still get convicted if your intentions were dishonest and you benefited as a result of that dishonesty. Hell, you don’t actually even need to profit personally, if the state has suffered damages as a result of your actions, you are basically fucked if there is any hint of dishonesty or malicious compliance involved.

The bar is even higher for Chinese officials. It’s simply not good enough to say I did everything in my contract as a defence if shit went down under your watch. Often you can have honest officials get swept up for simply not going the extra mile to ask that obvious key question or follow up on something that just seemed a little fishy. Yes it can be harsh and unfair, but it does create an environment where everyone is constantly going the extra mile, just in case. And China as a nation benefits massively from that. That is also why a lot of the people who are caught up in such large cases don’t actually get career or life-as-they-know-it ending consequences if they are merely involved due to incompetence or laxity. It will massively derail your career, but it’s not something you cannot come back from.

Dante80 said:

Coming forward with news like this one is considered a priori damaging to the state and the party. This means the news had to come out.

I understand the possible Kremlinology take, but at the end of the day it is far easier and more straightforward to simply call a spade a spade.

Even a faintly defined one.

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It is what it is, but just to poke it a bit more. I'm still a relative newcomer to PLA watching. Does the PLA ever reveal the details of investigations or firings? I would think that at a certain point the details stop being as relevant. You can also redact details that are sensitive to the military itself, or to on-going/future investigations. There's also the interest of the party itself to protect itself from criticism by revealing details that would paint them in the best light.

Revealing very little is what leads to... the Kremlinology takes, where a particularly strong explanatory theory is that the details or large parts of the investigation are embarassing to certain individuals within the Party, and therefore buried from the public eye.

Understandably, it is often the case with China that any additional transparency is exploited/punished by Western punditry/government actors only for the purpose of critiquing the party/China even more, but surely for domestic audiences it's worth exposing more information.

HighGround said:

surely for domestic audiences it's worth exposing more information.

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honestly? no.
the test i would apply is: what would you do with the information if it was provided? i think the truth is, nothing tangible to the state.
and i say this as an american. we have all this access to what we feel is government transparency, yet the government is completely insulated from the effects of any of it. we are not part of the decisionmaking process. if you're not part of the decisionmaking process, what's the use in knowing the information at all?
all you are left with is government information as private capital for your personal gain. which really is what we're messing around with all the time in the us. its an industry. heck, that's me and you playing pretend geopolitics here. china doesn't want it to be an industry and you know what, maybe it's for the better.