July 8, 2025: One thing that prevents a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan by forces is corruption. In China and Taiwan corruption is pervasive and crippling. This is regularly demonstrated every time China or Taiwan dismiss officers for corruption.

Corruption in government, military and economy are still an issue, as has been the case for thousands of years. Corruption was reduced for about a decade after the communists took control in 1949 and the surviving Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan. In the following decades the corruption revived and returned stronger than ever. The corruption in the military was so debilitating that Chinese leaders believed China could not regain control of Taiwan using its current military. This became evident when President Xi recently inspected the rocket forces established to regain Taiwan and found most of the missiles were inoperable because of corruption within the procurement bureaucracy.

Assuming the corruption could be made to disappear, it would still take several years before a Taiwan attack could be attempted. Additional forces and weapons must be created without yet another reform effort being crippled by corruption. That sounds unlikely, but Chinese President Xi knows what he is up against and declares that he can make it happen. Chinese and Western historians point out that Chinese military incompetence and military corruption have been the standard for thousands of years. The corruption only abates if China is invaded. This should give Taiwan an advantage, if it were not for the equally corrupt Taiwanese military officers. Taiwanese assume that the relatively uncorrupt Americans, Japanese and South Koreans would come to their aid. That only works if China is unable to take Taiwan quickly. Neither the Chinese or Taiwanese believe a quick conquest is possible. While corruption weakens Taiwanese defenses, it is also the main reason why China is unlikely to attempt an invasion.

It requires a major political effort to turn the corruption problem around and such efforts are often unachievable. Most wealthy Chinese know this and many have, at great expense, obtained foreign passports and moved some of their assets overseas as a form of insurance against another government collapse and possible civil war. That’s the way China has worked, and malfunctioned, for thousands of years. The Chinese Communist Party or CCP is seen as just another dynasty that prospered for a while and then failed. Chinese leaders pay attention to the thousands of years of Chinese history and cycles that continue to repeat.

It’s difficult for the Chinese and Taiwanese to deal with the many corrupt generals and admirals. All this corruption weakens the military. Finding enough honest junior officers to be promoted is difficult. This is a critical situation for the CCP, because Chinese soldiers and officers take an oath to defend the CCP which, in turn, is responsible for doing what must be done to rule the country effectively. After some reforms in the 1980s, the new relationship between the CCP, the military and the economy appeared to work for a few decades until it didn’t.

The Chinese military is an enormous collection of four separate services that provide employment for over two million Chinese. The military is officially called the People's Liberation Army or PLA and contains four separate services: the Ground Force, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Rocket Force. Between 2003 and 2005 the PLA reduced its peacetime strength by half a million personnel, from 2.5 million to about 2 million. Most of the reductions were in non-combat ground forces. This made it possible for more money to be spent on naval, air, and strategic missile forces. This was part of the Chinese shift from a large, low-tech, ground force to a military with the capability to operate far from the Chinese mainland, mainly in the South China Sea.

The Ground Force is the largest in terms of manpower, with nearly a million personnel in twelve group armies (equivalent to a Western corps) sequentially numbered from the 71st Group Army to the 83rd Group Army. These armies are distributed to each of the five theater commands, with each command receiving two to three group armies. In wartime, numerous reserve and paramilitary units can be mobilized to reinforce the group armies. The ground forces reserve component comprises approximately 510,000 personnel divided into thirty infantry and twelve anti-aircraft divisions.

The Navy was, until the 1990s, subordinate to the ground forces. Since the 1990s the navy has undergone rapid modernization. The 300,000 navy personnel are distributed to three fleets, the North Sea Fleet headquartered at Qingdao, on the Yellow Sea between northeastern China and the Korean Peninsula, the East Sea Fleet headquartered at Ningbo, north of Taiwan, and the South Sea Fleet headquartered in Zhanjiangn adjacent to Hainan Island and the South China Sea.

The navy includes a seven-brigade Marine Corps with 25,000 troops. There is also a naval aviation force with 26,000 personnel operating and maintaining several hundred attack helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. For over a decade China has been seeking to create a naval force that can operate on the high seas far from the Chinese coast. China has never had a high seas navy before because it was seen as more important to control coastal waters.

The Air Force has 395,000 personnel organized into five Theater Command Air Forces that share 24 air divisions.   As of 2024, a new system has been established, consisting of 11 Air Corps Bases controlling air brigades. Bomber divisions, and a few special mission units remain divisions. Each air division has 2 or 3 aviation regiments. Each regiment has between 20 and 36 aircraft. An Air Brigade has 24 to 50 aircraft.

There is also an air defense component called the Surface to Air Missile or SAM Corps that consists of divisions and brigades. There are also three airborne divisions consisting of air force personnel trained as parachute infantry.

The Rocket Force has 120,000 personnel and operates nuclear and conventionally armed strategic missiles. China is believed to have between 300 and 500 nuclear warheads. The Rocket Force maintains seven bases. Six are assigned to the six theater commands while the seventh stores and maintains the nuclear warheads.

All these numbers are very impressive, until you factor in the rampant corruption among Chinese and Taiwanese officers. The more senior these officers become the more corrupt they are. Every year China announces the arrest and prosecution of corrupt officers. It’s a similar, but lesser problem in Taiwan. The most effective defense Taiwan is the rampant corruption in the Chinese military.