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Oct. 21, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:56
WarRoom Battleground EP 873: President Xi Purges Top Military As Speculation Hints At Failed Coup
Participants
Main voices
a
ava chen
08:07
b
ben harnwell
16:18
f
forrest zhou
06:19
j
jim fanell
10:59
Appearances
j
jim rickards
04:22
Clips
j
jake tapper
00:10
s
steve bannon
00:45
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
steve bannon
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The people have had a belly full of it.
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It's going to happen.
jake tapper
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MAGA media.
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steve bannon
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unidentified
War room.
Here's your host, Stephen Khan.
ben harnwell
Monday 20th of October, Anno Domini 2025, Harnwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's war room.
Well, the big news coming out today is from Beijing from China with the fourth plenary.
And apparently uh the Emperor, the guy we were told just last year was now effectively destined to rule for life in China, has some internal problems he's going to resolve or need to resolve.
We'll be with the new federal state guys a little later on in the show for the personal dynamic there and what's going on.
But first of all, we're going to talk to the two people I know have the most insights on China, the two gyms, Captain Jim Fennel and Jim Ricards.
Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the show.
Tell me, this is this is a yearly event, the plenary.
Um this is the fourth plenary, which is I I think uh they have like these yearly mini plenaries that that that last between the five-year quinquennial.
200 of the most leading communists in China gathering together.
Jim Rickards, why don't you open?
Tell us exactly what has happened and uh to President Xi.
I I gather he's now having to report to a superior group.
Is this a temporary thing?
Is he gonna fight back?
Is he going to purge the people who've tried to put him on a chain?
Tell me the news.
What's happened today?
jim rickards
Well, there's definitely a struggle going on between the Xi faction, but you know, the uh Zhang Xia Min and Hu Jin Tao factors never completely went away.
They were they were squashed by Xi, they were marginalized, etc.
They won't Shanghai base, but they never completely went away.
They're they're now re-emerging.
The PLA is asserting war power, Xi's power is being diminished, but that doesn't mean he's weak or he's done.
What's interesting, Ben, is to put this in in the context of 3,000 years of Chinese history.
And I can give you, I give you the short version for 3,000 years.
China centralized the centralized centralizes.
The empire grows, becomes peak centralized, and then it falls apart.
You have the War in Kingdoms period, uh, you have Warlord periods, uh, multiple dynasties in different parts of China.
Then it consolidates again.
This is like an accordion.
It gets uh more centralized and then falls apart.
So one of the easiest predictions I've ever made was a few years ago when Ji got maximum power, where he started to talk about Xi Jinping thought uh on a part with Mao Zedong thought, uh, he got a third term.
Uh no one had ever had more than two terms before, at least since uh since Mao Zedong, etc.
I said, okay, that's peak centralization.
This is all gonna fall apart.
And it is in the process of doing that, and it's bigger than just X standing with uh with the power bureau and with the generals.
That's very important, and I think uh uh Captain uh I think James knows a lot more about that than I do.
Um but in addition to everything we just described, the economy is falling apart.
Their GDP is down significantly, that they admit, take two points off because they lie about it, maybe take another point off for uh investment which counts to GDP, but if you build a ghost city and no one's there, yeah, you got steel and concrete and copper and cement and all jobs and all that, but there's nowhere there.
An accountant would require you to write that off immediately.
So the gi there's a dollar shortage, uh, the banks are suffering, credit losses are going up.
So the economy is, I don't want to say imploding, that's a little bit of an overstatement, but the economy is collapsing very quickly on top of all the politics we just discussed.
ben harnwell
Um, I get the point that such a large country, large in terms of population, large in terms of economy, can't really be centrally commanded by one guy.
And you did absolutely call it when you said that this is now going to be overcentralized.
But when you say that there are different factions and rivalries here, what amazes me was last year when we were watching this, when as you say Xi had his unprecedented, in modern terms, third term.
The very day I think he was he was he was granted that.
They walked, it was Hu Jinta.
They they walked, if if maybe says me correctly, they walked him out, didn't they?
They literally walked in.
And you saw him bewildered.
Uh as he was much.
We never found out exactly what that was.
They said at the time it was some kind of medical emergency, which would probably be news to Hu Jinta himself.
But tell me then, Jim Rickards, continue this point, if you wouldn't mind.
Um, tell me how these factions are still bubbling under the surface if their exponents uh have been defense fed.
jim rickards
Well, uh what happened to who that was a public humiliation.
There's just no other explanation for it.
They they could have done a lot of different ways, disembodied and whatever.
Uh it was humiliated in public.
But uh these factions, as I described them, are more than just the leaders.
They have the Zhang Xia Men died uh, I think 10 years ago, but it's his followers, it's his supporters, etc.
They they had their own clubs, their own organizations.
They're suppressed to a point.
I was in uh Hong Kong not long ago, but it was uh Asian societies of the top, you know, the top leaders in in Hong Kong.
I've been on Hong Kong for 40 years.
Uh it was the first time someone took me aside and said, be careful what you say.
Uh and I never, I mean, I was at a table, a fairly small group, and they were praising Xi Jinping, et cetera.
And I said, whatever happened to Boji Lai, and they just they just they uh they froze, you know, I don't mention that name around here, but the but the truth is we don't know if he's dead or not, but in some ways these he was in uh Shangcheng, but in some ways these factions don't go away, they keep their head down, but they re-emerge at certain times, and that's what's happening now.
ben harnwell
Jim, I know you've got to bounce, just uh stay with us for five more minutes, if you wouldn't mind.
I know you're uh on an interesting um mission in Slovenia right now, but just hang with this for five minutes if you wouldn't mind.
I know you have uh government business to attend to.
Captain Fanel, what can you tell me about the the inner intra-China power dynamics that that are taking place right now at the fourth plenary?
jim fanell
Yeah, Ben, uh I I don't disagree with what Jim has said to the extent that uh there's no question that there are the various factions within the Chinese Communist Party.
I think my uh my issue is to the degree with which those factions have a real substantive impact on Xi's ability to have control.
Uh, for instance, and I mentioned this in the morning segment, you know, this uh purge of these nine generals that hit on Friday that's really raised this issue uh before the plenum.
Uh those were being discussed over the last year, and some of the first uh purges were occurring.
And this is something that's occurred throughout Xi's 12 years of rule, and it gets to the heart of his efforts to reform not just the party, but the PLA.
And so he's done over 12 years massive changes to the PLA, especially in 2015 and 2016.
And so what we see right now is uh the economy is weak, as Jim said, there are factional problems.
We're at this point where if there's going to be a discussion about these kinds of uh factional disputes, it'll come in this this plenum.
And what I think Xi did was he cleaned out the PLA, those that were party members that were going to be in uh this uh party congress to clean them out so that they were not in present at the event, so there would be no kind of uh event like you saw with Hu Xing Tao, and that he could have total control over the process to be able to set the 15, five-year plan.
And so I think that's kind of where we're at.
And when it comes to the military aspect, you know, throughout if you go back and you follow our analysis of the Soviet Union, we always looked at leadership and intentions and we looked at capabilities.
And in this case, when you look at the PRC, we can examine leadership, and we had you know rumors from the kind of The same sources saying that Xi had a stroke over the last couple of months.
Yet we continue to see Xi very much present in the international stage last week, meeting with international women's uh global women's forum and meeting many, many people.
So those rumors kind of don't come true.
Also, X not having control of the party.
If you go back to June and July, these rumors were existing that Xi was losing control of the PLA.
Yet who was leading the big uh PLA parade in Beijing this last month?
It was Xi.
So I I would put that in the leadership bucket.
And then in the military capabilities bucket, as I mentioned in the morning segment, we are seeing a continual uninterrupted trajectory, a strategic trend line of PLA modernization, growth in capabilities, and in expanding operations.
Now, Jim mentioned that maybe that's to show the flag and to be kind of uh aggressive because they got these problems at home.
That's possible.
Uh but my assessment is looking at their military, that this is a natural progression to meet Xi's global defense initiative, where he wants a global security initiative, that he wants to have a global military.
So we'll find out in the next week.
If Xia is still in power a week from today, we'll know that maybe these rumors weren't true.
If he's gone, then that'll be uh something that we'll have to face.
ben harnwell
Um I realize that China isn't a monolith, that there are different currents.
So there is it's very easy to take uh a party, single party structure like the CCP from outside the country externally, and just think of it as a monolithic structure.
I realize that it's not, and there are different trends and currents going on there.
Much of what we see taking place behind the scenes for obvious reasons to do with stability, um domestic political stability.
But one would have thought that after 10 years of being quite a hands-on kind of guy, she would have succeeded already in eliminating opposition.
And I gather some of the generals that have been perhaps are his own appointees.
Tell me, does that indicate that as time goes on?
It's not just a case that he hadn't selected he hadn't cleaned out the system it in his first 10 years.
Is it perhaps, Captain Fennel, the situation that the more he goes on, the more his third term in office uh goes on, and we'll we'll see whether it finishes within a week or whether it goes on for longer.
The resistance, the internal resistance to him within the CCP itself is actually growing.
Is that where the opposition is coming from?
Uh it it is a it it is a growing spontaneous reaction to his rule.
jim fanell
I it it's possible that that's part of it, uh, but I think it's more endemic.
I think Jim talked about the the you know the thousand years of history, and there's an old saying that you know, uh in the in the center is the rule, and out in the hinterlands, there's you know, they can't control everything.
And so what I think is what Xi is running up against is thousands of years of dynastic uh evolution where people uh make money through corruption and uh uh clinging to bits and pieces of power.
We see it in our own country, it's part of human nature.
And so what I think is is that uh Xi is having to continue to continually find and root out uh corruption in the party in order to achieve his global initiatives.
And so I think he has a global Marxist-Leninist view of how he wants the PRC to rule the world, and he knows that he can't get there if the people under him are corrupt and not following uh through with pure party loyalty.
ben harnwell
Captain Fanel, stand by I'm gonna come back to you on this point in just a moment.
Jim Mikovich, before you go, just answer me this question because my reading of China was basically the corruption was built in.
When you see people being picked out and removed from the system because of corruption, that is simply a public presentation uh for domestic consumption because everyone has their hand in the till.
Um, and it's for other reasons that they're being moved out, probably political disloyalty.
Give me your reading on that, will you?
jim rickards
Yep, I agree with that.
I think I think they're all corrupt.
Uh literally all of them, maybe one or two exceptions, but they're basically all corrupt.
And so when you hear corruption charges being announced, it's uh completely um it's opportunistic and it's political.
In other words, you're all corrupt, but I I like you five, but you two are don't.
So I'm going to announce uh an investigation or corruption charges against the two.
Is it's a way to get rid of people, it's a way to again humiliate them publicly, but it's not like they're the only corrupt ones and they're rooting out corruption.
What they're doing is they're using corruption as a way to root out people for other reasons, and that's political.
And then is uh as uh Captain Fanel said, uh, you have to then look behind the curtain and say, okay, why you who appointed you?
Why are you being kicked out?
Why now?
Uh corruption, as I say, is just an excuse.
ben harnwell
Jim Ricards, I know towards the end of this show, um, I'm gonna read out the the details of where people can go to get hold of strategic intelligence.
But on in terms of social media, uh, where do people get where do folk get hold of your analysis, which is world rated, it is first rate.
Where do people go on social media?
jim rickards
Yeah, thank you.
Uh, on uh XM at Real Jim Rickers at Real Jim Records.
Uh, I also have a website, the uh James Records Project.com, where you can uh find all my books and uh you know a few background uh details.
Thank you.
ben harnwell
Jim, I'll let you bounce.
Thanks.
Thanks for staying with us, and we'll catch up with you throughout the rest of the week.
How long do you need to levina for?
jim rickards
I'm here for a couple of days and I'm going down to uh Majigoria.
I haven't been there, so uh well, I want to go there before the whole world shows up.
ben harnwell
Of course.
Then um then keep us keep us briefed.
Thanks, Jim.
Take care.
God bless.
unidentified
Thanks.
ben harnwell
Captain Fennel, we'll be back with you in just a moment.
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Captain Fennel, before you were just saying something about the the communist political currents going on uh within the CPP at the moment, it's sometimes it acts as if it's just a political organization and the Marxism is a political front.
Um, but it's only superficial.
And other times it appears, especially in terms of the the way they run the party, the political police state that it is, it's very much uh in the Soviet model.
Can you tell me a bit more about how that might move forward if she should be removed within let's say because we were mentioning earlier on the show, let's let's say within the next week, but even if it's a bit longer than that, even if it's a few months or something.
Will that be will they be kicking him out to make sure that the regime itself goes on, or will they be kicking him out because actually it's revolution time and time for the whole thing to be overthrown?
jim fanell
Well, that's a great question.
And I would say that the party itself, if it's in this kind of turmoil to the extent that they remove Xi, uh, you know, it'll be very hard for us to predict exactly who will replace him.
There are the there are speculations that this General Zhang, who's the other vice minister of or a vice chair of the Central Military Commission.
If he's the one that's really moving the chess pieces around, and he's a strong proponent of the PLA and all these PLA activities that we've seen ramp up, especially towards Taiwan in the last three years.
If he's the generator of all this, then we should be standing by for some very serious uh potential for an invasion of Taiwan.
On the other hand, there's the factions that may say, hey, we've gone too far, the economy is being destroyed, and we need to pull back our uh, you know, pull back a bit in terms of our uh aggressiveness, and let's get keep our economy going and let's try to repair the damage that Xi did economically.
So it's kind of two-pronged, I would say those are the two major prongs on where it could go.
Again, I still believe that Xi's in power, and that to me suggests that there's a longer continuity between Mao all the way to uh Xi, that is, they've all had the same agenda, which is to restore in their minds China to this global Marxist uh world power.
The other leaders couldn't do it because they didn't have the economy, they didn't have the military, uh Hu, uh Zhang, and and Deng didn't have it.
Uh, Mao didn't have it, but he was so uh, you know, he was kind of a different kind of a person.
So Xi's adopted Mao's kind of aggressiveness, but he now has the tools to do it.
So again, it's really a matter of what will what will we see in this next week?
I think we'll get a really clear signal.
I mean, if he's not, if he's not mentioned or talked about, or he has diminished in any way.
I don't think the party can, I don't think he, if he if he's under struggle for power, he's not gonna accept uh some kind of partial agreement.
He's either going to say, I'm the leader or I'm not.
And that's my assessment of what we would see in the next week.
So if we see him, we're gonna see this continuity towards his agenda of this global domination.
ben harnwell
He's an interesting figure, isn't he?
Um as I understand it, he he very much sees it as his vocation.
Let me use that word, as his vocation to restore the communist party as the cultural heart of China, the one party system.
He's very loyal to that system.
Um, even though it sort of it didn't, you know, it didn't do very much good to hit his father when he was a kid growing up, right?
He his father fell out of favor in a big way.
Um but Xi himself is very keen on his beliefs that the glue that holds China together is the is the is the party, is the communist part.
So you have that on the one hand, but on the other hand, the actual ideology, the communism behind the older.
I don't know how much that permeates his thinking.
I think he is more communist than say someone like Hu Xin Tao.
Um, because the party sort of the party's strength had very much been waning up until Xi Jinping.
Well, just give me two minutes on that dynamic and what it might mean for the future of the the CCP as a one-party state moving forward without without Xi Jinping there pushing that with the force of his personality.
jim fanell
Right.
I mean, clearly, as you described it, Xi is more red than any other uh uh Paramount leader that China's had in its history since Mao.
And uh he has pushed through uh, you know uh uh kind of a top-down again control of the economy uh that you know Deng uh and Hu didn't have.
I mean, he has been pushing for the state-owned enterprises and the control of the economy, centralized control and the importance of these five-year plans.
And he is now in a position to where he's also in charge of the PLA, and he's been in charge of the PLA, and he's inclined to use the PLA much more often.
I mean, as we we talk about in military in the military arena, the Chinese military aircraft, jet aircraft, never cross the center line between the mainland and Taiwan.
They did it four times in 60 years, and after 2020, they're doing it hundreds of times a year.
So there's a there's a uh a party unity that he's bringing where it's very much you know, centrally controlled, going to achieve the great rejuvenation of China, which is his phrase.
We're gonna have the great rejuvenation of China, we're gonna make China this global power, and we're gonna replace the United States.
So we're gonna attack on all fronts.
They call it comprehensive national power.
We're gonna go after economic reforms or economic power uh through the way we run the Belt and Road Initiative.
We're going to uh do what they just did with this tariffs on rare earth elements.
There that doesn't seem to have any fear of the United States, maybe that they had when Deng was in in power.
And so now you see red tourism.
It's big in China.
People going to see uh the places where the Chinese Communist Party uh in their history of the establishment of the PRC.
That's a big item.
He's pushing it across all fronts.
And it seems to be taking on a kind of a populist patriotism inside China, not as the ancient Chinese civilization per se, but he's even embraced religion in certain areas and brought religion back in.
That's something that Mao didn't do during the Cultural Revolution.
So he's very adept at this.
ben harnwell
We we we've got about two minutes left.
Can you just tell me?
Because we've not spoken about Ukraine right now as a dynamic of what's going on.
Um and you can see that she's trying to wet wear down on every metric possible of the United States from being an opposition and a restraining force on him and his ambitions.
Tell me just what would happen to this friendship without limits between China and Russia should she be replaced.
jim fanell
Well, that's that's been the greatest strategic failure of the Biden administration was this rabid uh obsession with calling Trump uh an agent of Russia, and we drove in a way uh China or Russia into China's arms.
Now there's a natural economic relationship there, uh but there is a larger, and we've talked.
I mean, people talk about this as historic animosity or distrust between China and Russia.
So the idea that if we could get Putin and Russia to kind of uh pull back a bit from China and not be so reliant upon them, if we could do that, that would be great.
Uh, but I think China's very well uh entrenched themselves economically, militarily into the Russian sphere, and I don't see it happening right now.
And I that's my biggest uh fear is that Russia and China continue to stay linked together, and their military operations have only increased over the last two decades.
If you go back to twin 2005, when they first started the Shanghai cooperation organization, and they would do some of these military exercises, the Russians would come back and laugh about the Chinese military.
Now they don't.
They work closely together, and it's the Chinese that are setting some of the standards in certain areas in certain fields.
And so and now China's been supplying obviously funding to Russia through the purchase of oil, but also we're getting the reports of sending in uh uh drones and all kinds of other kinds of munitions that we probably don't know about, and their relationship with North Korea and bringing North Korea into that that dynamic has also been just China's doing it, in my opinion.
ben harnwell
Just give me 30 seconds on this.
Um is it possible that the international community inverted commerce might try uh and persuade a new leader of China to enter the international community and not be a stranger?
Or is China in and of itself such a threat to the rest of the world that that would that that wouldn't really be feasible?
jim fanell
It's definitely the former.
I think living here in Europe, I see the EU enamored with the PRC and trying to make a deal with them as opposed to holding them to account like I think President Trump is doing.
ben harnwell
So you think actually if the regime were to replace Xi Jinping, that might actually be a step closer, the normalization.
Let's call it that.
The normalization might actually be something easier for the evil regimes here in Europe to confect.
jim fanell
I think so.
unidentified
Yes.
ben harnwell
Jim Fennel, where do people go to keep up with your analysis on this point?
jim fanell
I I don't do social media, that's kind of something that you laugh about, but I do write for American greatness every once in a while.
unidentified
And uh that's that.
ben harnwell
Captain Fellow, very, very grateful.
Thanks for staying with us for the first half of this show, and we'll catch up again with you soon.
Go bless her.
unidentified
Thank you, Ben.
jim fanell
Appreciate it.
unidentified
Stand by, folks.
ben harnwell
We'll be back in two minutes.
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ben harnwell
Welcome back.
Well, I've got Ava Chen and Forrest Zhao from the new federal state of China here to explore some of the themes that we discussed in the first half of the show in a little more detail.
Guys, thanks for coming on.
I'm especially interested in some of the in inner dynamics of the CCP and the power struggle that seems to be taking place in front of our very eyes right now.
Even though the rest of the Western media doesn't seem to be paying that much attention to this.
Tell me more about what happened on Friday.
I I gather there was a significant military purge uh in all of the branches that sort of Navy, armed forces, the Air Force.
Uh tell let's start off a bit about that, Ava.
Why don't you tell me?
You're telling me in the break, tell me some more about what happened on Friday uh of last week.
ava chen
For sure, and this is just the three days ahead of the opening of the four's plan and sessions, in a sense, a strong message.
So I wanted to get out and let people know that she right now has the power.
That's why you saw the top uh PLA generals, nine of them, and all of them are personally picked by Xi Jinping himself.
And one of the particular prominent generos among the nine are two of them.
One is Ho Wei Dong, and he's the vice chair of the CMC.
Uh CMC stands for the Central Military Commission.
That's the highest decision-making body of the army of the PLA inside the Communist Party.
So, of course, Xi Jinping himself is the chair, and he has two vice chairs.
And Ho Wei Dong, the one just got purged, um, is uh the one of the two vice chairs.
But the other one is Miao Hua.
Miao Hua is also a very prominent person, and all of them has uh histories with Xi Jinping goes back to 20 years ago when Xi Jinping was the party depute uh deputy secretary and govern a governor for the Fujian province.
And they that's why they gained trust from Xi Jinping, and that's exactly why Heidong was uh nominated to take a seat on the CMC in 2022, which is quite surprising move because at that time he was previously was the Eastern commander and a lot of the party rule uh by moving him up so quickly, Xi Jinping actually broke uh the unwritten party norms.
But however, what we just saw three days ahead of the opening of the force plenum, she basically purged the person he used to entrust to secure his rule, and including Mao Hua as well, because Miao Hua, um, all the the other generals uh in the in the batch has somehow related to Miao Hua.
Either they served together uh in the past or either they come from the same province, the Fujian province.
So this actually sending a huge message because a lot of people say, oh, look at somebody you're done doing this to Xi Jinping, so Xi Jinping's power is weakening.
No, that's not right.
She she is very safe right now, okay?
By purging all those people he perceived a threat to him.
He's actually even more concentration, his power.
But I think this is a history in play itself.
We all know where the dictator ends.
Because power builds on feel inevitably collapse.
And the tighter his grip grows becomes, and the closer he's close to his downfall.
ben harnwell
Okay, let me um let me push on that one a little bit more.
Okay.
Forrest, what is the view in China when the president, the Secretary General of the Party, the president of the country, purges his own nominees from the from the party hierarchy?
Does not does that not indicate that he's panicking somewhat?
We're very used to seeing someone like Xi, who doesn't who's sort of if If anything, he's sort of very cautious in the when he acts, he's very he thinks a lot.
Nothing chaotic, nothing out of place.
It's it's almost as if he's the embodiment of process.
When he purges his own appointees like this, does it not look as if he's made a a misjudgment somewhere along the line?
forrest zhou
No, actually, it this is uh nothing new to the Chinese people or let's see uh communist the countries.
If you if you you see Stalin and the Mao Zadong, they all purchase their own generals.
Stalin almost killed every top general around him.
So that's that's that's kind of common in in the communist dictatorship uh controls.
Because there is no trust.
There's nobody you can trust in this type of system.
Nobody is safe, including Xi himself.
That's why the moment he sees anything, he started anything, he will purge, it will purge his people changing to the new blood, which he thinks he can trust.
Maybe later on he will have any other doubts, and then other people try to take uh the position from Xi, and then there will be uh the killing and the purge happening again.
So there is nothing new happen uh this this kind of purge happening in China, whether it's from Mao or Deng to uh to Xi.
This is happening all along, and the Chinese people know all the charges, all the fake charge, whether it's uh robbery or corruption, it's all it's nothing real.
The real thing is the political and the purge.
That's what the real thing happening in China.
It's nothing new to the Chinese people or to the party members.
ben harnwell
Hey, but tell me after seeing this, if if this is nothing new to the Chinese people, what might the Chinese be expecting right now as they're sitting watching these events unfold?
And what does what are they drawing from the fact that this purge took place just sort of three days before this meeting uh the high point when all the place is focused?
Uh how are these things being received?
ava chen
Okay, so if you look at how this time it was done, it was a purge first and then the plenar meeting.
But if you look back to the history in 2014 and 2024, uh Xi Jinping had done it reversely, he he had opened the political conference work for the military, and then uh started the purge.
So, but this time he reversed it.
So tells you that the purge is urgent.
So, according to the new federal state of China's Intel, and this is probably you were not here anywhere else, and our intel suggest the reason why the Xi Jinping has to act right away, is this is a failed coup.
Okay, so these generals who um Xi Jinping has personally picked, put it in those high uh ranking uh uh CCP military ranks, and now are turning against Xi.
Okay, so this is tells you as what uh Forrest mentioning about how but Bruto the system is.
It's a crudie that Xi understood himself, because if you look at the history, whether it's a Stalin, the Soviet Union, where the communist ideology and practice come from, and in terms of the Mao, and as as forest dimension, Stalin every night he would have a list of people to kill the Great Purge 1977 to 1938, and then never stopped continuing with 1940s.
So there's a list of people that he wants to strike, okay?
And then and he would have given to a general to executing on those people, and the next day the person who executing the people on the list were on the list himself.
So this is how but how brutal the communist system has always been.
And look at Mao.
Mao basically killed all the all the all the buddies, all the other comrades that are fighting against the Guoming Dan and so-called the Japanese invader together, but all of them are purged and killed by ruthlessly by Mao.
Xi Jinping is basically repeating the same history.
And don't forget, communist system is a very low trust system, okay?
Because everybody is scheme schemed and plotting on against everybody else.
This is why uh Xi Jinping cannot trust anybody.
And think about the only person left, the vice chair of the CMA.
What position he will be in?
What he's thinking about.
He understood all the history, okay, all the history of communists, and again and again played again again.
So sh can she trust him?
Of course, no.
Can he trust Xi?
Of course no.
This is exactly where I think the West has an opportunity to apply the right pressure.
When you apply the rat pressure, you will enable the internal descent to magnify to a degree that would help the West to bring down the CCP, and that will help the Chinese people to bring down the CCPs using the borrowed sword to do the things you want to do.
And and and that's why we advocating for decoupling the CCP and you were shaking it.
And that the person who ended doing to destroy the Chinese Communist Party are the Chinese Communist Party members, who are right now holding the guns, you know, holding the powers, because they are the insider.
They know exactly what button to push, and they pose the real threat to Xi Jinping.
As you mentioned, almost every branch of the army, the top generals has been purged, and the rumor has it.
There's 80 more, there's dozens, dozens more, are right now under investigation.
Think about this.
When she comes on power after 2012, 2013, she had a stretch strategy.
How to concentrate the power under his name only.
He targeted broadly in terms of the communist party.
And he started Purge, never-ending corruption campaigns, started in uh in 2013.
And the second, he targeted a specific group.
It's called Princlin.
These are in Chinese, we refer to them as the red uh second generation.
So they have family blood.
Uh uh lineage goes back to the older CCP uh card rates.
ben harnwell
They see themselves as a legitimate like Xi Jinping himself, he's a princely exactly.
ava chen
That's where the legitimacy and that's where uh the the bloodline legacy comes from.
So who will pose the most a threat to Xi Jinping right now?
If you are older Cardi, you were thinking all those princeling could potentially replace, right?
If she stepped down, if they forced Xi uh lose the power, and another Princeton would step in.
So that is why Xi Jinping, after he took power, he understood that.
That's why he made the enemy of that second generation, second cardre generation, the his political uh rivalry.
So that's why we saw uh Liu Yao, the other general was purged in 2022, was given a death sentence with two years of reprieve.
He was the summing law of Li Xian Yin, uh, which is the top general of the PLA, which had a bloody hands on the Tiananced Square uh student massacre.
So this is brutal sh and Xi Jinping understood it because why?
He chose to be a dictator, and this is when we streak, and he has no way to turn back because if the moment he hesitates, he will be gone, and this is a life a struggle and s inside of the communist party system.
ben harnwell
Fascinating.
I'm gonna first I'm gonna come to you uh in just a quick moment, uh, because I want to I want more information, what Ava was just saying about this being a failed coup, especially about the point that that basically she himself assumed the mantle of dictator, destroying the constitutional two term norms, uh and now he has he doesn't have an off ramp now.
He's stuck in that and being stuck in a position that means ever more fighting to maintain control.
I'm gonna come back to one of those points in a minute, Forrest.
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Forrest, tell me a bit more if you wouldn't mind about because we've got like five minutes to the end of the show now.
Tell me a bit more about what the purge being the result of a failed coup.
Is that what people are actually talking about in China right now?
forrest zhou
No, I don't think that most people will know this coup happening because this is just uh under underground.
But uh there's a high-profile purge.
Again, it's the message President Xi wants to send it to the internal people and as well as US, because he's going to uh meet President Trump very soon, talking about the deals regarding minerals.
He's in a very strong position.
He needs to send the message to the internal people.
Look, I'm in power, I have uh the boss to challenge to fight with the US.
That's his message.
And you know what?
Because the the deal is gonna happen because the President Trump himself is the master of making the deal, but how much we'll have to force to give up because we have to face it.
Now we are at a point where forced to buy those minerals from the CCP, which they had planned at a dedicated plan and a strategic plan for five years, ten years, 15 years, as just we talked about before.
So we have our intelligence.
She already had four demand for the US before this negotiation.
It's kind of like a preconditions.
The first one is when he strike Taiwan, no US military interference.
Second, no support, any supply support from US.
The third, no political support to any Taiwan leadership.
The last one.
The US has to keep silence about this invasion when that happens.
That's the preconditions that she prepared for President Trump.
Make no mistake.
I think there will be a deal, but how much we have to give up?
That's the most important question.
And I'm glad you and Ava just mentioned about the insiders.
The insider is very important.
I think for us, the immediate danger is really within this own country.
The CCP only becomes so efficient and so strong, just because all the anime is the enablers and collaborators within our institution, whether it's Wall Street, media, uh, the schools, the providing our own government.
We have to clean those traders out in order to save this country, because they are not only provided the technology, the money, and also uh the even in uh provide the strategy to the Chinese Communist Party.
That's why they are so effective, attacking and counter-attacking US movements.
ben harnwell
First, I just want to go back to something that you said.
Um sadly, there's not enough time to go over everything.
But one thing that you said was that in his favor within the system, she can say, look, I've got the balls to tackle the United States head on, and because he has been doing so.
How much I get I guess that resonates with the party, but how much does it actually resonate with the Chinese people themselves?
I mean, that is to say not much.
Okay, because that is to say the Chinese actually want to the Chinese act people actually want an aggressive policy, uh, against America, or do they want to find uh a way to work together peaceably?
forrest zhou
The Chinese people, okay.
Chinese people has nothing to lose.
They have been slavery for more than 70 years.
Look at their economy, and I think James just mentioned about the economy in China.
Chinese people are uh freedom-loving people, hardworking people.
The situation they are in, it's all the result from Chinese crew control and regime control.
So they want they are ready to fight and stand to get their uh country back.
I think the point here we we want to ask the same thing for the US, the American people.
We also have options to make and decision to make.
The first option is to have a strong and aggressive China with CCP's leadership.
The second and what the second one is the free friendly domestic, uh uh democratic and freedom country without CCP.
I think the American people and the American administration has to make that decision right now because Miles and Steve talked about back in 2017.
Want that we have to fully decouple from CCP before it's too late.
Here we are now.
We have to buy the mineral from them.
We have to compromise, we have to make a deal with them.
So time is critical here.
CCP took a great uh advantage of the pandemic effect of the political system in this country.
They took advantage of all the traders and they use great deal of them.
That's why we are here today.
So time is running out.
I think we have to make decisive and bold movement to clean out the insider traders from this country and taking down the Chinese Communist Party, dismantled just a small circle of family, CCP family, which hijacked China and turned them into a weapon to attack to threaten the free world.
ben harnwell
Guys, that that's all we've um we've got time for.
Can you just give me a one-word response to this question?
And then we'll quickly do the socials.
We've got like 40 seconds left.
After the plenum, right that's taking place right now and the and the purge three days ago.
Do you think she's time is running short now?
Yes or no?
Forrest.
ava chen
Absolutely.
ben harnwell
It is his time coming to an end.
Is his time coming to an end?
Yes or no?
ava chen
Um, not any time shorter, because he is going that direction by no means.
But right now his power is more concentrated than yesterday.
ben harnwell
Yes, 10 seconds.
forrest zhou
It's gonna happen.
ben harnwell
Where do people go to learn more about the new federal state of China?
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