On Sept. 3, China staged a massive military parade in Beijing designed to demonstrate the strength of the People’s Liberation Army. Long-range ballistic missiles, unmanned systems and artificial-intelligence-enabled technologies rolled through Tiananmen Square in carefully choreographed formations.
The message was clear: China’s military modernization is advancing rapidly, and Beijing intends to project confidence in its rise as a global power.
Yet the display revealed as much about the PLA’s weaknesses as it did about its strengths. Behind the polished surface of new platforms and weaponry lie deep vulnerabilities that limit the PLA’s effectiveness. The parade, instead of inspiring confidence, underscored many enduring challenges in China’s defense system.
The Chinese Communist Party is among the most corrupt in the world, and the parade reflects the level of the CCP’s depth of corruption and procurement failures.
In the week leading up to the parade, China Government Procurement Weekly announced the termination of licenses for nearly 200 weapons assessment experts for fraud, along with licenses for 116 key defense suppliers, many of them state-owned, for substandard or fraudulent products. The fact that Beijing felt compelled to act days before the military extravaganza underscores how deeply corruption undermines procurement, particularly in the Rocket Force and the General Armament Department. Such systemic weaknesses call into question the reliability of the very weapons showcased on Sept. 3.
These systemic weaknesses were unmistakably reinforced by the market as it soundly rejected the CCP’s military propaganda. On the very day of the parade, the stocks of nearly all of China’s leading defense manufacturers plummeted.
AVIC Chengdu, China’s largest defense firm, producer of the J-10 and J-20 fighters, fell 14% that day and 25% over the next week. Northern Long Dragon, a major missile and unmanned aerial vehicle producer, lost 20% that day. Zhuzhou Hongda dropped 7%.
The numbers suggest that investors — those most attuned to risk and many insiders — did not believe the propaganda value of the spectacle.
A more fundamental problem lies in Xi Jinping’s binge of purges over the PLA’s professionalism and the leadership of the PLA itself.
Two Rocket Force commanders were recently purged. Defense Ministers Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu fell in rapid succession.
Across the military, a substantial number of officers with technical expertise have been replaced by political commissars whose main qualification is loyalty to the party.
This pattern of purges illustrates a structural dilemma: Preparing for war requires competent professionals, but securing party control demands politically reliable and often inexperienced leaders.
The result is an institution hollowed out by fear and instability.
All communist dictators are megalomaniacs and love extravagant military parades. Mr. Xi has had five such grand pageantries during his reign.
Following custom, tens of thousands of PLA soldiers trained for eight months under harsh conditions to perfect parade formations this year. The effort reflected the CCP’s obsession with order and unanimity and its reliance on symbolic displays of control rather than tested combat performance.
Even so, the parade did not achieve the level of precision seen in North Korea, underscoring the limits of mobilizing discipline for propaganda purposes. Kim Jong-un, standing next to Mr. Xi during the parade, must have smirked watching Mr. Xi’s troops becoming the communist world’s second best, failing to equal Pyongyang’s grim choreography of obedience.
The parade also illustrates the CCP’s brazen lack of self-awareness and irony.
In his speech, Mr. Xi emphasized “peace” and “respect for sovereignty.”
Yet his stage partners told another story: Vladimir Putin, responsible for the war in Ukraine, and Mr. Kim, whose regime perpetually destabilizes Northeast Asia.
The juxtaposition undermined Mr. Xi’s rhetoric, highlighting the contradiction between China’s words and its international alignments.
The diplomatic optics were equally damning. Not a single major democracy sent its leaders. The parade was flanked instead by the world’s most notorious aggressors and despots, notably Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim, and the heads of impoverished Central Asian states — bribed into attendance via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit immediately preceding the parade — and by the few remaining communist holdouts from Laos to Cuba.
For a nation aspiring to global leadership, the optics of an audience dominated by authoritarian or economically dependent partners were telling.
The parade was meant to affirm China’s ascent as a military power. Instead, it offered a window into the contradictions that define the PLA: impressive, mostly untested, hardware paired with institutional fragility.
These vulnerabilities do not negate China’s military modernization; the PLA’s capabilities are real and growing. Still, they highlight the limitations and risks of miscalculation of a leadership that seeks to project strength while managing deep internal and institutional weaknesses.
The lesson for democratic policymakers is clear: China’s rise as a military power should be taken seriously but never assumed to be seamless or unstoppable.
The PLA remains an organization that, despite modern weapons and ambitious rhetoric, is seriously weakened by lack of combat experience, pervasive corruption, civil-military dysfunction, cyber defense weaknesses, defense industry base limitations, logistics and power projection shortcomings, overseas base challenge, command and control rigidity, unreliable equipment and maintenance, reputation and partnership shortage, ideology preponderance over military professionalism and so on.
What was intended as a demonstration of confidence may instead be remembered as a confession of vulnerabilities.
Read in The Washington Times.