Eastern War Zone News Today

China analyst Dean Cheng breaks down the key military aspects of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's statements at the recent Party Congress.

With this Party Congress under way in Beijing, Xi Jinping will put in place China's political and military leadership for the next five years.

There should be no doubt that the Communist Chinese leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is angry at the United States, and especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for her visit to Taiwan.

From the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) perspective, the Pelosi Taiwan trip was a betrayal of the foundations of the US-China rapprochement.

China got tremendous propaganda value out of the Chinese People's Liberation Army's (PLA) exercises and drills held after Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, but it is important to recognize that they were not conducted as a response to the Pelosi visit. Some elements (especially the missile overflights of Taiwan) were probably added due to the Pelosi visit, but the larger effort of training PLA forces would have happened, Pelosi or no.

Reacting to the PLA's previous large-scale exercise in the Taiwan straits in 1995-1996, the United States deployed two carrier battlegroups in response. The Chinese undoubtedly noted that this latest exercise, which included missile overflights of the island, led to a far more muted reaction, writes Dean Cheng.

>> translator: yes, they sent it to us, absolutely. >> reporter: in fact, what followed was according to our sources a fountain of freely volunteered intel. not just documents and photos but potentially incriminating videos like this one, after the downing of a ukrainian military aircraft in the eastern war zone. offered up by the fighters themselves. all ukrainian intelligence had to do was pick the ones it wanted, offered the lucrative venezuela contracts and because of covid-19 travel restric...

>> we started to call them and say, hey, man, okay, tell me something about yourself. maybe you are not really a fighter. maybe you are a plumber or something like that. and then they started to reveal things about themselves, sending us documents, military ids and proof of where they had fought, and we are like, bingo, we can use that. >> reporter: theyre sending you evidence of who they are. >> yes, they sent it to us, absolutely. >> reporter: in fact, what followed was, according to our sourc...