CHINA'S Xi Jinping has purged several of his most senior army commanders - choosing to replace them with fierce, war-ready generals.
The Chinese leader is trying to reshape his military into a finely tuned machine ready to invade Taiwan, and ready to fight, military analysts have claimed.
Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, claimed that his overhauling of the military is an attempt to regain control of his forces, bringing in officers who are "prepared to actually fight".
"There is a sense that many of China's general officers don't want to fight," Chang told Business Insider.
"And so we really have a force led by an officer corps that is ambivalent about going to war."
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From the very onset of his reign, Xi has taken drastic measures to reform China's military - he's discarded personnel, sought to improve its standing amongst civilians and wholly reshaped its structure.
His military crackdown peaked late last year, on December 29, when he ridded himself of nine of his most senior officers in one blow.
At the time, the move was viewed by some experts as a way for Xi Jinping to remove political opponents and root out corruption in his armed forces.
But Chang, who authored China is Going to War, couldn't disagree more.
He said: "If that were the case, all of them would be sacked."
Instead, he suggested that the mass sacking was more likely a purge of officers who weren't ready for war.
Chang pointed to the case of the former Chinese Air Force General Liu Yazhou, who spoke out against an invasion of Taiwan only to receive a suspended death sentence.
Joel Wuthnow, an expert on Chinese military affairs, told Business Insider that the recent military purge suggests Xi is worried about the investments he has made since coming into power.
Wuthnow suggested that Xi has little confidence in his army, and desperately wants to reshape it ahead of a military incursion.
China has become increasingly hostile to its neighbours recently.
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These aggressions have manifested themselves in the South China Sea, where a fighter jet almost smashed into an American surveillance plane just months ago.
The People's Liberation Army's naval flotilla has also been spotted by Japanese forces as the fleet came within 400 miles of the Western Pacific nation in April last year.
While there have been constant clashes between Indian and Chinese troops over their disputed border in the Himalayas.
The conflict garnering the most concern, however, is Taiwan.
China regards the island as part of its territory - and has vowed to take the nation by force if necessary.
In recent years, these efforts have been seriously ramped up, with Xi giving his military the go-ahead for drills described as a “stern warning” to the self-governing island.
All of which has been in the background of Xi's ever increasing warlike rhetoric.
In his chilling New Year message he insisted "China will surely be reunified.
"All Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."
Months prior, Xi told Biden his exact intentions with Taiwan, according to NBC News.
They reported that Xi threatened to take control of Taiwan at the APEC summit in San Francisco - even going as far as to tell the US president encouraging Taiwanese independence was "dangerous".
Chang views this as a significant political move, saying that statements like this might be Xi "talking himself and China into a war".
Citing the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, military activity in the Red Sea and the insurgencies in Africa, Chang went on to say that all the conditions are primed for World War Three.
"Remember, in the 1930s, there were separate wars that merged into what we now call World War II," he said.
"The same dynamics exist today, and it's entirely possible, and some people can even argue that it's probable that these will merge into a global conflict.
"I think that Xi Jinping is taking two pages out of Mao's Peasant Revolution playbook.
"One of them was to encircle the cities from the countryside. And in this, I think that Xi Jinping views Ukraine, north Africa, Israel as the countryside, and the United States as the city."
