The Unsettling Implications of Xi’s Military Purge

Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the total annihilation of his high command. On January 24, the Ministry of Defense announced that China’s top uniformed officer, General Zhang Youxia, and the military’s chief of staff, General Liu Zhenli, were being investigated for “serious violations of party discipline and law”—usually regime code for corruption. One Western press account even says that Zhang leaked nuclear secrets to the United States. The ministry’s terse announcement masked the biggest political earthquake to hit the top brass of the People’s Liberation Army since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. It also marked the zenith of Xi’s latest officer purge, which has touched every corner of the PLA and claimed all but one top officer over the last few years.

Although the move came as a shock, its seeds were sown at a Chinese Communist Party plenum last October. That CCP meeting formalized the ousters of Zhang’s fellow vice chair of the Central Military Commission—China’s supreme military decision-making body—and another CMC heavyweight then serving as the PLA’s top political minder. Those removals broke the seal on Xi’s targeting of the apex of the PLA. Moreover, they halved the CMC’s strength from its last overhaul, in 2022. The plenum left those seats vacant, forgoing the appointments that would usually come with such a reshuffle. That was puzzling then but makes sense now: it telegraphed that the work was not done and more was to come.

Much of the analysis of the current cycle of purges interprets them as an indicator of Xi’s loose grip on or distrust of his generals. Others claim it is a fight among rival factions behind the high walls of the PLA, with Xi as a passive observer. His evisceration of the entire CMC offers solid prima facie evidence that these frameworks lack explanatory power. But they also deny Xi his greatest asset—a knack for long-term, patient planning punctuated by political blitzkriegs. Xi is not clairvoyant, and he has adapted to unexpected developments as his antigraft war has unfolded. Still, claims that he was ignorant of the depth of PLA corruption or that his commanders push him around overlook a clear storyline of Xi’s steady orchestration and control of the process. As such, the persistence of these narratives means that a fundamental reboot of outsiders’ thinking about Chinese party-army relations and internal PLA politics is urgently needed.

When this tremor inside the PLA subsides, Xi must consider picking up the pieces. He could demonstrate his ongoing pique by maintaining the current stasis in the high command until the 21st Party Congress next year or force a more thorough overhaul of the regime’s institutional framework for overseeing what it calls “the Party’s Army.” Xi’s calculus could be shaped by thoughts about telegraphing his succession at the next party congress, sometime thereafter, or even before. In fact, that may offer the sole way Xi may have seen Zhang as a threat. Whatever form the overhaul takes, it will surely underscore Xi’s unquestioned authority as he contemplates a fourth five-year term next year.

As that process unfolds, foreigners may be tempted to judge that the chaos inside the PLA means that military action against Taiwan or in the South China Sea is off the table. But that would overlook the signal feature of the purge—Xi’s intensifying impatience with the PLA’s inability to obey his order to “fight and win wars”—but also the progress China has made in expanding its suite of options for coercive military force. Given his obsession with stability at home, which the PLA ultimately underwrites, Xi would have forgone this sweeping and disruptive shakeup unless he were a man in a hurry. This does not suggest he is galloping toward war, but outsiders run a serious risk by doubting his determination to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

The purges are a signal of Xi’s renewed commitment to that ambition. His success in forcing U.S. President Donald Trump into a truce last year validated his political and economic program, giving Xi the assurance that now is the time to double down on his vision. This time, however, his approach will not repeat the brash “wolf warrior” diplomacy and declarations (“The East is rising and the West is declining” and others) of his early years, which precipitated a global immune response. Instead, he will focus on his internal projects of building a fortress economy and assuring that the PLA can deliver if military action becomes unavoidable. Those daunting challenges will leave him wanting stability with Washington in the immediate term but make him, and China, an even more formidable competitor by the end of this decade and beyond.

CONTROL FREAK

The argument that Xi’s widening purge shows a weak grip on the PLA rests on faulty assumptions. One of those assumptions is that he follows the same civil-military rules that his post-Mao predecessors did, with the PLA a hermetically sealed kingdom to which Xi can gain access only through careful bargaining and doling out steady funding for the military’s perquisites and expanding combat prowess. A related assumption is that the PLA is a mostly self-policing institution where senior officers call the tune.

Those assumptions do not give Xi his due. They describe the dynamic that existed before he took power, with PLA monopolies on intelligence and military-technical expertise granting substantial autonomy. But Xi has since fought hard to bring the PLA to heel, and there are clear signs that it is paying off.

Early on, he announced sweeping changes to the PLA command structure. The retooling broke institutional networks that had thwarted previous efforts to impose similar changes. Xi then started touting the so-called CMC chair responsibility system to formalize his—and the party’s—grip on the military, in a sharp contrast with earlier practice where uniformed subordinates had outsize control over their notional civilian masters. In 2016, he became the PLA’s commander in chief, claiming direct operational command instead of just administrative control. At the 19th Party Congress a year later, he cut the CMC’s ranks from an unwieldy 11 to seven, concentrating his authority. The final insult came at last October’s plenum, where, snubbing commanders and commissars alike, he made the PLA’s top disciplinarian a CMC vice chair, smashing the fallacy of a self-policing PLA. It would not be surprising if Zhang thought that was a bridge too far, but that officer is the last general standing, rubbing more salt in the wound.

Xi’s grasp on the military is not perfect. He is still sometimes surprised by PLA activities, such as when a spy balloon drifted into U.S. airspace in 2023. The charges against most of the recently dethroned CMC chieftains also included failure to respect the CMC chair responsibility system. Nevertheless, suggesting that Xi is merely a passive bystander ignores the plain facts: he has put the PLA in a much tighter box.

POWER SHORTAGE

The idea of senior military clans purging each other while Xi looked on also strains credulity. For starters, it assumes the purges of the last few years form a single thread, with the 2023 sackings in the PLA Rocket Force the beginning of an assault on Zhang. The attack, the theory goes, came from a rival group who served in a key PLA unit opposite Taiwan. But, in fact, this spasm of purges has come for a variety of reasons that do not stem from one particular rivalry or come for one particular reason. The Rocket Force dismissals are linked to garden-variety corruption associated with the recent rapid build-out of nuclear forces, as were the subsequent purge of two past defense ministers, who previously commanded the Rocket Force and oversaw PLA procurement. The alleged ringleaders of the Taiwan unit were dismissed months apart—suggesting their cases were independent—unlike the simultaneous purge of Zhang and Liu.

Moreover, Zhang’s ouster offers the best refutation that an internal PLA prizefight explains the purge. This theory paints Zhang as a giant of the PLA whose combination of combat experience and a gruff manner made him a kingpin Xi could not touch; there were even rumors in Chinese diaspora circles last summer that Zhang wanted Xi’s removal or might even replace him. But that is belied by Zhang’s career and Xi’s adroit management of him.

Zhang is a princeling—the term for sons of senior CCP revolutionaries—and he rose through the ranks at a time when princelings’ career progression was artificially slowed by the revolutionary heavyweights then ruling the country. (Those elders worried that rocketing their offspring into senior posts would make the public cry nepotism, especially with social tensions running high amid wrenching post-Mao social and economic reforms.) Xi, also a princeling, faced similar obstacles in his own career. The elders’ fears meant that Zhang got a general’s billet only in his late fifties—late for a typical fast-riser in the PLA—and even that post was in the PLA’s then least prestigious regional command. Xi therefore revived Zhang’s career by giving him a CMC seat in 2012, and protected him again by framing a 2023 procurement investigation in a way that would exclude Zhang’s time leading procurement. Yet Xi later fired a warning shot by purging a former subordinate of Zhang’s, showing that Xi had the whip hand in their relationship.

In short, the PLA today is not the freewheeling enterprise it once was. The old soldiers of the revolutionary period are gone, and Xi, in his methodical and patient way, has proved adept at managing their descendants.

STEP BY STEP

A better framework for understanding Xi’s military purge is to see it as a stepwise process unfolding across his three terms in office. When he started the effort, he was still consolidating power, so he focused on decapitating the officer networks of potential rivals. When he registered the extent of corruption, he even drew a line on the effort at accountability to avoid crippling the PLA operationally and risking regime stability; he was wary of breaking those parts of the PLA—the missile forces, weapons design and procurement, and the general staff—he would need if military action proved unavoidable.

During his second term, Xi refrained from purging senior officers, even as the corruption problem clearly persisted—a fact sometimes held up as evidence of his ignorance of internal PLA doings. But in fact, his attention was elsewhere. The civilian security and intelligence services presented their own morass of corruption, prompting a multiyear crackdown targeting them that netted scores of high-ranking security officials. Xi knew he could not attack the PLA and security agencies simultaneously, so he adopted a staggered approach.

When Xi could refocus on the PLA as his third term commenced, the cesspool of corruption in the Rocket Force made plain that he could not get by with a light touch. As that investigation metastasized across the defense industry in late 2023, he knew the procurement system also needed cleansing. The separate firings of the two CMC officers at last October’s plenum crossed a final Rubicon that, along with what appears to have been disagreements between Xi and Zhang over personnel matters, drove Xi to make a clean sweep and dump Zhang and Liu, as well.

PUNISHING DOWN THROUGH THE GENERATIONS

Comprehensive purges of the commands and services below the CMC show that Xi is cutting very deep generationally to find officers who may have avoided the pay-for-promotion schemes that flourished in the decades before his ascension, and perhaps since. Low-ranking generals are being rapidly promoted into jobs that previously required much greater experience.

The CMC cannot technically meet with only two members, and Xi’s intelligence briefers presumably are telling him that U.S. officials might see the chaos in the PLA as crippling operations against Taiwan. Those realities suggest that Xi will move quickly to restock the CMC. Yet he is also stubborn, and, in order to convey anger at errant institutions, has a pattern of letting vacancies go unfilled for long periods or denying new appointees some of the traditional titles and trappings that would automatically accompany such posts. So it is possible that Xi will just keep the high command understaffed and treading water until the 21st Party Congress in late 2027.

If he cannot wait, Xi will have to call another plenum to make changes to the CMC and other senior CCP bodies. Lucky for him, he can do so without breaking standard protocol. The Central Committee holds seven plenums in a typical five-year cycle. For unknown reasons, Xi delayed this round’s third session until July 2024, which left the fourth occurring when the committee normally would convene its fifth. So Xi could choose to call that spare plenum now and restore confidence by affirming a new CMC lineup and signaling that the worst is over.

He could also be more ambitious and use it to create new systems for supervising the PLA. After all, he clearly sees the officer corps as incapable of managing its own affairs. That could include putting additional civilians on the CMC, which has not happened since Xi took office; empowering the civilian corruption watchdog to also investigate the PLA or to work with its military analog in doing so; or creating new CCP bodies to address the problem, an approach that Xi has used to try to resolve other vexing policy issues.

CAUTION FLAG

American policymakers might see the purges as delaying a Chinese attack against Taiwan or in the South China Sea. Trump could also conclude that Xi’s domestic challenges give the United States leverage in the Trump-Xi summits planned for later this year, with the first in April. But that would be a mistake. As the latest U.S.-Chinese trade war escalated from April to October 2025, Xi repeatedly chose to stare Trump down even when the outcome was uncertain and Xi’s position looked fragile. The mess in the PLA may have taken some of the shine off Chinese confidence coming out of his October engagement with Trump in South Korea, but Xi still knows that he has powerful weapons, such as rare earths, to use if Trump pushes him too hard.

To be sure, the chaos in the high command will have real-time operational impacts. But that limits Xi’s options less than some outside observers may think: the PLA now has several military options that should be considered off the shelf in a crisis. As Bonny Lin, John Culver, and Brian Hart wrote in Foreign Affairs last May, the PLA signaled as early as 2008 its readiness to fire missiles around Taiwan—and perhaps even to bombard the island—to deter what it perceived as “Taiwan independence activities.” It has subsequently taken advantage of U.S. “provocations” and the actions of Taiwan’s current president as pretexts to rehearse and further hone these capabilities, to the point of their being on autopilot. The massive build-out of PLA forces across the strait opposite Taiwan also means that, unlike in 2008, there would be few warning indicators for U.S. forces to pick up on before PLA action targeting the island.

U.S. policymakers and force planners should take Xi’s top-to-bottom purge of the officer corps as a sign of his impatience with the PLA’s failure to meet his operational requirements—and not mistake such impatience for fear or distrust of the military. He is apparently so frustrated by his commanders’ penchant for putting cash in their pockets instead of building warfighting capacity that he is willing to risk increased vulnerability, at home and abroad, to get them to do their jobs. That does not mean that Xi is rushing toward war, but he is fond of using centenaries to force progress in the Chinese system, and the PLA will celebrate its hundredth birthday next year. He wants it to be ready to “fight and win wars” when that anniversary rolls around.

After several years of playing it relatively safe, Xi is back on the march.

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