What Xi Jinping’s purge of China’s most senior general reveals

Among China’s generals, one had long seemed immune to sweeping purges of the high command in the past two years. Zhang Youxia, its most senior uniformed officer, was not just a personal friend of Xi Jinping, China’s leader. He was one of the few military commanders with combat experience, having fought with distinction in clashes with Vietnam more than 40 years ago. That bolstered his authority as the senior of the two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission (CMC), which commands the armed forces and is headed by Mr Xi. Some analysts viewed General Zhang as the mastermind of some of the recent purges. Now even he has been toppled, in the most dramatic blow yet.

On January 24th the defence ministry announced that General Zhang, 75, and another member of the CMC, General Liu Zhenli, had been placed under investigation for “suspected serious discipline and law violations”. General Liu, who is 61, heads the joint staff department, which oversees operations, intelligence and training. He also has close ties to General Zhang as another veteran of the war with Vietnam. The defence ministry gave no further details. But an editorial the next day in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official military newspaper, accused the two men of various offences, including fuelling corruption, impairing combat readiness and undermining Mr Xi’s authority as commander-in-chief.

The investigations mean that Mr Xi has now hollowed out his entire military leadership in a purge unmatched since an alleged coup attempt in 1971. Although Generals Zhang and Liu have yet to be officially removed from the CMC, investigations such as this normally entail detention and are routinely followed by formal dismissal. Three more of the six generals on the CMC that was formed in 2022 have already been sacked from Communist Party and military posts. As a result, the body that oversees the roughly 2m-strong People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, now just has two active members—Mr Xi as its chairman and the PLA’s disciplinary chief, General Zhang Shengmin, who became the second-ranking vice-chairman in October.

The latest probes are the most striking evidence yet of the scale of the problems that Mr Xi still faces in trying to transform the PLA into a fully modern fighting force. Soon after taking power in 2012 he began tackling pervasive corruption and a lack of focus on real combat by axing dozens of generals and launching a big overhaul of the PLA’s structure. A new wave of purges started around 2023 with the Rocket Force, which handles China’s nuclear arsenal, and later spread to other services as well as the PLA’s equipment-development and political departments. Yet corruption endures and Mr Xi’s structural reforms are incomplete. He may now be showing his frustration with General Zhang’s failure to deliver better results ahead of next year’s deadline, set by Mr Xi, for the PLA to be capable of taking Taiwan.

Another possibility is that General Zhang or his family members were involved in corruption in the past, perhaps when he headed the graft-prone department responsible for weapons development and procurement between 2012 and 2017. Old allegations could have resurfaced or new ones emerged as Mr Xi’s investigators expanded their efforts or were fed information by rivals (or protégés) of General Zhang after they were purged.

But this latest turmoil in the CMC could also have been triggered, in part, by Mr Xi’s concerns about General Zhang’s expanding clout. “This is the most stunning development in Chinese politics since the early days of Xi’s rise to power,” says Dennis Wilder of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who is a former China analyst at the CIA. He believes that many of the recent purges were due to rivalry between a faction led by General Zhang and another group who mainly built their careers in eastern China, some of them when Mr Xi was an official there. General Zhang’s faction prevailed when General He Weidong was purged last year as the junior vice-chairman of the CMC. That left General Zhang with unprecedented authority. But it may also have made him a potential threat to Mr Xi. “He is a tough, profane old goat and, while he had allied with Xi, he was never his subordinate,” Mr Wilder says of General Zhang.

Several other experts said the most serious official allegation against the two generals was outlined in the military newspaper’s editorial. It said they had “seriously trampled on and undermined the system of ultimate responsibility resting with the CMC chairman”. Mr Xi introduced that “chairman responsibility system” in 2014 to centralise authority in the military leadership, and ensure his own and the party’s control over the armed forces. “The charge implies that Zhang had challenged Xi’s authority over the PLA and Xi’s position as the commander-in-chief,” says M. Taylor Fravel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr Xi and General Zhang may have disagreed over the timeline for developing the PLA’s capabilities, according to K. Tristan Tang of the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank in Washington.

But there is speculation about even more egregious offences. On January 25th the Wall Street Journal reported that General Zhang had been accused of leaking information about China’s nuclear weapons programme to America. Some PLA experts are doubtful. Even so, the one thing that most observers agree on is that the official explanation for the purges does not tell anything like the whole story.

General Zhang’s family connection to Mr Xi goes back to when their fathers fought together in China’s civil war. General Zhang’s father later became a three-star general; Mr Xi’s became a civilian leader. Mr Xi demonstrated his trust in General Zhang in 2017 by overseeing his appointment to the Politburo, which includes the party’s top 20 or so leaders, and as the junior CMC vice-chairman. Then in 2022, when Mr Xi secured a third term as party chief, General Zhang became the senior CMC vice-chairman despite being 72, which would have disqualified him under previous retirement norms.

General Zhang stood out in other ways. Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official who is now at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, spent a week hosting a military delegation including General Zhang on a visit to America in 2012. “He had an aura of competence around him,” Mr Thompson said. “The other PLA generals and staff officers could see it, and they respected him for it. They stood up faster and straighter when he entered a room.” He recalled in particular a tour of an army base, during which General Zhang relished the opportunity to fire a machinegun and ask questions about American military technology and doctrine. “Seeing Zhang Youxia tour a military base and absorb what he was offered revealed an intellect that stood out from his peers,” Mr Thompson said.

If General Zhang is now formally dismissed, he would be the highest-ranking active-duty military officer ousted by Mr Xi. And if he also loses his seat on the Politburo, it would be the first time that two of its members have been purged in the same five-year term since the PLA crushed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. That would send a powerful message to other members of the armed forces and civilian elite, especially “princelings”, as those from prominent revolutionary families are known: ties to Mr Xi are no guarantee of protection. But it also presents Mr Xi with a problem: who should he choose to replace all the generals he has purged?

Since taking power, Mr Xi has tried to promote generals who are both politically loyal and qualified to lead the PLA’s transformation into a more nimble force that can combine air, land, sea, cyber and space-based operations. He started by replacing generals appointed by previous leaders. More recently he has targeted many of his own appointees. And many of the remaining generals are either too inexperienced or are tainted by their association with one or more of the disgraced military commanders. Another risk is that those he promotes will not dare to give him honest advice about the state of the PLA. This may make it more likely that Mr Xi will overestimate its strength when considering whether to attack, say, Taiwan.

The upheaval is also starting to affect the PLA’s ability to fight, according to some Western assessments. At least in the short term, that could reduce the likelihood of an attack on the island. “It has to be having real-time operational impacts,” says Chris Johnson, another former CIA China analyst. Mr Xi “knew that would be the case, but it seems clear he had concluded it is worth risking temporary vulnerability and serious breakage to get the PLA to meet his operational objectives”, he says. The Pentagon’s annual report on China’s armed forces, published in December, noted that the removal of senior PLA officers had “caused uncertainty over organisational priorities”. But it also warned that the PLA could emerge as a “more proficient fighting force” if efforts to tackle the roots of corruption were successful. On that point, at least, Mr Xi will be hoping the Pentagon is right. ■