What is behind Xi Jinping’s sweeping military purge?

“A photograph may be an early signal that something is up and further study is required.” So concluded Roderick MacFarquhar, a late scholar of Maoist China, in an article in 1971 about how to decode Chinese politics. It was the height of the cold war and of Pekingology, involving scrutiny of wording and images. Half a century later, MacFarquhar’s ideas again have purchase. Elite politics, never renowned for clarity, has grown more opaque under Xi Jinping, so analysts are dusting off old tools.

Last month’s purge of Generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli exemplified this back-to-the-future trend. The first strong indication of trouble came when they were absent from a television report about a recent Communist Party meeting. Four days later the defence ministry announced that they were under investigation. Some analysts believe there had been an even earlier visual clue of the coming trouble: General Zhang had turned his back on Mr Xi at the end of a speech nearly a year ago, perhaps hinting at a falling-out between the two.

Textually there has been much to parse regarding the possible nature of their wrongdoing. The armed forces’ newspaper listed five offences. One stuck out. The two generals had “seriously trampled” on the chairmanship system which gives Mr Xi ultimate authority over the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), as the armed forces are known. The implication, many observers concluded, was that the generals had sought to undermine Mr Xi.

That scholars are back to gleaning information from such limited evidence shows how much more guarded the party has become. From the late 1970s on, as China opened up, analysts, executives and diplomats gained better access to power-brokers. They could also triangulate between factions. The Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of power, ranged between five and nine members. Outsiders could hope to connect with a few of them or their subordinates, cobbling together a rough model of policy and personnel. One consequence of Mr Xi’s squashing of collective leadership is that only one person now matters, and he is not spilling the beans. Hence the return to Pekingology.

But does it work? Such analysis has many pitfalls. One flaw is that with so few visible dots, there is a strong temptation to link them all, even when connections may be spurious. Take one fascinating perspective on the purges, written by K. Tristan Tang for the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank in Washington. By sifting through officials’ speeches, and state-media coverage thereof, he concluded that General Zhang was not living up to Mr Xi’s reported demand that the PLA be ready to invade Taiwan as soon as next year. Perhaps Mr Tang is correct. But his verdict was based in large part on minute discrepancies in how they talked about “military struggle”. If the purges were really about Taiwan, why then did Mr Xi ditch He Weidong, another general, last year? Mr He had performed well in overseeing ultra-intense military exercises around the democratic island.

That points to another problem with Pekingology: it is all but impossible to verify who gets what right. Theories abound about Chinese power politics. Indeed, there may be more than ever, owing to the spread of social media plus burgeoning communities of Chinese expats around the world, some revelling in coup fantasies. If it were possible, after a few years, to assess who has been correct, that could at least provide an indication of future reliability. Alas, China’s opacity is long-dated. It could be decades before archives from Mr Xi’s rule are opened, if ever.

Visual cues may well be the hardest to interpret. Much has been made of how Hu Jintao, a former leader, was escorted off stage during a televised party meeting in 2022, after an apparent dispute over official papers in front of him. For those looking for evidence of rifts in China’s upper echelons, the scene was irresistible. Yet the explanation given by state media—that Mr Hu was suffering from ill health—was arguably more plausible given his confused demeanour.

Wu Guoguang, who worked briefly in government and then as a state journalist in the 1980s, speaks of his own experience in getting things wrong. Now a professor at Stanford, he recalls his political boss receiving a piece of calligraphy from Chen Yun, a powerful leader at the time. Mr Wu assumed that his boss was on excellent terms with Chen. Many years later he learned he had been badly mistaken. Mr Wu sees it as a cautionary tale about the danger of “over-interpretation” from superficial information.

Still, it is dangerous to go to the other extreme and conclude that nothing is knowable. Mr Wu talks of the importance of focusing on slight changes in wording. The charge-sheet against Generals Zhang and Liu mentioned violations of law, not—as in an earlier military purge—mere disciplinary offences. That, to Mr Wu, suggests that Mr Xi perceives the wrongdoing of those most recently purged as much more serious. Neil Thomas of the Asia Society, a think-tank in New York, concurs about the need to scrutinise language. “It’s all we’ve got to make judgments about activities and intentions, but it has to be handled with great care and intellectual humility,” he says. He thinks analysts can discern Mr Xi’s policy priorities but struggle to judge how or why decisions are made.

It is worth revisiting MacFarquhar’s essay of 1971. He did not see the analysis of photographs as the sole path to truth, but as “one, rather blunt, instrument to be used along with many others in the dissection of Chinese politics”. Photos, he conceded, often raise more questions than answers. That is a useful framework to keep in mind as Pekingology comes back into vogue among China analysts. It does not provide definitive answers. But, done well, it can help in formulating good questions.■