The great (military) purges of China | Number Theory

Not only was Zhang the highest military leader as the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, he had also known Xi from school

When China’s president Xi Jinping purged General Zhang Youxia on January 19—among other things Zhang was accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the US—China’s military purge reached a level never seen before under Xi. Not only was Zhang the highest military leader as the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, he had also known Xi from school. The latter, in fact, referred to Zhang as his “elder brother.” Purges, whether political or military—and the two do not necessarily have a Chinese wall between them—are not entirely unheard of in post-revolution China. However, the latest round under Xi’s leadership is definitely different in terms of its momentum and reach in China’s more recent past. On Thursday, Chinese state news agency reported that the country’s top legislature updated its list of deputies from the PLA, removing nine military officials. A new dataset prepared by Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington DC-based think tank, which tracks active duty and retired generals and lieutenant generals purged or potentially purged from January 2022 to February 2026 allows us to quantify this process. Here is a quick summary.

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  And then there was just one…

  In China, the Central Military Commission (CMC) is the supreme authority as far as the armed forces are concerned. Xi has been its chairman since 2013, right after he assumed the office of the president. A Reuters story published on Tuesday, along with CSIS data shows that apart from Xi there is only one member left in the CMC now. Zhang was only the second last of the other five to have been purged by Xi. After his purge, another Zhang (Shengmin) from the PLA Rocket Force is the only military officer in the CMC. “From an organisational perspective, until the vacancies are filled, the PLA is operating with serious deficiencies in its command structure,” the London-based IISS said in its annual Military Balance, a survey of global military forces that is a key research tool for analysts, the Reuters story reported.
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  The purge has been most ruthless at the top…

  The CMC sits right at the top of the military hierarchy in China. The CSIS database shows that it has also suffered the most from the ongoing purges, with 71% of its positions vacant. Vacancies/unknowns are the second highest at 50% for support forces, which includes the Joint Logistics Support Force, Information Support Force, and Strategic Support Force, and 40% for CMC subsidiary organisations. To be sure, the problem is much worse than what counting just the purged generals shows. A lot of top military positions are being held by acting/interim appointees.
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  …And was the worst in 2025

  Not all generals are officially purged in China. Some of them just go missing. The pattern is easy to miss because disappearances often doesn't precede any formal announcement. A WSJ report on the purge of General Zhang for instance, mentioned how the military high command was kept in the dark for days about why he was missing from a “can’t miss” event. Although Zhang’s arrest was eventually announced, many aren’t. The CSIS database tries to account for this. While 36 generals and lieutenant generals have been officially purged since 2022, CSIS data shows that another 65 have gone missing or are assessed as potentially purged based on unexplained absences from key meetings where they were expected to appear. That takes the combined count of confirmed and suspected cases to a staggering 101, showing that the officers publicly removed from the CMC are only the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg. In fact, data for 2025, which has seen the greatest number of purges at 62, shows that 42 of the cases recorded by CSIS are of generals and lieutenant generals that have gone missing.
• While the PLA appears to have gone about business as usual despite the purge wave, the bigger impact may be on operations that demand tight coordination and confident leadership. One signal is the unusual lag in 2025 between what Beijing called “problematic” moves by Taiwan and the PLA’s response drills, a contrast with the quicker turnaround in 2024. Another is military diplomacy: joint exercises with Russia reduced after the CMC Joint Staff Department was hollowed out, consistent with disruption in the machinery that plans complex, multi-service activity. At the same time, CSIS notes that China’s western-facing commands, which cover the India frontier, have maintained a steady cadence of drills, indicating the system remains resilient. The longer-term risk for China and Xi, however, is political. Repeated purges can incentivise caution and conformity. “Our principle is that the party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party,” Mao said. The current purges are more about Xi commanding the gun and guns never being allowed to command Xi.