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

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

AMONG CHINA’S generals, one had long seemed immune to the sweeping purges of the high command in the past two years. Zhang Youxia, its most senior uniformed officer (pictured below), 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 a war with Vietnam in 1979. 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.

Xi Jinping, China’s leader

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”. It gave no further details. General Liu, who is 61, heads the joint staff department, which oversees operations, intelligence and training. Perhaps more pertinently, he is thought to have close personal ties to General Zhang as another veteran of the border war with Vietnam.

The investigations mean that Mr Xi has now, in effect, hollowed out his entire military leadership in a purge unmatched since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. 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. Four of the CMC’s other uniformed officers have already been formally dismissed from 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 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, 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 structure of the PLA. 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 General Zhang’s rivals. Some of the officers targeted earlier on were considered his protégés.

But these latest purges could also have been prompted, in part, by Mr Xi’s concerns about General Zhang’s expanding powers. “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, 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 serving in eastern China, some of them when Mr Xi was an official there. General Zhang’s faction, which included several sons of prominent revolutionaries, prevailed. That left him with unprecedented authority. But it also 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.

General Zhang’s family connection to Mr Xi goes back to when their fathers fought together in the country’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 Communist Party’s top 20 or so leaders, and as the junior vice-chairman of the CMC, making him China’s second-ranking general. Then in 2022, when Mr Xi secured a third term as party chief, General Zhang became the senior vice-chairman of the commission despite being 72, which would have disqualified him under previous retirement norms.

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 Politburo seat, 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 those from prominent revolutionary families: 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 in 2012, 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. The upheaval is also starting to affect the PLA’s ability to fight, according to some Western assessments.

The Pentagon’s most recent annual report on China’s armed forces, published in December, noted that the removal of senior PLA officers had “caused uncertainty over organisational priorities” and “reverberated throughout the ranks of the PLA”. It said corruption in defence procurement had led to “observed” capability shortfalls such as malfunctioning lids on missile silos. “These investigations very likely risk short-term disruptions in the operational effectiveness of the PLA,” it said. “Alternatively, the PLA could emerge as a more proficient fighting force in the future if it uses the current campaign to eliminate systemic issues enabling corruption.” On that point, at least, Mr Xi will be hoping the Pentagon is right.