The purge offensive that Chinese leader Xi Jinping promoted against the military elite was evident at a recent Legislative meeting. A year earlier, state TV footage showed around 40 generals in the hall. This time, there were only a few.
Even so, Xi made it clear that the upheaval — comparable to those of the Mao Zedong era — had not yet come to an end. With a frown on his face, he warned the remaining officers about the risk of disloyalty.
“The Armed Forces,” he said, “can never have anyone who is divided in heart toward the party.”
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It was a rare public mention by Xi of one of the worst political crises of his 13 years in power: he lost confidence in the military leadership he had been shaping for a decade.
“When Xi uses the expression ‘divided heart,’ it carries a lot of weight,” said Chien-wen Kou, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. The phrase appears in ancient Chinese treatises that guide rulers about treacherous generals — among them, a volume that Xi keeps on his own bookshelf.
“Even his closest and most important allies have fallen,” Kou said. “Who else can earn his trust?”
The crisis threatens one of Xi’s great projects: transforming the Chinese military into a major force, with new aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles and an expanding nuclear arsenal. And all of this happens at a time when rivalry with the United States has intensified, and when the Trump administration has put American military power — and also its limits — in the spotlight in Venezuela and Iran.
China’s ability to go to war could be compromised for years due to the very “cleaning” that Xi says is necessary to purify and strengthen troops. What initially seemed like a one-off fight against corruption turned into a widespread dismissal of dozens of high-ranking officials, culminating, at the beginning of this year, in the fall of Zhang Youxia, China’s top military commander, who until then seemed to be one of Xi’s trusted men.
By some accounts, the final break came when Xi tried to promote the general leading the cleanup to a position equivalent to Zhang. He objected. Months later, he was out.
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The weight of the campaign was evident again last week, when a military court sentenced two former defense ministers to death, suspended for two years, for corruption. In practice, they must spend the rest of their lives in prison.
“This is Xi Jinping’s Army,” said Daniel Mattingly, an associate professor at Yale who specializes in Chinese politics and military affairs. “Why is he destroying what he built?
“It’s not the kind of attitude you would have expected from Xi, not even five years ago. Something profound has changed,” he said.
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The corruption that Xi pursues is real. But the leader’s own internal speeches, previously little detailed in public, reveal another element: a leader who sees in any sign of disobedience the seed of a threat to his power. He began to consider, analysts say, that the commanders chosen to modernize the Armed Forces had ceased to be trustworthy, with their loyalty and effectiveness eroded by bribery and cronyism.
Experts also say that this upheaval exposed the clash between Xi’s two central goals: preparing for war and ensuring absolute loyalty. Ultimately, Xi ousted a general with real combat experience, a key player in the transformation of the military, and replaced him with an inquisitor, who is today, alongside Xi, the only other remnant of the country’s most powerful military council.
“Xi Jinping’s government is slowly entering its final phase,” Kou said. “His political calculations change at this stage; his biggest concerns become those in his own inner circle.”
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Taking control of the guns
Early on, Xi seemed determined not to repeat the fate of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, widely seen as a leader who never managed to impose authority over military commanders.
Hu’s orders to the Army were “almost like suggestions that they were considering whether to follow,” said John Culver, a former CIA analyst and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Basically, you had a system that no longer really responded to the party.”
Upon coming to power in 2012, Xi launched investigations against commanders who had grown rich — and gained too much power — under Hu, including some who were previously treated as untouchables because of their positions and connections.
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In 2014, Xi summoned hundreds of high-ranking officials to Gutian, a city in eastern China where, according to the party’s official narrative, Mao established, in 1929, the principle that defines the Chinese state to this day: it is the party that commands the weapons.
Xi used this historical reference to warn that the Communist Party’s control over the military had deteriorated dangerously.
In Gutian, he listed the problems he said he inherited. Faith in the party’s values had been depleted. Corruption, patronage and insubordination were open. He cited training exercises so artificial that soldiers used shovels and sticks instead of weapons.
The president orders
From his first years in power, Xi began to consolidate the so-called “presidential responsibility system”, a restructuring that reinforced his control over the military, giving him direct access to information and command at deeper levels of the hierarchy. Xi said he trusted his own ability to choose the right names for promotion.
“The key to building a strong Army is choosing the right people,” he said in an internal speech in 2016, detailing how he evaluates and talks to promotion candidates. “Senior and mid-ranking officers are the backbone of the construction and management of the Armed Forces, and as chairman of the Central Military Commission, I must personally take care of this.”
He also replaced old military regions with new theater commands (or theater commands) and dissolved central departments of the People’s Liberation Army that he considered obstacles to effective control. The goal was to give China the ability to coordinate land, air, and naval forces to project power abroad — while at the same time ensuring that this new war machine remained completely loyal to the party.
General Zhang Youxia was among the commanders tasked with carrying out Xi’s plan. Zhang was a tough but charismatic officer who had distinguished himself on the front lines of the long border war with Vietnam starting in 1979. He was the son of a revolutionary general who had fought alongside Xi’s father.
The Chinese leader had previously promoted him to the Central Military Commission and placed him in charge of the general armaments department — responsible for purchasing new weapons, a central part of modernization plans, but also a true nest of corruption due to the concentration of contracts and resources.
“He came from a Communist Party elite, and that was clear,” said Drew Thompson, who worked at the Pentagon and met Zhang in 2012, when he was part of a Chinese military delegation visiting the United States. “I think the combination of family background, combat experience, self-confidence, familiarity with weapons systems and openness to change made him very attractive to Xi.”
In 2018, Xi seemed certain that his reform was paying off. Although he acknowledged, before the Central Military Commission, that problems still existed, he classified the changes as a “historic transformation” that would have “saved the military”.
When Xi secured a third term in 2022, he surprised by keeping Zhang on the commission. At 72, he was already seen as close to retirement. Instead, Xi named him the country’s top general, tasked with achieving the goal of a leap in military capabilities by 2027.
China faced an increasingly risky international scenario, Xi said two weeks later, on a visit to the Joint Operations Command Center. “Direct all our energy into combat readiness,” he ordered.
The last man standing
Just over six months later, in 2023, the feeling of stability collapsed. Xi abruptly changed the top commander of the Rocket Force and his deputy — an extraordinary gesture in the arm of the Armed Forces that controls nuclear and conventional missiles. Nothing was publicly explained. Then the Minister of Defense was also fired without any official justification.
As the campaign expanded, the power of General Zhang Shengmin, in charge of conducting the investigations, grew. He had risen through the ranks despite having little experience in combat operations. In the Rocket Force, he served as political commissar, responsible for ensuring loyalty to the party. He was also known for his passion for brush calligraphy.
He was then promoted to command a newly created body to investigate corruption and disloyalty within the Armed Forces. His rise reflected the importance Xi places on ideological control and political allegiance, even as he insists on readiness for eventual conflict.
At the end of 2025, the purges were already changing not only the composition of the troops, but the balance of power between the remaining commanders. Analysts say that as the investigations deepened, a climate of turmoil grew within the military, including among officers focused on combat capabilities and those tasked with enforcing political discipline.
“Xi is caught in a contradiction between being ‘red’ and being technical,” said Thompson, the former Pentagon official, using “red” as a synonym for party loyalty.
According to Christopher K. Johnson, a former US government intelligence officer and now president of the consultancy China Strategies Group, the final straw came when Xi decided to promote Zhang Shengmin to vice-president of the Central Military Commission.
Zhang Youxia, supported by his number two general Liu Zhenli, opposed the idea. Placing an investigator in such a high position, they argued, could reinforce the image that the People’s Liberation Army cares more about politics than actual combat capability.
China’s recent history is not exactly kind to commanders who thought they could go too far in their disagreements with the top of power. Zhang appears to have made the same mistake. “He thought, ‘I have the biography to come forward and say this,’ and it turned out he didn’t,” Johnson said.
When he and his vice-president were removed at the beginning of this year, the military’s official newspaper accused the two of having “severely trampled” on the president’s accountability system — the same one that Xi had created precisely to consolidate his control over the Armed Forces.
Xi didn’t stop there. In April, he launched a program of “ideological rectification” and “revolutionary forging” within the military — in practice, a new indoctrination campaign. Xi addressed a group of high-ranking officials in Beijing, described as the “first class”, signaling that the effort to reinforce loyalty to the party must continue.
TV footage of the meeting showed rows of officials taking careful notes as Xi spoke. Next to him at the main table was General Zhang Shengmin, the person in charge of cleaning.
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