A military purge that began as an anti-corruption campaign has consumed nearly every senior officer in China’s armed forces — including Xi’s closest confidant in uniform. What remains is an army rebuilt around loyalty rather than competence, with implications that extend far beyond Beijing’s internal politics.
The warning from the ancient texts
When Xi Jinping addressed the surviving officers of the People’s Liberation Army at a legislative session this spring, the room told its own story. A year earlier, state television footage showed some 40 generals in attendance. This time, only a handful remained. Xi’s words were correspondingly somber. The military, he said, must never have anyone who harbors “a divided heart” toward the party. To observers of Chinese political language, the phrase carried the weight of centuries. It appears in ancient Chinese treatises on statecraft that counsel rulers against the danger of treacherous generals — texts that Xi is known to have studied. The reference was not rhetorical decoration. It was a public acknowledgment that one of the gravest political crises of his 13 years in power has yet to be resolved.
From anti-corruption campaign to historic purge
What began in the early years of Xi’s tenure as a targeted crackdown on corruption in the PLA’s weapons procurement system has metastasized into the broadest military purge since the Mao era. The Center for Strategic and International Studies documented in a February 2026 report that 36 generals and lieutenant generals have been officially removed since 2022, with another 65 officers listed as missing or potentially purged. The campaign has touched every corner of the military — the Rocket Force, the Strategic Support Force, the Equipment Development Department, all five theater commands, and ultimately the Central Military Commission itself.
The CMC, China’s supreme military body, now effectively consists of two people: Xi himself, and Zhang Shengmin, the military’s chief disciplinary inspector. At the National Defense University in April, when Xi delivered an opening address to remaining senior officers, only two full generals sat in a front row that once overflowed with stars. The empty chairs were the message.
36 generals officially purged since 2022 (CSIS)
100+ total officers ousted or missing since 2022
33% reduction in pool of theater command successors
The fall of Zhang Youxia — the last man Xi trusted
The most politically significant dismissal came in January 2026, when General Zhang Youxia — China’s top uniformed commander and, by most accounts, the officer Xi had trusted most deeply — was placed under investigation for serious violations of party discipline and law. Zhang was a princeling, the son of a revolutionary-era hero, and a combat veteran who had fought in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. Xi had personally revived Zhang’s career in 2012, elevating him to the CMC when his advancement had stalled, and had shielded him from an earlier procurement investigation by carefully framing its scope to exclude Zhang’s tenure in that role.
The final break, according to multiple accounts, came over a personnel decision. When Xi moved to elevate the general overseeing his anti-corruption campaign to a position that would have rivaled Zhang’s authority within the CMC, Zhang objected. The objection — to Xi, an act of institutional defiance — sealed his fate. Months later, he was gone. One former Pentagon official who had accompanied Zhang on a U.S. visit in 2012 described him as the one active-duty PLA officer who could give Xi honest, objective assessments of the military’s capabilities and shortcomings, including the human cost of conflict. His removal, that official wrote, could be seen as a step toward eliminating that caution from Xi’s inner circle.
“I think he was the one active-duty PLA officer who could give Xi the best, most objective advice about PLA military capabilities, including the PLA’s shortcomings and, crucially, the human cost of military conflict.”
— Drew Thompson, former China specialist, U.S. Department of Defense
Two networks dismantled — and what replaced them
Foreign Policy’s analysis of the purge identifies two distinct informal networks that Xi has systematically destroyed over the past 18 months. The first was the so-called Fujian faction — officers whose careers Xi had intersected with during his 22 years climbing the party ladder in southeastern China. That network was anchored by He Weidong, a CMC vice chairman, and Miao Hua, the Political Work Department director who for nearly a decade controlled the personnel files of virtually every flag officer in the PLA. Both were expelled from the party and military in October 2025, along with seven associated generals. The second network — the old ground-force establishment built around Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff chief Liu Zhenli — fell in January 2026.
What replaced these networks is the subject of considerable analytical debate. Xi’s “chairman responsibility system,” formalized over the past decade, gives him intelligence and direct control deep into the PLA’s ranks. He has replaced traditional military regions with theater commands, dissolved central departments he saw as barriers to his authority, and — in a move that stunned many inside the system — elevated the military’s chief disciplinarian to CMC vice chair, signaling that self-policing by the officer corps was no longer acceptable. The result, critics argue, is not a more professional military but a more atomized one: an institution whose informal networks — the relationships through which complex coordination actually happens in any large organization — have been systematically destroyed.
The readiness question — and the Taiwan implication
For Western defense analysts, the central concern is operational: what does the purge mean for the PLA’s ability to conduct complex military operations? The CSIS report is unambiguous on the short-term impact. With 56 deputy theater commanders purged, the pool of officers capable of assuming command of one of the PLA’s five theater commands has been reduced by more than a third. Officers who would have been promoted based on competence and experience within established networks are instead being elevated based on demonstrated loyalty to Xi — a selection criterion that does not map cleanly onto military effectiveness.
“This is dangerous for crisis management because it could make Xi unrealistically confident in his military’s capabilities in future contingencies.”
— Thomas Christensen, CSIS analyst
The Taiwan scenario occupies a particular place in this analysis. CSIS analysts note that less-complex operations — a naval blockade, limited strikes, punitive actions — can still likely be executed effectively even with a degraded command structure. More complex combined-arms operations, requiring highly coherent coordination across air, sea, land, and cyber domains, are where the gaps become most consequential. War on the Rocks argues that the purge’s ultimate effect will be atomization rather than professionalization: the destruction of the informal trust networks that allow large military organizations to function under the pressure of actual conflict, without the compensating benefit of robust formal institutions that exist in Western armed forces.
There is a longer-term counterargument. Joel Wuthnow of the National Defense University has noted that by the end of the decade, the officers now being promoted into senior roles will have gained experience with China’s modern hardware and with Xi’s command culture. By the 2030s, the argument goes, the PLA may emerge from this transition more cohesive — if less professionally diverse — than it entered it. Whether that trajectory materializes depends heavily on whether China avoids a major military contingency in the intervening years.
A CIA recruitment video and an unprecedented opening
One revealing indicator of how Western intelligence agencies are reading the moment: in February 2026, the CIA released a recruitment video specifically targeting Chinese military officers — appealing to PLA personnel who might be willing to share information with U.S. intelligence. The video, released in Mandarin and disseminated through channels accessible inside China, was an unusually public signal that Washington sees the current period of institutional turbulence within the PLA as a potential intelligence opportunity.
The paradox at the center
Xi Jinping set out more than a decade ago to build the most powerful, modern, and loyal military force in Chinese history. The means he has chosen — the purge of corruption, the destruction of informal networks, the concentration of authority in his own person — may be producing a force that is more loyal in the narrow sense of personal fealty, while less capable in the broader sense of institutional competence. The phrase “divided heart,” drawn from ancient texts, was meant as a warning to the officers who remain. But the deeper irony may be that a military remade entirely in one man’s image risks losing the very qualities — independent judgment, honest counsel, experienced initiative under pressure — that distinguish a capable fighting force from an obedient one.
