Xi’s purge of China’s military brings its top general down

FLORENCE LO / REUTERS / APRIL 24, 2024

Chinese Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia arrives for a group photo session before the opening ceremony of the Western Pacific Naval Symposium in Qingdao, Shandong province in 2024.

China’s top general, second only to Xi Jinping, the nation’s leader, in the military command, has been put under investigation and accused of “grave violations of discipline and the law,” the Ministry of National Defense said today, the most stunning escalation yet in Xi’s purge of the People’s Liberation Army elite.

The general, Zhang Youxia, is a vice chair of the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party body that controls China’s armed forces. Another member of the commission, Gen. Liu Zhenli, who leads the military’s Joint Staff Department, is also under investigation, the Defense Ministry said. Its announcement did not say what either general was alleged to have done wrong.

Zhang’s downfall — few if any Chinese officials placed publicly under investigation are later declared innocent — is the most drastic step so far in Xi’s yearslong campaign to root out what he has described as corruption and disloyalty in the military’s senior ranks. It is all the more astonishing because Zhang seemed to be a confidant of Xi, who has known him for decades.

“This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents the total annihilation of the high command,” Christopher K. Johnson, a former CIA analyst who follows Chinese elite politics, said of the investigation of Zhang.

With the two generals effectively out, the Central Military Commission has just two members left: its chair, Xi, and Gen. Zhang Shengmin, who has overseen Xi’s military purges. Xi has now removed all but one of the six generals he appointed to the commission in 2022.

Johnson, the president of China Strategies Group, a consulting firm, said Xi seemed to have concluded that problems in the military ran so deep that he could not trust the top command to cure itself and must look to a new cohort of rising officers.

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He appears to have “decided he must cut very deep generationally to find a group not tainted,” Johnson said. “The purging of even a childhood friend in Zhang Youxia shows there now are no limits to Xi’s anti-graft zeal.”

Rumors that the general might be in trouble had spread for days, since official news reports left clues that he and Liu had been absent from a Communist Party meeting. But Zhang has disappeared from view before, and a senior official is usually out of sight for months before the party confirms that he is under investigation.

The speed with which Zhang’s ouster was announced seemed intended to stanch the potential damage for Xi, said Su Tzu-yun, an expert on the People’s Liberation Army at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, a body funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.

“This could be a big blow to morale inside the PLA,” Su said in an interview, referring to the removal of a seemingly invulnerable commander.

Zhang and Liu were also the PLA’s two top commanders for practical operational tasks, and their removal will leave a gap in experience, said Shanshan Mei, a political scientist at RAND, a research organization, who studies China’s armed forces.

“There’s no one right now at the highest level who has operational experience or who is in charge of training and exercises,” Mei said. “This is going to cut very deep, and there’s more to come, possibly.”

Zhang, 75, had seemed to be cordoned off from Xi’s widening purges. The two men’s fathers, both veterans of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary wars, were personally acquainted, and Xi had kept Zhang in office beyond the customary retirement age of about 70.

But Xi’s worries about the trustworthiness of his commanders seemed to finally outweigh whatever attachment he felt to the general, Su said. “I think this reflects Xi Jinping’s personal sense of insecurity, and that’s a major factor in his purges of the military,” he said.

Since 2023, waves of top commanders, officers and executives for arms manufacturers have been removed from office and placed under investigation — or, in some cases, have disappeared from view without explanation.

The first purges in that wave focused on China’s Rocket Force, which operates most of its nuclear missiles and many of its conventional ones. Ensuing investigations took down admirals, regional military commanders and members of the Central Military Commission.

Many of the targeted officers had been promoted by Xi since he took power in 2012, vowing to cleanse the armed forces of endemic graft. But after a decade in charge, he seemed to have concluded that some of his own handpicked protégés had been infected by the military’s corruption, which historically has often involved taking bribes for contracts or promotions.

The investigations’ toll on the military was visible at a meeting last year of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, a council of top officials. Of the 44 uniformed officers appointed to the committee in 2022, 29 — roughly two-thirds — had been purged or were missing, according to calculations made by Neil Thomas, a researcher on Chinese politics at the Asia Society.

Xi seems to have calculated that in the longer term, his shake-up of the military will make it less corrupt, more loyal and more effective in pursuing his goals, like putting pressure on Taiwan, the island democracy that rejects China’s claims of sovereignty.

But for now, and potentially for years, the disruptions caused by the purges could leave Xi less confident that his commanders are ready for combat, analysts have said.

“It’s a dilemma,” said Su, the Taiwan-based analyst. “He wants to first get rid of these so-called corrupt people, but for the PLA, if you clear out these high-level officers, that means a whole lot of experience is gone.”

Zhang was among the few Chinese commanders with extensive experience in battle. The son of a general, he gained prominence as a front-line officer during China’s last war, a border conflict with Vietnam that began in 1979 and lasted for years. He rose to become head of the General Armaments Department, which is in charge of procuring weapons, and Xi promoted him to the Central Military Commission in 2017.

“For Zhang Youxia, having combat experience — and being one of the only left who has any — has to add to his luster, at least to Xi Jinping,” John Culver, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst specializing in the Chinese military, said in an interview before Zhang’s dismissal was announced.

But analysts speculated that Zhang’s time in the General Armaments Department — which, because it controls arms contracts, became known as a honey pot of corruption — may have planted the seeds of his downfall. Other generals who rose through that department have also been purged, including Li Shangfu, a former defense minister.

Xi may need years or more to nurture a new crop of — presumably — trustworthy officers, and he must also fill the depleted ranks of the Central Military Committee.

“To rebuild these chains of command may take him five years or longer,” Su said. “The chances of an attack on Taiwan in the short term have been lowered.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2026 The New York Times Company

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