By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

For the high command of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi Jinping’s third term as China’s president has been a period of almost operatic tumult. A large number of senior officers have been removed since Xi started his third term in 2022, including three of the seven members of the party’s supreme military body, the Central Military Commission. Many of the members of the PLA’s most senior ranks, including the defense minister and the officer who oversaw just about every general officer promotion for over a decade, have been disgraced. By the end of his tenure, Xi could well exceed the mercurial Mao Zedong in his body count of officers who have been purged.

In other words, Xi’s iron grip on the military not only endures, it is also indicative of his obsession with breaking the PLA’s insularity and endemic corruption and ensuring that, should he need to bet the regime on the military’s prowess, it will not fail.

Although Xi oversaw military purges earlier in his career and even imposed a sweeping overhaul of the PLA’s command structure in 2015, this recent shakeup has raised eyebrows since many of the affected men were Xi’s putative allies rather than potential political rivals. The ousting of senior officers who were once considered untouchable has fed a flurry of rumors that Xi is losing his grip over the PLA—and even prompted more extreme claims that Xi’s political demise might be imminent.

But rather than Xi’s diminution, the recent moves more likely reflect Xi’s continued dominance of the military. Much like a Mafia don, Xi has shown that he considers even his associates to be disposable. More importantly, the staggering political casualties reflect that he is losing patience with his military rather than his control over it. The moves demonstrate his continued dissatisfaction with the PLA’s high command and can be seen as part of an ongoing process of achieving his larger goals of bending the military to his will. Indeed, Xi wants to ensure he can employ violence with confidence, but Xi’s confidence seems to be the rarest and most precious commodity for an otherwise well-resourced military.

Xi sees his military agenda as a centerpiece of his legacy. Whereas Xi’s predecessors focused their political firepower primarily on advancing major economic reforms, some of the most dramatic reforms of the Xi era have occurred in the military. Two goals have driven his unforgiving management of the PLA. His paramount aim is ensuring the military is thoroughly politicized and thus willing to fulfill its role as the ultimate guarantor of the party’s rule should it be challenged by internal unrest. And Xi also wants a military that can fight if he needs it to do so, including against the U.S. military.

 

Friendly Fire

The recent purges of CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong and Director of the Political Work Department Admiral Miao Hua have garnered the most attention in the rumor mill. The two men overlapped with Xi in Fujian Province earlier in their careers and were believed to enjoy a special relationship as a result. But He is now missing (he hasn’t been seen in public since March), and Miao was removed from his post in November 2024.

Analysts have gravitated to two hypotheses. The more mundane is that these purges reflect embarrassingly poor judgment by Xi in his choice of subordinates. The more extravagant is that they reflect a burgeoning movement among disaffected party and military leaders who now seek to challenge or even remove Xi.

Neither of these hypotheses stand up to scrutiny, however. Both share the unlikely premise that these purges have somehow loosened Xi’s grip on the military. If the political turmoil inside the PLA was in fact embarrassing to Xi, it would be covered up rather than publicly acknowledged, as most of these cases have been. If the party excels at nothing else, it is adept at propagandizing and protecting the leadership’s image, particularly Xi’s.

Moreover, if Xi were in fact in political trouble with the military, the question would be: why now? After a decade of seemingly supine obeisance, there is no obvious reason why the military leadership would suddenly rouse itself to oppose Xi. The PLA actively thwarted the efforts of Xi’s predecessors when they tried to reform the high command. But so far, the PLA has not only succumbed to Xi’s sweeping reforms, it also seems to be earnestly preparing for Xi’s order to provide military options for a Taiwan contingency by 2027.

Historically, the PLA has been loath to wade too deeply into politics. Even after filling the administrative vacuums left by the Cultural Revolution or the turmoil of the 1989 Tiananmen crisis, the military was content to relinquish its political role and go “back to the barracks.” Indeed, Leninist regimes tend to effectively inoculate themselves against the prospect of military coups that bedevil other authoritarian systems because of their reliance on purges and political commissars to enforce party discipline.

Rather than a split between Xi and the PLA, it seems more likely that the recent purges are the result of an intramural game of thrones within the PLA. Xi still has close ties to key senior officers, after all, especially CMC Vice Chairman General Zhang Youxia, whom Xi has known for decades and whose father was close friends with Xi’s father. Xi has even allowed Zhang to remain CMC vice chairman after he exceeded the party’s informal retirement age—a remarkable and clear sign of Xi’s trust in him. Zhang has also survived Xi’s anticorruption campaign unscathed despite having previously run the PLA’s Equipment Development Department, which has been a focal point of the most recent round of purges.

The ousted officers, by contrast, could simply be in the outer orbit of Xi’s political circle. And given that corruption is such a widespread reality of life in the PLA, especially since Xi initiated his pricey military modernization program, the recently purged officers may have miscalculated that their ties to Xi would allow them to line their pockets with impunity.

 

Red Army, Red Flags

The scale and drama of these machinations in the high command, however, raise deeper questions about why Xi has been so fixated on the military—and so ruthless in his management of it. His biography offers some clues.

As the son of a leader who played a major role in China’s civil war, Xi was more comfortable with military affairs than his two predecessors—both of whom were engineers with little prior exposure to the military. Xi’s immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, had few if any identifiable allies among senior PLA officers and struggled to exercise full control over the military. Since many of his fellow princelings served in the senior ranks, however, Xi was better attuned to the politics within the military. And he had a greater appreciation for the political importance of the PLA, intuitively understanding that control of the military was indispensable for his ability to dominate Chinese politics.

Yet in 2010 when Xi became a member of the CMC and the Chinese Communist Party’s heir apparent, he was probably alarmed by what he discovered at PLA headquarters. Thanks to the domination of generals loyal to former leader Jiang Zemin, who sustained his influence throughout the Hu era (2002–2012), the PLA had become an insular and unwieldy institution that was spending more time protecting its parochial interests than operating as a joint force globally or even regionally.

Indeed, Xi started his tenure as commander in chief by promulgating the idea that the PLA needed to be prepared “to fight and win battles,” a turn of phrase that rather patronizingly implied that the PLA was not currently prepared to do so. Xi also likely found that behind the wall of PLA insularity, there was extensive corruption. As one of Xi’s princeling allies famously commented, corruption had become so rife in the PLA that “only our own corruption can defeat us.”

The insularity of the PLA is hard to fathom from afar. It is a sprawling, opaque, and technologically advanced empire unto itself within the party apparatus, and even civilian Communist Party leaders often can’t understand, penetrate, or control it. Although the Communist Party has a monopoly on the use of force, the PLA has a near monopoly on military expertise. Unlike in the United States, there is no cadre of civilian experts on military affairs either inside or outside the PLA. There is no equivalent to the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense, which helps ensure civilian control of the military.

Paradoxically, this has bred an increasing degree of professionalism: senior officers in the PLA are neutral experts focused on warfighting and not on politics. Although an apolitical military appeals to democracies such as the United States, this trend would have startled rather than mollified Xi. In the Chinese political system, the military is supposed to be thoroughly politicized: virtually all officers are required to be party members and both senior commanders and the rank and file devote considerable time to ideological education and other tasks that are ancillary to military proficiency. In fact, the PLA’s chief periodical regularly publishes diatribes against the notion of an apolitical military. That focus stems in large part from the PLA’s primary mission and its true raison d’être—protecting the CCP and its rule, not defending the Chinese state per se.

 

Course Correction

In 2011, a mere year into Xi’s tenure on the CMC, the question of whether the PLA would serve as guarantor of the party became acute because of the Arab Spring. In the face of public discontent, security forces across the Middle East melted away and regimes fell. During China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, the PLA’s support for quashing the protesters in Tiananmen Square rested on a narrow consensus; many senior PLA officers opposed martial law and the military was paralyzed for a month before paramount leader Deng Xiaoping could sway the outcome. After the Arab Spring, one could imagine senior CCP leaders asking, “If Tiananmen happened today, would the PLA again save the party?”

Xi was likely not assured. The command structure of the PLA at the time looked like a joint force at first glance, with each service having a representative on the party’s supreme military body—but in fact, this structure made it even more difficult to control the high command since no officer had the authority to corral the various service chiefs. For any civilian leader, this state of affairs would be troubling. But for a Leninist leader like Xi, it was unacceptable.

Soon after becoming commander in chief, Xi initiated a risky blitzkrieg against the military chieftains who had turned the PLA into a near state within a state. He arrested and purged two retired but influential vice chairmen of the CMC for accepting bribes before purging several other senior officers across a wide swath of the PLA. He then went on to diminish the role of the PLA’s Ground Force, which had traditionally enjoyed a dominant position in the PLA, through a major overhaul of the PLA’s command structure. (Unlike their brethren in the navy or the air force, the ground forces did not consider themselves a mere service among several in the PLA. Rather, they were the PLA itself because they had conquered China for the Communist Party.)

Xi’s reforms wrested operational control from the services and handed it over to a novel command structure that is streamlined and reflects Xi’s dual emphasis on strict party control and joint operations. Today, the Ground Force, which has been somewhat clumsily renamed the People’s Liberation Army Army, must operate as a peer with its fellow services, which in many ways are at the forefront of the PLA’s dramatic military modernization.

This is a marked shift from just 20 years ago, when the ground forces still dominated the PLA’s priorities and institutions. The “Army Army” no longer dominates membership of the CMC, and the Joint Theater command staff and the other services now receive a greater share of the budget, especially for weapons acquisitions. Those services have grown, meanwhile, while the army has been cut by almost 500,000 since 2010.

 

‘Kill the Monkeys’

The sheer scope and scale of the institutional reforms that Xi imposed on the PLA a decade ago are not to be underestimated. They are tantamount to the U.S. military experiencing both the 1947 National Security Act, which subjugated the Navy and War Departments to a unified Department of Defense, and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which sought to oust the service chiefs from the operational chain of command, simultaneously. Although the United States has a long tradition of civilian control of the military, both reforms provoked intense public hostility as well as opposition from the high command, including the famous “Revolt of the Admirals” in 1949 when navy officers publicly opposed the Truman administration’s defense policy.

Given the audacity of Xi’s purges and reforms, many analysts have expected—or even hoped for—some kind of backlash against Xi for more than a decade. Yet Xi made these extensive renovations to the high command with no visible sign of dissent. By going straight for the metaphorical jugular of the PLA, Xi flipped on its head the oft-used phrase that Chinese leaders “kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.” Instead of purging the protégés of PLA elites to send a message to the top, he decapitated the leadership itself. It was a gamble, but the moves effectively bludgeoned resistance and seemed to enhance Xi’s stature.

Indeed, power in Chinese politics tends to accrue like compound interest rather than depreciate, and the potential for opposition to Xi has dissipated rather than coalesced over time. This dynamic was most vividly on display at the last party congress in 2022, when Xi not only evicted the already marginalized allies of his predecessor Hu from the leadership lineup but also had Hu himself physically removed from the proceedings while Xi looked on impassively. Twice in his tenure, Xi has even hauled the entire high command to historic revolutionary sites where Mao institutionalized the party’s control of the military, reinforcing the military’s role as the armed wing of the Communist Party.

Xi’s focus on reforming the PLA is often portrayed in the West as a myopic obsession with unification with Taiwan. But it is more symbolic than that. Throughout his tenure, Xi has demonstrated a keen fondness for centenary celebrations, and 2027 will mark the 100th anniversary of the creation of the PLA. Serendipitously for Xi, 2027 will also coincide with the start of his potential fourth term in office, and Xi and the military will inevitably use the occasion to publicly extol the considerable advances the PLA has made toward his objectives. Behind closed doors, however, Xi is likely to remain relentless in pushing the PLA to do more.

 

Combat Ready?

Xi’s overbearing approach to the PLA not only ensures Xi’s military objectives, it also serves his political objectives. Keeping senior officers uncertain about their career prospects and reliant on Xi for their promotions and livelihoods allows Xi to cultivate multiple channels of information from within the PLA so that he can puncture that wall of insularity and triangulate what he hears from different sources. This tactic is especially important as the PLA modernizes to conduct twenty-first-century warfare and becomes even more impenetrable for senior party civilian leaders.

For many observers, Xi’s approach may seem counterproductive. Stringent management of the PLA and the relentlessness of Xi’s anticorruption campaign is probably both humiliating and demoralizing for senior officers. Yet Xi probably sees such suffering among the high command as having a salutary effect. Xi’s own father was ousted from power and imprisoned multiple times during his long career in the CCP—trials that seem to have deepened his loyalty to the party rather than undermined it.

For more than 40 years, the PLA has been a peacetime military unbloodied by actual conflict. Without challenges or tests of loyalty, Xi knows it is at risk of growing complacent. He wants a military that is inured to such trials and ready to take on the most difficult missions, whether that is punishing its purported compatriots in Taiwan and fending off a potential U.S. intervention, or even employing violence to protect the party from its fellow citizens. As Xi noted in his first speech to the PLA after becoming commander in chief, the Soviet Union fell because “nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” Xi is obsessed with ensuring that the PLA’s men would resist if need be—but he is still not confident they would.

 

 

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