Standing inches from Xi Jinping at a military ceremony in late December, China’s highest ranking general, Zhang Youxia, may have had little inkling about the fate that was to befall him just a few weeks later when he was put under investigation.
The 75-year-old’s physical proximity to China’s leader, who stands to his right, reflects the position he holds in China’s hierarchy. As vice-chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the ruling body of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), he is the second-most powerful person in China’s military, after Xi, the commander-in-chief.
But on Saturday, China’s defence ministry announced that Zhang and Liu Zhenli, another CMC member, were under investigation for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law”, party-speak for corruption.
Zhang and Liu have not been formally removed from the party or the commission, but being placed under investigation is all but certain to lead to those outcomes.
“This is easily the most significant PLA purge in the post-Mao era,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society thinktank. “It’s hard to overstate how rare this is … it would be like arresting the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff for corruption.”
A Sunday editorial in the PLA’s official newspaper laid out the charges against Zhang and Liu. The men allegedly “seriously betrayed the trust and expectations” of the party and the CMC and “fostered political and corruption problems that undermined the party’s absolute leadership over the military”.
Precise details of the allegations have not been revealed, but the editorial suggests that political problems were a factor as well as corruption.
Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, said Zhang’s recent appearance alongside Xi and his nomination to the CMC at the 20th party congress in 2022, when he was past the normal retirement age, indicated that he was a trusted figure until relatively recently. “Corruption does not just happen overnight,” Wu said.
Zhang is the most senior in a string of top PLA officials who have been defenestrated in recent years, including Li Shangfu, the former defence minister, who was kicked off the CMC in 2023 and expelled from the party in 2024. The Wall Street Journal reported that Zhang’s downfall was linked to the fact that he had promoted Li.
Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and a former senior CIA analyst, said a power struggle was a more likely explanation than corruption. The purge “isn’t about corruption, it isn’t about leaking secrets, it is about a general that became too powerful”, he said.
Whatever the reason for Zhang’s fall from grace, one thing is certain: Xi wants him gone.
“The fact that Xi is purging his right-hand man in the military is a shocking development which suggests Zhang was guilty of a significant betrayal of Xi’s trust,” Thomas said.
Zhang was once considered to be one of Xi’s closest military allies. He is a fellow Communist party “princeling”, the son of revolutionaries who served under Mao Zedong. He is one of the few generals to have seen active combat as a frontline officer during China’s conflict with Vietnam in 1978.
These credentials, and the fact Xi handpicked him to serve on the CMC, might have suggested a degree of political protection.
But Xi seems determined to prove otherwise. “For Xi, there’s nothing more important than strengthening party discipline and ensuring it does not go the same way as the Soviet Communist party, which in his view was rendered ineffective by corruption,” said Thomas. “No one is safe in Beijing because Xi puts the party above any individual.”
The party’s control of the armed forces is central to its, and therefore Xi’s, grip on power. That means that Xi is willing to assert his authority at all costs, even if the result is a somewhat absurd CMC lineup effectively down to two people: Xi himself and the CMC’s anti-corruption chief, Zhang Shengmin.
For western analysts, the biggest question is what it means for China’s military buildup, and particularly its readiness to launch an assault on Taiwan. US intelligence believes Xi has ordered the military to be ready to win a fight for it by 2027, making this a crucial year for modernisation. Unification with the self-governing island which Beijing claims as its territory is one of Xi’s main priorities and he has not ruled out the use of force to achieve it.
Some argue that the purges make an attack on Taiwan less likely, at least in the short term, because the army does not have the high level decision-making capacity to launch a sophisticated operation. “It gives the US military more time to prepare for a Taiwan conflict,” said Wilder.
Others caution that the ousted men could be replaced by a younger, more aggressive lineup of officers who are unlikely to question their leader.
Lyle Goldstein, the director of the Asia programme at Defense Priorities, a US foreign policy thinktank, noted that China had unveiled a suite of powerful new weapons at its military parade in September, a sabre-rattling display of bravado.
“I think it would be a major mistake to assume that the Chinese military lacks capable senior officers or that it is less likely to move against Taiwan due to this recent shakeup of the CMC,” he said.
One aspect widely agreed on is that the investigations will not end with Zhang and Liu. Scholars of the Chinese Communist party describe corruption as a feature of the system, not a bug. Zhang and Liu are likely to be interrogated about whatever offences they are specifically accused of, which will throw up more names. “More arrests are likely,” Wu said.
Additional research by Lillian Yang
