China’s high command is in the midst of extraordinary upheaval that has deformed command relationships and renewed a climate of fear that will likely be a fixture of civil-military relations under Xi Jinping. Internal investigations began around 2023 within the familiar breeding grounds of military corruption – procurement and logistics – but have spread into the heart of the political discipline system and the head of the command structure, the Central Military Commission (CMC).

An Unprecedented Campaign Against Xi’s Handpicked Subordinates

Xi has purged half the uniformed members of the CMC little more than two years after selecting them, including the first uniformed CMC Vice Chairman forcibly removed since the Cultural Revolution. CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong’s absence from recent gatherings of the Politburo and CMC confirms the rumors that he has been detained, following the downfall of CMC member and Political Work Department Director Miao Hua in November, CMC member Li Shangfu in 2023, and a slew of other active and recently retired senior officers.

Xi’s move against his commanders is even more striking because it comes during a period of domestic political stability, unlike previous periods of civil-military turmoil. Xi’s own inquisition into the high command after assuming power in 2012 was even broader than today’s, but took place in the context of his struggle to consolidate power within the CCP. Other upheavals have likewise been part of larger seismic shifts within the party, including Jiang Zemin’s and Deng Xiaoping’s consolidations of power and the Cultural Revolution.

Now, however, Xi’s grip on the CCP is unassailable and he is removing some of the generals with whom he appeared to have had the closest ties. Miao and He hail from Fujian Province, where Xi served as a rising leader, and both enjoyed rapid promotions that suggested Xi had a hand in elevating them. (Strikingly, He was not even a Central Committee member when he vaulted into the Politburo and CMC Vice Chairman position in 2022.)¹ For many outside and presumably inside observers, they would have been counted as among Xi’s top lieutenants in the military.

Adding to the puzzle, one of the linchpins of Xi’s oversight of the PLA appears to be absent from center stage. Zhong Shaojun has been one of Xi’s closest aides for decades and Xi immediately installed him in the PLA’s nerve center – the CMC General Office – upon taking power. Zhong rose to be Director of the General Office and was the only civilian other than Xi in a position of real authority within the PLA.² Zhong was presumably a vital link for Xi in the PLA until sometime in 2024 when he took a position with little political significance, Political Commissar of the National Defense University. In a sign of how unsettled the PLA has become, Zhong’s move could easily be read as either a stepping stone to higher office, or a sidelining that could presage trouble. Zhong’s replacement is Fang Yongxiang, a career officer whose background in the former Nanjing Military Region would have seemed a boon a year ago but now puts him in company with Miao and He.

Dismissals Probably Reflect Failures Of Judgment And Deliberate Pressure On Leaders

I interpret the spiraling campaign as a product of several complementary factors: specific errors of political judgment by Xi and his personnel apparatus, probable internal feuding within the PLA, and Xi’s broader governing philosophy of using fear to control the CCP’s instruments of force. These judgments are based on my understanding of Xi’s overall political position, his personal motivations, and organizational dynamics that flow from the structure of Leninist systems. But the complete absence of openly available information about the substance of leaders’ personal relations means that many of these assessments are speculative.

Failures Of Judgment

The dizzying rise and fall of so many senior leaders probably partly reflects the personnel apparatus’ failure to deter, detect, and report problems. In some cases this was likely due to mistakes and corruption by political officers, Organization Department personnel, and discipline inspection watchdogs. But it also indicates failures of personal and political judgment by Xi himself because he would have handpicked several of the individuals involved. Just as important, Xi is ultimately responsible for maintaining the system of interlocking checks and oversight mechanisms that guards against corruption and fiefdoms within the CCP. The extent of its failure suggests a deeper structural problem than simply incompetence or graft on the part of a few bad apples.

A series of prosecutions and transfers in the CCP’s civilian personnel system suggests Xi is holding its leaders responsible for at least some of the recent failures, probably including the embarrassing removal of former Minister of Foreign Affairs Qin Gang. In an extraordinary move, Politburo member Li Ganjie was effectively demoted in April from leading the Central Committee’s Organization Department to the United Front Work Department. Around the same time the former head of the Discipline Inspection Commission supervision group in the Central Organization Department was expelled from the CCP for seeking bribes to facilitate promotions, among many other offenses. In December the party also expelled a former deputy director of the Organization Department for similar offenses, although he left the Department in 2020.

Xi’s Implicit Choice About How To Maintain Power

More broadly, there are different models that Xi could use to maintain his political position and the investigations of the past year indicate he is favoring one that relies on unpredictability. The following are two stylized models that aren’t mutually exclusive but offer a useful framework for understanding Xi’s instincts. Many party cadres are also likely to grasp for models like these to interpret events about which they know little more than outsiders.

Xi could have leaned heavily on the strength of his personal ties to key lieutenants to oversee key nodes of power. In this model, if someone were “Xi’s guy,” he would have a free hand to enforce Xi’s dictates within their sphere and their loyalty would be assured by their reliance on Xi and the strength of their ties. Xi would also probably be willing to overlook their personal foibles (and might even appreciate the leverage that they provided) as unimportant compared to their role as an enforcer.

Xi instead appears to be relying more heavily on a balance of power – and fear – among key lieutenants to keep them and their organizations in line. In a system where political rectitude is subjective and corruption is pervasive, investigations into senior leaders are political acts rather than impartial rule-based processes. The downfall of Miao and He and the murky situation of Zhong Shaojun are signals that at least in the PLA, no one is guaranteed to be safe. Xi may be especially inclined to keep military subordinates on their toes because of the inherent political sensitivity of the military and because his networks are relatively thinner than in the civilian party apparatus. However, many civilian cadres are likely to assume the same dynamic could take hold in their realm given the turbulence in the Central Organization Department and other civilian bureaucracies.

This approach will have profound consequences. For Xi, stoking uncertainty and fear among subordinates is a useful check on potential inclinations toward complacence and empire-building, so long as that fear doesn’t morph into animosity that jeopardizes Xi’s personal safety. For the PLA and many other organizations, that pervasive sense of threat is likely to undermine organizational cohesion and slow decisionmaking as leaders seek explicit permission for any action that could be scrutinized for signs of favoritism or corruption. In one sense this is a familiar dynamic since Xi took power, but the slowdown in the fall of top leaders since 2017 had seemingly offered the possibility of a different dynamic.

An Unknowable X Factor: Internal Military Feuds

One simplified shorthand of Xi’s tenure illustrates why we might suspect internal feuds are partly to blame for the spate of fallen followers: Xi’s first five years (2012-17) were consumed with the quest to consolidate power. His lieutenants were kept disciplined and relatively united by the fact that their gains came at the expense of Xi’s rivals, and by the risk that they would suffer if their squabbling undermined Xi’s high-stakes bid to remake the party. In Xi’s next five years (2017-22), those lieutenants settled into their positions and cultivated their own extended networks. Now, political power within Xi’s network of allies and associates is a zero-sum game; it can no longer be taken from Xi’s rivals because there are none left. The passage of time has also probably exposed some leaders’ inevitable missteps.

This environment is ripe for internal jockeying for power within Xi’s extended network, and the competition is likely to be vicious because Xi’s relentless internal investigations have made the stakes of losing high indeed. Participants probably weaponize rumors, allegations, and outright accusations of corruption and political misconduct against competitors, and these dynamics probably add an unpredictable wildcard to the course of investigations.

Unfortunately, in the current information environment it is virtually impossible to observe evidence of this game of thrones from open sources, and analysts are more likely to be misled than informed by supposed indicators of “factions” and their maneuvers. Personal or career backgrounds and public utterances, including measures of the frequency and fervor with which leaders repeat Xi’s slogans, do not reflect personal loyalties or sentiments. Analysts who rely on indicators like these are like the man who searches for his lost keys under a streetlight simply because that’s where the light is. The best that outsider observers can do is often to assess whether structural conditions are conducive to competitions for influence boiling over.

Could There Be Outright Opposition To Xi?

It is worth considering an alternative hypothesis that the flurry of moves reflects actual political opposition to Xi. After all, the last uniformed CMC Vice Chairman forced from office, Lin Biao, was accused of leading a coup. (Neil Thomas has a great rundown of previous vice chairmen who left office.) But in my view the weight of the evidence and the overall continued strength of Xi’s position within the party makes it very unlikely that PLA leaders were actively opposing Xi.

Xi’s control over the CCP is so comprehensive that opposing him would require significant collective action among leaders and would be extraordinarily risky. Officers like He and Miao would very likely assume that their personal communications and movements could be monitored. There is also no clear reason why they would turn against the man who, until very recently, had elevated them above their peers and upon whom they relied for their positions. Furthermore, the two men’s fingerprints are quite literally on the documents and denunciations that condemned many officers to incarceration and disgrace. This would have been a powerful deterrent to abandoning Xi until the very moment they heard the knock at their own doors.

Li Ganjie’s demotion to the United Front Work Department also suggests Xi is sidelining him for errors, not betrayal. And although the formal denunciations of Miao and He are likely to accuse them of a wide range of political misdeeds, if they had been suspected of plotting directly against Xi many more officers in their circles would likely have been rounded up much more quickly than appears to be the case.

A Broken Central Military Commission Probably Disrupts Command Relations And Force Development

Xi’s purge of half the CMC is a seismic shock that is likely to impede decisionmaking about military development and raises difficult questions about the role of the CMC and key command relations within the PLA.

There is now one single most senior uniformed officer in the PLA, Zhang Youxia, which is unusual and probably disadvantageous for Xi. In the current political context, multiple uniformed CMC Vice Chairmen counterbalance each other’s influence, guarding against a single general amassing excessive authority.³ Many PLA officers might also wonder whether Zhang himself is at risk after numerous investigations into senior leaders involved in the procurement apparatus, which Zhang led for five years. Such is the extent of uncertainty in the PLA that even Zhang’s longtime connection to Xi and the fact that Xi ignored retirement norms to keep Zhang on the CMC are no guarantee of safety.

A single CMC Vice Chairman also has implications for certain edge-case scenarios. If Xi were to suddenly die, the Vice Chairman would have an avenue to exercise sole operational control over the PLA, which would greatly influence succession politics. Having a sole Vice Chairman also suggests the concerning possibility that a smaller circle of people would have authority over the disposition of China’s nuclear weapons in some cases.

The only other remaining CMC members are Liu Zhenli and Zhang Shengmin. Zhang Shengmin is presumably the most feared man in uniform because he leads the inquisitors of the CMC Commission for Discipline Inspection, but his political position would play only a peripheral role in operational decisions. Much of the massive weight of coordinating the PLA’s strategic development and operations therefore falls on Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff Department (JSD) Liu Zhenli.

The PLA is therefore left with an overstretched and odd operational core in the CMC. The only two CMC members who had any experience in the Eastern Theater, which is the locus of Taiwan war preparations, are now in detention. JSD Chief Liu has had a narrow career; although he reportedly saw combat against Vietnam in the 1980s he then served almost exclusively in Army positions in the Central Theater, with no experience in other services or in China’s primary strategic directions. CMC Vice Chairman Zhang is one of China’s last serving war heroes but has no direct experience outside the Army.

Compounding the problem, Xi’s military reforms since 2015 have flattened the PLA hierarchy in a way that imposes a tremendous span of control challenge on the CMC. The four massive General Departments that organized military affairs were dissolved, and the CMC now has something along the lines of 18 subordinate units and service arms of varying sizes, depending on how they are counted.⁴ This reorganization had its own compelling political and operational rationale but coordination will be a problem for a fractured CMC, especially when subordinates scramble to get explicit approval for decisions of any significance.

Overall, the current climate is likely to promote paralysis in force development decisions as officers try to avoid attracting any scrutiny. The Joint Staff Department may gain relative importance almost by default as the shrunken CMC struggles to coordinate decisions across the bureaucracy, and because the JSD Chief has fewer peers on the CMC. Xi may also appoint replacements to the CMC at a CCP plenum, which would restore some decisionmaking capacity to the CMC even if investigations continue to ripple through the bureaucracy.

The PLA’s vital political work system is also once again in disarray with Miao’s downfall. There are today 22-year veterans of the PLA – the armed wing of the CCP – who have never known a top political officer who avoided public disgrace. Xu Caihou took over the General Political Department in 2002, Zhang Yang was the PLA’s top commissar beginning in 2012, and Miao Hua followed in 2017.

The purges probably will have a disruptive impact on near-term PLA readiness and are an indication that Xi does not anticipate fighting a war soon. But they would not preclude the PLA from large-scale action if necessary, nor do they pose an obstacle to large-scale exercises and saber rattling directed at Taiwan or the United States, given the PLA’s regular cadence of exercises and operations. If the threat of large-scale conflict suddenly appeared much greater, Xi would probably take steps to restore order and signal his personal support for key operational commanders. The PLA’s political reliability is always essential but investigations into personal misconduct and corruption would take a back seat to ensuring the force’s short-term readiness. In the long-term Xi no doubt hopes that taking a hard line on misconduct will improve PLA’s capabilities, although he may overlook the downsides of the climate of uncertainty that he is perpetuating.

Purges Indicate Fear And Uncertainty Will Be Fixtures Of Civil-Military Relations Under Xi

Xi’s decision to remove He, Miao, and numerous other leaders indicates that fear and suspicion are likely to cloud civil-military relations and elite politics under Xi. Before these purges, it was unclear whether Xi had eviscerated the PLA’s top brass in his first term simply because he hadn’t chosen them and didn’t trust them. Many cadres would have reasonably interpreted the makeup of the latest CMC as a sign that Xi had a clearly defined and trusted inner circle on whom he would rely to manage the PLA. The extraordinary downfall of so many senior officers has shattered those illusions and replaced them with a miasma of suspicion that will linger for years to come.