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A new wave of purges has engulfed the senior leadership of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army. Since the 20th National Party Congress in October 2022, more than 20 senior PLA officers from all four services—the army, navy, air force, and rocket force—have disappeared from public view or been removed from their posts. The absences of other generals have also been reported, which could foreshadow additional purges.
Most notably, since the fall of 2023, three of the six uniformed members of the party’s Central Military Commission, the top body of the Chinese Communist Party charged with overseeing the armed forces, have been removed from their posts. The first to fall was Defense Minister Li Shangfu, who was removed in October 2023 and expelled from the CCP in June 2024. Then, this past November, Miao Hua, the director of the CMC’s Political Work Department, which manages personnel and party affairs, was suspended for “serious violations of discipline” before being formally removed from the CMC last month. And most recently, the Financial Times reported that He Weidong, the second-ranked vice chair who has not appeared in public since early March, had been purged.
Even stranger is the fact that all three generals had previously been promoted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping; they were appointed to the CMC itself in 2022, after Xi consolidated his control over the party at the 20th Party Congress. He Weidong was even a member of the Politburo, one of the party’s top decision-making bodies, comprised of the 24 highest-ranking party leaders. And Miao and He have been described by analysts as being part of a “Fujian faction” within the PLA, because the generals had been stationed in that province at the same time as Xi and are believed to have close ties with him.
Nevertheless, it is useful to remember that Beijing has rarely waited for the right conditions before ordering the PLA into battle. In 1950, for instance, Chinese forces intervened in support of Pyongyang in the Korean War, even though China’s economy and society had been devastated by years of civil war. In 1962, the PLA attacked India, even though China’s most senior military officer had recently been purged for questioning Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. And in 1979, Beijing dispatched an ill-prepared PLA to Vietnam, where Chinese troops suffered significant losses for limited political gains. Now, as then, Chinese leaders may pursue war even if the domestic economic and political conditions appear unfavorable—and even if the PLA is not ready to fight.
First, a common reason for many purges is graft. Corruption has long plagued the PLA and the CCP more broadly. Since Xi came to power in 2012, Beijing has more than doubled its defense budget in order to fund the military’s rapid modernization. This flood of new money, especially related to weapons procurement and construction projects, has increased opportunities for officers and defense industry executives to pad their budgets or skim money off the top. Before becoming defense minister, Li had been in charge of the CMC’s weapons development department, which oversees the procurement process. A few months before Li’s dismissal, both the commander and commissar of the PLA Rocket Force, and two of the commissar’s deputies, were all detained. The PLARF’s rapid expansion on Li’s watch, including the construction of more than 300 silos and the significant expansion of its ballistic missile arsenal, likely offered many opportunities for self-enrichment.
Some generals may also have been purged because they were engaging in bribery related to promotions and patronage networks. This has been a long-standing problem for the PLA: often, the most well-connected officers, rather than the most competent ones, are promoted to higher ranks. Miao, the head of the Political Work Department, oversaw personnel and appointments. If the promotions he signed off on were not strictly merit-based, it may have contributed to his undoing. Miao’s predecessor, Zhang Yang, was placed under investigation in 2017 for similar reasons. Less than two months later, he died by suicide, and the following year, he was posthumously expelled from the party.
CMC members and other senior officers may also have been removed if they were deemed to be using personnel appointments to create their own power centers, or “mountaintops,” within the PLA. Senior officers who prioritize the accrual of personal power are a liability for Xi because they create conflicting loyalties and factional tensions within the armed forces that can harm operational readiness. Because Miao and He were newly appointed members of the CMC, they may have sought to strengthen their positions at the expense of veteran members, such as the first-ranked Vice Chair Zhang Youxia, a childhood friend of Xi’s. Xi has kept Zhang, now 75, on the CMC despite the normal retirement age of 68.
this touches upon points that most commentators rarely bother to follow, if a person is purged, then the line followed is that it is simply a matter of not towing the line of the top brass, and was removed for spurious reasons, there is always a possibility that with the rapid changes in chinese society, some of those purged had indulged in a bout of self-enrichment to the detriment of the wider party interest
Finally, it’s possible that the purged senior officers committed no offense at all beyond incompetence: Xi may simply have been dissatisfied with their performance and lost confidence in their ability to lead and achieve his goals for the PLA. As Joel Wuthnow and Phillip Saunders observed in their new book, China’s Quest for Military Supremacy, the structure of the relationship between the party and the armed forces makes it hard for Xi to trust his generals. The PLA enjoys substantial autonomy with little direct supervision, so the party must rely on the PLA to discipline itself. Moreover, the highly specialized nature of modern military affairs means that the party lacks the expertise to ensure that the PLA is meeting the party’s modernization goals.
If the CCP uncovered corruption in the weapons procurement system, for instance, the party leadership may doubt the reliability and performance of the advanced weapons systems developed and fielded over the past decade. According to U.S. intelligence, some of China’s new ballistic missiles were filled with water, not fuel, and the blast doors constructed for new silos needed to be repaired or replaced. Efforts are likely underway to review and recertify new and planned weapons systems to ensure they will function as expected, which may slow their development and deployment.
The purges also disrupt the functioning of the entire command system. The CMC, a six-member body that Xi chairs to oversee all aspects of the PLA, has 15 subordinate units.
Early the following decade, China attacked India’s forces on the two countries’ disputed border. At the time, Mao was on the back foot politically after his disastrous Great Leap Forward, an industrialization campaign in which as many as 45 million people perished in famines. Yet Chinese party and military leaders concluded that war was necessary to blunt Indian pressure on Tibet and restore stability to the Chinese-Indian border. Moreover, the attack occurred only a few years after Peng Dehuai, China’s top military officer throughout the 1950s, was purged for questioning the wisdom of the Great Leap Forward. Peng’s dismissal also led to the removal of other senior military officers who were seen as closely tied to him, shaking up the PLA high command. In this instance, China enjoyed overwhelming superiority on the battlefield, destroying Indian forces and achieving its political objectives, as India did not challenge China on the border militarily for the next two decades.