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Over the past few years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has built up more and more control of the People’s Liberation Army, the world’s largest fighting force. He pushed out dozens of high-ranking commanders and officers for alleged disloyalty and corruption. He removed three consecutive defence ministers under suspicion of “violations of discipline.” He expelled nine top generals from the Communist Party on graft charges in October, including the No. 3 figure in China’s military hierarchy.

Through it all, the No. 2 figure – General Zhang Youxia, second only to Xi himself – seemed immune to the purges. The men had grown up in Beijing together as the “princeling” sons of revolutionary leaders, who served alongside each other under Mao Zedong. Zhang became a close ally during Xi’s rapid rise to the height of Chinese politics. Xi then kept Zhang on past retirement age, naming him senior vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, which oversees the two-million-strong PLA.

But Zhang’s lifelong connection to Xi still couldn’t guarantee his safety. Over the weekend, the defence ministry announced that Zhang and another senior commander, Liu Zhenli, were under investigation for corruption. Worse still: According to the People’s Liberation Army Daily, an official military mouthpiece, the generals had “seriously trampled on” Xi’s authority, betrayed the trust of the Communist Party, and undermined the Party’s absolute leadership over the armed forces. It was “​​an unusually pointed reference to potential political differences within the top ranks of the military,” The Globe’s Asia correspondent James Griffiths writes.

The break

What exactly did Zhang do to fall out of Xi’s favour? It’s incredibly hard to say. Politics has always been a black box in China, particularly at the highest level. Through Xi’s 13-year tenure, decision-making has only become more opaque.

So here comes the speculation about Zhang’s downfall: Some analysts think he must have amassed too much power for Xi’s liking, or else perhaps he could no longer be trusted to root out corruption himself. Maybe he was plotting a coup. There might have been a gunfight in Beijing. The Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources, that Zhang was accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the U.S.

That last allegation struck one analyst as especially unlikely. “How would Zhang even do this?” Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, posted on X. Senior military leaders rarely leave China, never meet anyone unaccompanied, and have their communications closely scrutinized. Thomas doubted that a “battle-hardened general” like Zhang would “betray everything that gave his life meaning for the last few decades.”

The battle ahead

Zhang’s combat experience made him an anomaly in the PLA’s upper ranks – unlike most active commanders, he’s an actual war veteran, having fought in skirmishes with Vietnam beginning in the seventies. Drew Thompson, a former China specialist at the U.S. Department of Defense, suspects this background also made Zhang a rare voice of caution when it came to seizing Taiwan.

“I think he was the one active duty PLA officer who could give Xi the best, most objective advice about PLA military capabilities, including the PLA’s shortcomings, and crucially the human cost of military conflict,” Thompson wrote in a Substack post called “The demise of Zhang Youxia hits different.” He worried about the consequences with Zhang now absent. “A sycophant with no combat experience has to tell Xi what Xi wants to hear.”

And Xi may not want to hear that his gigantic military isn’t prepared to fight a costly and wildly complicated war for Taiwan. After all, Griffiths writes, it would mean pulling off a hugely tricky seaborne invasion against fierce resistance, while also fending off intervention from the U.S. and Japan, while also dealing with the inevitable economic fallout, up to and including a global market crash.

But this latest military purge could signal that Xi recognizes China’s limitations, Griffiths says, and is moving “to ensure that if and when the time comes, the PLA is ready for war.” That certainly seems to be Taiwan’s assumption. Taiwanese Defence Minister Wellington Koo told reporters that Taipei is keeping a close eye on the military shakeup, “based on the fact that China has never abandoned the use of force against Taiwan.”

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