A paradoxical purge: Xi shows his power, and his trouble in controlling the PLA
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s purge of the senior leadership of the People’s Liberation Army continues unabated. It reveals both the reach of the Chinese Communist Party’s disciplinary apparatus, and the persistence of disloyalty and corruption in the PLA.
On 21 September, Xinhua News Agency announced that the Politburo of the CCP Central Committee had approved the expulsion from the party of Central Military Commission vice chairman Zhang Youxia and former chief of the commission’s Joint Staff Department, Liu Zhenli. Both had already been expelled from military service, and their alleged criminal offences had been referred to military prosecutors.
The official statement presented their removal as evidence that the PLA was becoming ‘purer’ through the ‘revolutionary tempering’ of the anti-corruption struggle. Yet the allegations against Zhang and Liu suggest that considerably more is at stake than corruption. Their cases bring together three problems that have repeatedly complicated party–military relations in the post-Mao era: corruption and patronage; failures of command and party supervision; and political disloyalty.
The central issue is therefore not simply senior officers’ self-enrichment but whether informal networks of authority and obligation have persisted within the PLA despite Xi’s efforts to strengthen centralised party control.
Political loyalty is particularly prominent in the charges. Zhang and Liu are accused of having ‘betrayed their original aspiration and mission’, ‘lost their party spirit and principles’, crossed political ‘red lines and bottom lines’, formed ‘self-serving cliques’ and been ‘disloyal and dishonest to the party’. They are also accused of violating organisational, integrity, work and life discipline. Most concretely, they allegedly used their positions to help others with promotions in exchange for large bribes, accepted gifts and money, failed to fulfil their responsibilities for ‘rigorous party self-governance’ and failed to properly manage relatives and staff.
Taken together, these allegations are significant because they collapse the distinction between corruption and political control. The official statement explicitly concludes that Zhang and Liu’s ‘political problems and economic problems were intertwined’, combining corruption and dereliction of duty with factionalism and political disloyalty. In the party’s framing, therefore, selling promotions, distributing favours and cultivating patronage networks are not merely financial or organisational offences. They potentially create relationships of personal loyalty and obligation that compete with the vertical chain of authority running from the PLA through the Central Military Commission to the party centre.
For more than a decade, Xi has strengthened the institutional mechanisms through which he (as chairman of the commission) and the party supervise the PLA. Yet corruption and disloyalty appear to have persisted at the very top of the military hierarchy.
The extraordinary seniority of the latest targets therefore permits two contrasting interpretations. On one level, the removal of officers as senior as Zhang and Liu demonstrates the formidable reach of Xi’s disciplinary machinery and the party centre’s willingness to use it against even the most powerful military figures. On another, the persistence of corruption, patronage and alleged factionalism after the prolonged anti-corruption campaigns and institutional reform raises questions about the effectiveness of those mechanisms as instruments of routine control.
The party’s challenge is to maintain effective political control over an increasingly large, specialised and professionally complex military organisation whose senior officers necessarily have significant authority and informational advantages regarding personnel appointments, military procurement and military operations and strategy. Corruption is particularly threatening when it intersects with personnel management because control over promotions enables senior officers to construct networks of patronage. Such networks can distort formal chains of command and create alternative sources of loyalty within an institution in which the party demands absolute political obedience.
This helps explain why Xi’s anti-corruption campaign cannot be understood simply as an attempt to produce a cleaner government or even a more efficient military. Its central purpose is to ensure that professionalisation does not generate military autonomy and that organisational authority remains subordinate to party authority. The recurrent emphasis on corruption, personnel appointments, disciplinary violations and patronage networks in cases involving senior PLA officers since 2022 reflects the interconnected character of these concerns.
Xi seeks not to separate political reliability from military professionalism but to fuse them more closely. The PLA under Xi must be simultaneously ‘red’ and ‘expert’: professional competence must encompass not only operational effectiveness and preparedness but also organisational discipline and demonstrable political loyalty. The fall of Zhang and Liu suggests that Xi remains dissatisfied with the extent to which that model has been realised.
The likely consequence is a further intensification of party supervision. The central question raised by the removal of Xi’s generals is therefore not simply whether the PLA is becoming purer. It is whether recurrent purges represent the successful operation of Xi’s system of party control or evidence that the system requires increasingly intrusive intervention to maintain that control. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the defining paradox of party–military relations under Xi may be that each purge simultaneously demonstrates the power of his disciplinary apparatus and the persistence of the political-organisational problems it was designed to solve.
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