Xi Jinping’s military purges and reorganizations have reinforced his control over the PLA at the expense of its operational capabilities, and the fallout probably will hinder its ability to coordinate strategic force development and large-scale campaigns through 2027. The PLA’s inward turn is a positive factor for regional security in the next several years because it probably will deter Xi from taking unilateral actions likely to lead to war, although it will not stop the PLA from continuing coercive operations short of large-scale conflict.

Xi has set a Herculean task for the PLA to accomplish by its 2027 centennial, but that task is closer to cleaning out the Augean stables than slaying beasts abroad.

Sizing Up New CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Shengmin

Newly promoted CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Shengmin appears well suited to continue serving as Xi’s hatchet man because he has taken down some of the most powerful officers in the PLA but does not seem to have an extensive network of his own. He is a career political officer from the Rocket Force, the most insular military service, and he has overseen the annihilation of its senior leadership through repeated rounds of investigations. Zhang has thereby dismantled the very networks that would have served as the most natural foundation for his own organic power base. He will also be over the soft retirement age of 68 at the 2027 Party Congress, and cleansing the high command may well be his final assignment.

• Whether or not Zhang formally remains secretary of the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission now that he has been promoted, he is likely to play the key role in pursuing the ongoing investigations.

As a relative outsider with a narrow background, Zhang is the polar opposite of the two most prominent anticorruption crusaders from early in Xi’s tenure, which reflects the shift in the balance of power within the CCP. When Xi was first consolidating power after 2012, he enlisted Wang Qishan and General Liu Yuan (son of Liu Shaoqi) to help take down the old guard. Wang and Liu were among the most dynamic and independent figures within the civilian and military wings of the CCP, and probably for that reason both were ushered off stage after serving their purposes: Wang into China’s ceremonial vice presidency and Liu into early retirement. But now, thirteen years into his rule, Xi no longer needs allies; he needs lieutenants.

The Rise Of The Inquisitors

In April I wrote that a “broken” CMC created political problems for Xi and operational problems for the PLA; Xi’s promotion of Zhang to vice chairman addressed the most pressing political risk while deepening the operational ones.

Naming a second active CMC vice chairman to replace the purged General He Weidong restored an implicit check on the military’s political influence by again dividing leadership of the PLA between more than one uniformed officer.¹ It also marked the culmination of the steady ascent of the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission (DIC), led by Zhang, which reflects Xi’s focus on the military’s political character throughout his tenure.

Before Xi, the DIC was subordinate to the General Political Department and was at best ineffective and at worst complicit in pervasive corruption. The secretary of the Commission served simultaneously as deputy director of the General Political Department, formalizing its subordinate status. That changed with Xi’s 2015 military reforms, which carved up the General Political Department and made the DIC an independent entity directly subordinate to the CMC. Xi elevated it even further in 2017 when he named Zhang to the CMC, putting him on par with Political Work Department Director Miao Hua. Now that Zhang is a vice chairman and the Political Work Department is leaderless and reeling from investigations, Zhang and the DIC have eclipsed (and imprisoned) their former superiors.

The rise of the DIC at the expense of the Political Work Department is indicative of the fact that the PLA is in a crucible rather than a period of stable development. The DIC’s mandate is inherently negative; it exists to deter, identify, and remove wrongdoers. The commissars of the Political Work Department impose their own kind of tax on operational capabilities, but they at least have a broader role that supports more elements of the PLA’s institutional capacity. They identify and evaluate candidates for promotions, manage personnel records, inculcate officers and soldiers in party ideology, and at lower levels are responsible for morale and welfare.

The missions of these two organs are complementary, but when one subsumes the other, the imbalance ripples through the PLA. Before Xi, the Political Work Department’s predecessor co-opted the discipline inspection system and corruption spread unchecked. Now, discipline inspection has consumed the political work system and turmoil will follow.

Political Security At The Expense Of Operational Capabilities

In the broader arc of Xi’s tenure, the two pillars of his military program – structural reform and internal discipline – have had complementary political effects that enhance his control, but conflicting operational effects that very likely hinder strategic- and operational-level decisionmaking. The problem for the PLA is not simply that purges cause disruption, but that the disruption is magnified by organizational design decisions Xi made a decade ago when overhauling the PLA. Those decisions multiplied the requirements for coordination, which the purges impede in the short-term through acute disruptions, and in the long-term by stoking a climate of fear.

The PLA’s 2015 reforms affected many parts of the force, but for our purposes (and Xi’s), the changes at the apex of the structure are most relevant. Xi broke apart the four formidable General Departments that oversaw the PLA and made many of their constituent parts directly subordinate to the CMC (and he has designated even more units as directly subordinate in the years since). This flattened structure had a clear political benefit by inhibiting individual bureaucracies and their leaders from accumulating power.

The implications for operational effectiveness were more ambiguous. As for any large organization, there is no inherent “best” structure for the PLA, but there are structures that align better or worse with different missions and operating environments. In theory, the reorganization enabled the PLA to conduct more flexible and integrated joint campaigns. But it is difficult for outside observers to gauge whether the PLA’s institutions adapted to the greatly redistributed roles and responsibilities in practice.

That ambiguity means PLA reforms can plausibly be interpreted as products of either complementary or competing political and operational imperatives. The relative calm within the PLA from 2017-2022 bolstered the “complementary” narrative but the purges of the past few years have led me to view the political and operational implications as more contradictory. Given Xi’s implicit approach of keeping the PLA internally divided to maintain political security, the operational structure he installed has probably hurt its operational effectiveness and ability to implement coherent long-term force development strategies.² The recent investigations have decimated CMC departments, service headquarters, and theater commands at the same time as the PLA’s structural evolution has required more coordination between them than ever before.

The CMC Level

Xi’s dissolution of major military bureaucracies has made the CMC’s span of control too broad. Since 2012, the number of uniformed CMC members has been cut by more than half while the organizations and budget they oversee have more than doubled.³

This greater span of control implies a bigger burden on the locus for information sharing and coordination within the CMC: its General Office. And indeed, by 2017 Xi had bolstered its status and capacity by promoting its director to full theater grade, assigning the same officer to lead the CMC’s Reform and Organization Office, and later promoting his longtime aide Zhong Shaojun to lead the General Office. (Xi’s own first politically relevant job as a young man was in the CMC General Office during another period of profound change within the PLA, between 1979-82.)

Now, however, the status of the CMC General Office is murky. Zhong moved to a politically irrelevant post at the National Defense University in 2024 and was replaced there by another officer in October 2025. Zhong’s successor in the General Office, Rocket Force officer Fang Yongxiang, has been absent from public reporting for months and was passed over for promotion to full membership of the Central Committee at the Fourth Plenum in October. Even if he is not actively under investigation, the fact that Xi chose not to add him to the Central Committee is a clear sign that he lacks the political heft to effectively manage this key post amid the PLA’s current crisis.

These dynamics put an extraordinary burden on the three uniformed officers of the CMC to provide strategic direction and coordination, including about critical operational issues about which they have very limited experience. Their careers are heavily weighted toward the domains and geographic theaters that are least relevant to the PLA’s operating environment:

• Vice Chairman Zhang Shengmin is a lifetime political officer whose exposure to operational issues has been indirect and concentrated in units with niche roles.

• Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia is a war hero from the Sino-Vietnam conflict, but he spent the first 37 years of his military service in the landlocked former Chengdu Military Region. His 5-year stint as commander of the former Shenyang Military Region would have exposed him to a broader set of operational issues, although that region’s composition indicates it would have been strongly focused on Korea-related contingencies and it had a minimal maritime component.

• Joint Staff Department Director Liu Zhenli similarly distinguished himself in combat against Vietnam in the 1980s, but since then he has never served outside of the former Beijing Military Region — which had no significant maritime assets — and other headquarters organizations in Beijing.

The Theater Level

The 2015 reforms also instituted a stronger form of matrix-based organizational structure by separating military administration and operational command into two different hierarchies: the service headquarters and the theater commands.⁴ Joe McReynolds last year went so far as to characterize the PLA as moving toward a “triple matrix” with the addition of functionally-organized “forces” alongside the services and theaters. There is nothing inherently wrong with matrixed organizations, but they generally require personnel policies and organizational cultures that support decisionmaking across ambiguous hierarchies. Xi’s purges very likely have instead created the opposite: a climate of fear, mistrust, and recrimination that compounds the complexity of operating within a thicket of overlapping organizations and authorities.

The following organization chart highlights the elements of the CMC (and the theater commands) whose top commanders, directors, or political commissars have been officially removed or have been conspicuously absent from events they should have attended, which suggests they are under investigation. The data is compiled from several sources, including Neil Thomas and Lobsang Tsering’s outstanding analysis of the plenum at the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis, and observations from eagle-eyed Twitter user 中国人事观察 (@cnpoliwatch).

PLA Damaged But Still Dangerous Through 2027

The scope and scale of Xi’s purges strongly suggest he does not foresee a major conflict through 2027 for several reasons:

• Xi probably recognizes that the sheer number of critical commanders who have been removed significantly raises the risks of operational breakdowns and miscommunication in a large-scale conflict.

• Xi’s elevation of Zhang Shengmin to CMC Vice Chairman will further empower Zhang, and it indicates internal rectification is likely to remain a top priority for the PLA during Zhang’s tenure.

• The purges probably both reflect and reinforce Xi’s pre-existing doubts about the PLA’s combat readiness. This assessment is based on what I think Xi’s broader career, policies, and life reveal about his worldview rather than hard evidence, because there is no information in open sources about Xi’s views on PLA readiness that is credible, candid, and direct.

Even amid this turmoil, the PLA’s absolute and relative capabilities may continue to grow because of the sheer scale of quantitative and qualitative improvements in its arsenal. China would also have significant material and geographic advantages in many scenarios that would outweigh these headwinds, and if Xi came to believe that a major conflict was looming he could take steps to stabilize the force. I also think the PLA can continue to intensify the coercive operations it has conducted in the past few years, including large-scale demonstrations of force around Taiwan, without straining its command system because these operations require only limited time-sensitive coordination and decisionmaking.

The speed and extent to which the PLA will recover from the ongoing inquisition probably hinge on Xi’s decisions at the 2027 Party Congress and the leaders who emerge from the wreckage during his fourth term. It is plausible that Xi’s confidence in the PLA could rebound if he convinces himself that the investigations have rooted out unreliable officers and sent a powerful deterrent message. However, regardless of his own perceptions of the PLA, a corrosive undercurrent of fear is likely to be a permanent fixture of civil-military relations under Xi.