Another bombshell landed in the PLA last week when four more generals who had been absent for months were formally expelled from the legislature. It is a testament to the extraordinary tumult within the PLA that the latest purges made hardly a ripple in English-language media, when in fact they illustrate the depth of disarray engulfing the high command.
Beleaguered organizations suffer new losses…
Two of the four fallen generals come from a perennial source of corruption: the logistics system. Zhang Lin had been head of the CMC Logistics Support Department since 2022 and Gao Daguang was a career political commissar who was most recently Commissar of the Joint Logistics Support Force. Given the decimation of the logistics, procurement, and political commissar systems in the past two years, these two were in especially perilous positions.
The dismissal of the third general, Rocket Force Discipline Inspection Commission Secretary Wang Zhibin, expands the devastation in the upper echelons of the Rocket Force. Wang’s fall is startling because he was transferred to the Rocket Force from the Army in December 2023, after its Commander and Political Commissar were dismissed. This suggests that Wang’s fall is related to actions and relationships from earlier in his career, when he served as a commissar in Fujian (where former CMC member Miao Hua also served). Regardless of the specifics, it is hard to overstate the disarray within the Rocket Force’s leadership in the past several years: an extraordinary number of its sitting and former top officers have been purged and now even the outsider who was brought in to oversee discipline inspection is himself disgraced.
The fact that these removals seem almost routine in today’s PLA illustrates how different the paradigm of civil-military relations is under Xi than it was under his predecessor. Hu Jintao’s one and only significant move against a senior PLA officer during his entire tenure was to investigate a deputy Director of the General Logistics Department, Gu Junshan. Last week’s dismissal of the Director of essentially the same department isn’t even among the most consequential moves of the past year.
…while purges spread to a bulwark of regime security
From a political standpoint, the most important domino to fall was People’s Armed Police (PAP) Commander (and Central Committee member) Wang Chunning. The PAP is politically important because it is the primary central security force specifically tasked with quelling large-scale unrest; when local security forces fail to contain protests or are overwhelmed by natural disasters, the PAP is the next line of defense. Its corps-level “mobile contingents” can deploy across the country in case of severe crises and would almost certainly be a centerpiece of any response to major unrest in Beijing.
The officers who lead the PAP are therefore among the very few people in China who maintain contingency plans for deploying large numbers of armed forces in the capital. And although those deployments are designed to provide security at major events and protect the regime in a crisis, it is imperative for the CCP that the leaders of such a force are politically and personally reliable.
Xi signaled the importance of the PAP early in his tenure, when he upended tradition and transferred a PLA general with whom he probably crossed paths early in his career into the PAP to serve as its commander. (The man whom Wang replaced was later purged.) Xi then oversaw a major reorganization of the PAP to place it under firmer PLA control at the expense of local officials and the State Council.
The expulsion of the current PAP Commander therefore illustrates and reinforces the idea that Xi is undertaking a broad purge of politically sensitive positions in the military apparatus to ensure the reliability of its leaders. PAP Commander Wang probably is a target because of past career overlaps with fallen Central Military Commission members He Weidong and Miao Hua. And although Wang may ultimately be charged with corruption, Xi’s PAP reforms reduced the scope for corruption by removing peripheral functions like overseeing certain infrastructure projects and border defense. His real offense – real or imagined – is likely to be political.
Status of the most politically sensitive posts in the PLA is murky
In my view, the following are the most politically important positions within the bureaucracy of the armed forces, broadly defined. They are the organizations that monitor, control, and route orders for the armed personnel that are closest to Xi. The leadership situation of a startling number of these positions appears ambiguous or in flux.
Central Guards Bureau reporting to the Central Committee General Office
The leadership of this unit is always hard to nail down and I don’t know the current status. However, given the relatively small size of this unit and its critical importance, it is probably relatively easier for Xi to identify a truly trusted confidant to run it. This unit tends to experience the most flux during leadership transitions.
Central Military Commission General Office
Longtime Xi aide Zhong Shaojun led this office until sometime in 2024, when he took a position with little political importance: Political Commissar of the National Defense University. Zhong’s successor – career PLA officer Fang Yongxiang – appeared to be absent from Xi’s trip to Tibet in late August 2025.
Beijing Garrison Command
Fu Wenhua was Commander of Beijing Garrison from 2020 until earlier this year, when he was transferred to become a deputy commander of the PAP. I couldn’t easily find who the current Beijing Garrison commander is. Fu’s transfer may have been a promotion, but deputy commanders have amorphous roles in the PLA/PAP and officers are sometimes shunted aside into these roles.
Central Theater Command
The Commander of the Central Theater traditionally leads PLA military parades, but at the September 2025 parade, a subordinate led instead. Commander Wang Qiang’s status is unclear.
People’s Armed Police
Commander purged.
Upheaval reinforces paradigm shift in interpreting Xi’s approach
The storm engulfing the PLA has made it all but impossible for outside observers – and PLA officers themselves – to navigate the political currents within the military. Many senior officers are no doubt fearful that they will be next, and are probably responding with varying combinations of lying low and actively seeking to direct suspicion onto colleagues.
I continue to think that Xi remains essentially impervious to an organized challenge or resistance from within the elite, but this assessment is now uncomfortably reliant on logical reasoning and extrapolations from Xi’s past record; the dismissals have chipped away at the simpler narrative of a stable apparatus undergirded by longtime loyalists protecting every flank. My own revised analytic paradigm relies more heavily on Xi maintaining a balance of power and fear within the system.
The turmoil also reinforces several implications for Xi’s approach to power, strategic calculus, and the future of the political system:
Xi is unwilling to compromise on absolute control over centers of political power even as he delegates on certain policy issues. He is decimating the upper ranks of the PLA to stamp out any possibility of divided loyalties or autonomy within the officer corps, but Neil Thomas has argued convincingly that he is increasingly delegating some aspects of state governance to Premier Li Qiang. Although it is impossible to completely separate politics and policy, Xi appears to draw a distinction between them.
Xi’s willingness to sacrifice institutional cohesion and capacity in the PLA suggests he still does not anticipate fighting a war in the near-term. I made the same point two years ago and the disruptive impact of political investigations has only increased since then.
The purges reinforce the fact that from the moment he took power, Xi has sought to dominate the PLA and subjugate its officer corps rather than follow his predecessors’ approach of co-opting it. I therefore respectfully disagree with the argument that Xi instead sought to satisfy the PLA and interest groups within it to cultivate support for his agenda.
Major political institutions within the political system are in upheaval a mere two years before the crucial inflection point of the 21st Party Congress. Within the civilian realm, Xi has sidelined former Organization Department head Li Ganjie – possibly along with several of his deputies – and prosecuted the deputy of the Department’s discipline inspection unit for corruption.
As Jon Czin wrote in September, “If Xi’s peers do retire, in his fourth term Xi will find himself surrounded by officials who are a generation younger than he is, with whom he may have little familiarity, and who in all likelihood will be his protégés’ protégés.” Xi now faces the difficult task of deciding which of his protégés’ protégés to trust and elevate to the highest echelons of power after having removed the heads of the CCP’s military and civilian personnel systems at the very moment when their roles are most important.