With Xi Jinping’s Purge of China’s Most Senior Uniformed Official, War in Taiwan May Be a Step Closer
Xi’s decision to thoroughly purge the PLA’s top command might be a sign of preparation — not a reason for Taiwan to relax.
National Review
With Xi Jinping’s Purge of China’s Most Senior Uniformed Official, War in Taiwan May Be a Step Closer
Xi’s decision to thoroughly purge the PLA’s top command might be a sign of preparation — not a reason for Taiwan to relax.
Jianli Yang
Today, Xi Jinping tightens his iron grip on China’s military with the shocking purge of its most senior uniformed official, Zhang Youxia. This unprecedented upheaval has swept not only Zhang, the formidable first-ranked vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), but also General Liu Zhenli, head of the military’s Joint Staff Department, into an investigation for “grave violations of discipline and law.” Reportedly, China’s Ministry of National Defense has accused Zhang for leaking to the United States information about the Chinese nuclear program.
With these removals, the once seven-member Central Military Commission — China’s supreme military decision-making body — is now effectively reduced to just two individuals: Xi Jinping himself and Zhang Shengmin, the head of the anti-graft watchdog. This move by Xi marks a seismic shift in Beijing’s power structure, consolidating unparalleled military authority in Xi’s hands at precisely the moment he has defined “unification” with Taiwan as the greatest unfinished task of national rejuvenation.
As corruption scandals in the upper ranks of the People’s Liberation Army continue to surface, many observers draw a straightforward conclusion. Corruption hollows out combat power. Purging so many top generals must create chaos in the command system and depress morale, therefore Beijing’s timeline for using force against Taiwan will be delayed. I believe the opposite is closer to the truth. The thorough purge of top generals — including the seemingly irreplaceable Zhang Youxia — does not push conflict farther away. It tightens Xi’s personal control over the gun, removes whatever moderating influence might have existed inside the top command, and elevates precisely the kind of younger, more ideological, and more risk-prone officer corps Xi is likely to rely on if he decides that the “opportunity window” for Taiwan is opening rather than closing.
To understand what this purge is fundamentally about, one must begin not with rumors, but with the official language the Chinese Communist Party uses when it finally gives the public a clue. So far, the most revealing official characterization of the cases came from an editorial in the PLA Daily on January 24. The editorial did mention corruption, but it highlighted a different accusation first — and with unusual emphasis. The charge, the most serious one, was that Zhang and Liu had “seriously trampled and sabotaged the chairman responsibility system.” The phrase is cumbersome and abstract to outsiders, but in CCP political grammar it is electrifying. The “Chairman of the Military Commission Responsibility System” is the core principle that the party commands the gun and that the CMC chairman — always the party’s paramount leader — is the final, absolute center of decision, command, and control over all military affairs.
It is also critical to notice what the PLA Daily did not say. When the CCP wants to accuse someone of attempting to seize supreme power, it reaches for familiar phrases: “plotting to usurp the Party and seize power,” “forming cliques,” “building factions,” “harboring political ambition,” and the like. Even when the party targets figures who are not challenging the top leader directly but are cultivating their own networks, it typically uses the vocabulary of factionalism to signal political intent. Yet in the PLA Daily editorial’s framing of Zhang and Liu, none of that standard script appeared. If their offense were a coup plot, or even an attempt to climb higher within the political hierarchy, the party’s ideological machinery would almost certainly have reached for those tried-and-true accusations. It did not. This suggests that what angered Xi was not a classic bid to overthrow him but disobedience, independence, or deviation in matters where he insists on being the sole decider.
Here is another reason to think that this was not a case of an attempted coup, as rumored. The PLA resembles the U.S. military in one crucial way: it is an institution governed by procedures, chains of command, and organizational routines that constrain individual initiative at the top as much as at the bottom. A general’s influence is real only insofar as he functions within this system. Outside it, he is merely a person. The myth of a Chinese general who can spontaneously raise “his troops” for a coup misunderstands how the PLA is structured and how officers are promoted. PLA generals do not command personal armies; they do not cultivate “children’s troops” in the way warlords once did. The promotion pathway does not allow any general to carry an independent, personally loyal force from unit to unit over decades. In such a system, the likelihood of a coup is extremely low — not only because of surveillance and political commissars but because the institutional architecture itself is designed to prevent autonomous military power.
Zhang and Liu were not aspiring dictators. They were professional soldiers who had reached the ceiling of their careers and whose highest personal ambition was to retire safely, preserve their families’ privileges, and enjoy their status. They had already entered the category of national leaders. Under a strongman like Xi, there is little potential upside in gambling on political adventurism. For men at the pinnacle of a professional military career, the rational preference is stability. If they fell, they fell likely not because they tried to overthrow the leader but because they crossed him on the one subject that increasingly overrides all others in Xi’s strategic imagination.
What military planning or operational decisions could be so important that Xi would risk dismantling the military leadership team he personally built at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party — and even sacrifice a “brother” such as Zhang? The answer can only be Taiwan. For Xi, Taiwan is not a slogan. It is a historical project with a deadline. One of the sharpest distinctions between Xi and his predecessors is that, for him, “reunification” is not merely rhetorical. It is on his governing agenda as an achievement he is determined to inscribe into the national story. Jiang Zemin tested the waters in the 1990s, not long after taking power, but quickly discovered the costs and constraints and stepped back. Hu Jintao did not even try. Xi is different. He has taken concrete steps to move from slogan to capability, from aspiration to operational planning. The world has learned to take him seriously on this matter.
The paradox is that Xi’s determination makes him more willing to accept risk, while many of his senior uniformed professionals may prefer to avoid it. My assessment — that Zhang and Liu diverged from Xi on the question of using force against Taiwan — contradicts the popular assumption that generals always want war because war bestows glory on them and gives them power. In reality, incentives can point the other way. For Zhang and Liu, a Taiwan war would be a negative bet--high risks but low returns. Should it succeed, the glory would belongs to Xi. Should it fail, they would be blamed, punished, disgraced, perhaps even tried.
Their biographies also complicate another common stereotype: that combat experience breeds aggression. Zhang and Liu are among the very few in the current Chinese top command who have personally experienced war. Zhang participated in the 1979 and 1984 campaigns against Vietnam; Liu fought in the 1986 Sino-Vietnamese border conflict. Unlike leaders who romanticize war from the safety of politics, they encountered war’s brutality firsthand, when China still relied heavily on massed infantry tactics and suffered severe casualties. They rose not from textbooks but from blood and smoke. They might be precisely the kind of senior professionals who would warn against a high-risk amphibious campaign that could go catastrophically wrong.
If so, one can imagine how their divergence might manifest. It would not require open defiance. It could take the form of caution in planning, slower timelines, more stringent readiness assessments, reluctance to endorse certain operational concepts, insistence on additional training cycles, or arguments for coercive pressure on Taiwan short of war. It could involve pushing back — privately, bureaucratically, procedurally — against a top leader’s impatience. In an authoritarian system where the leader insists on being the single point of decision, even such professional caution can be interpreted as political disloyalty.
Why, then, would Zhang dare to differ or even argue, if indeed he did? The answer lies in his special relationship with Xi. He is a “princeling,” the son of Zhang Zongxun, a founding general of the People’s Republic of China. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a political partner of Zhang Zongxun during the CCP revolution; the families maintained long-standing ties. Zhang is not merely an appointee; he is a childhood associate. Shortly after Xi consolidated power, he appointed Zhang to the Central Military Commission, then elevated him to vice chairman, and at the 20th Party Congress in 2022 even broke convention by keeping Zhang — already in his seventies — in the top post as the first-ranked vice chairman. That decision signaled that Zhang was trusted in a way few others could be. It is precisely such intimacy that can create the illusion of safety to speak candidly. Zhang may have believed that because he was “family,” because he was a “brother,” he could tell Xi hard truths without political consequence.
This brings us to the party’s use of the word “loyalty,” which the PLA Daily editorial also emphasized. Loyalty in the CCP system has two senses. The first is straightforward: do you cultivate your own faction, build personal networks, or harbor a desire to seize power? On that level, Zhang and Liu likely posed no threat. But the second meaning is subtler: you may have no ambition to usurp, yet you disagree with the leader’s policy and refuse to execute his will fully. You may even believe that your dissent is a form of loyalty — to the party’s long-term survival. But to a leader as sensitive as Xi, this is intolerable because it creates space for the first kind of disloyalty. Ambition can hide behind professionalism. For an authoritarian ruler obsessed with stability and control, such ambiguity is a political toxin. He cannot allow it to spread.
If we assume that Taiwan was the core issue behind the latest purge, the next development becomes easier to anticipate. With the top command decapitated, Xi now will likely elevate a new generation of officers, those born in the 1970s and 1980s. This would be not merely a personnel reshuffle but a transformation of the PLA’s psychological and ideological profile. Zhang, born in the 1950s, and Liu, in the 1960s, carry memories of a poorer China and a more backward military. They also carry the experience of combat’s ugliness. By contrast, the cohort Xi is likely to promote grew up alongside China’s economic miracle. Their formative years coincide with high-speed rail, aircraft carriers, astronauts, great industrial capacity and military technology. They are steeped in nationalism, confident in slogans such as “The East rises and the West declines,” and hungry for a moment of historic achievement.
Xi’s obsession with “corruption” is a part of the story. He has used sustained anti-corruption campaigns across the bureaucracy — including the military — as a principal mechanism for concentrating power. Few senior PLA officers have avoided entanglement in patronage networks and procurement systems that invite graft. Since 2023, a total of twelve full generals have been stripped of their ranks. Yet this purge’s symbolism points beyond routine graft. Purging Zhang carries reputational costs for Xi and shakes confidence in the military leadership he personally installed. If the problem were merely that Zhang was corrupt, Xi could have managed it quietly, contained it, or allowed him a dignified retirement. He would replace him, at the latest, in two and a half years, at the party’s next congress. By then Zhang would be 78 years old. To take him down publicly suggests a more serious and urgent issue — one that touches the regime’s strategic core. Taiwan fits that criterion.
When we read the PLA Daily editorial with this in mind, its language becomes more revealing. The editorial promises not merely punishment, but “a rebirth through molting.” That is the language of rebuilding an instrument, not merely punishing criminals. The PLA today is more institutionalized, more professionalized, and more rapidly staffed by large cohorts trained in modern systems. The replacement pool is deep, and the cadre system can promote quickly. The old war experience of Zhang and Liu is not easily transferable to modern joint warfare; younger officers who have grown up within the PLA’s post-2015 joint command reforms may be better suited to implement contemporary operational concepts. In this sense, Xi’s purge could accelerate the creation of a more obedient, more ideologically aligned, and more modern officer corps — exactly what a leader would want if he is preparing for the most consequential military decision of his life.
This leads to the last key question: why now? If Taiwan lies at the heart of this purge, then timing must be linked to shifts in the international strategic environment — above all the posture of the United States. Washington’s broad strategic direction has now become clearer. The United States appears to be retreating from the postwar international order and from the post–Cold War tradition of value-infused internationalism, turning inward, toward the Western Hemisphere, emphasizing “homeland defense” and redefining alliances in more transactional terms. A rules-based order is fraying, democratic coalitions are strained, and mechanisms that previously imposed strategic and psychological constraints on Beijing — NATO’s cohesion as a signal of Western resolve, the Quad’s momentum, U.S.-Japanese-Korean alignment, Five Eyes, AUKUS — risk losing their credibility as well as their function.
Moreover, the Pentagon just released its 2026 National Defense Strategy, which features noticeably softened language toward China. Whereas earlier documents described China as the most decisive challenge, this new strategy suggests a desire for “stable peace,” “fair trade,” and “mutual respect” and emphasizes a favorable military balance rather than an ideological confrontation. Most striking to many Asian observers is what the document does not say. Despite Taiwan’s facing intensifying pressure, the strategy reportedly does not mention Taiwan at all. That omission, in a geopolitical environment already thick with uncertainty, will be read in Beijing not as a detail but as a signal — a potential loosening of the political and strategic constraints that have long deterred the use of force across the strait.
Xi would be naïve if he believed that the U.S. posture is fixed forever. Most leaders think in windows: moments when conditions align, when opponents seem distracted, divided, or fatigued, and when decisive action can redefine history. Xi may judge that such a window is opening — or at least that he cannot afford to let it open without his being ready. If he believes that the next few years will offer a rare chance to coerce, compel, or seize Taiwan under more favorable global conditions, then he cannot tolerate internal friction. He cannot tolerate commanders who hesitate, who emphasize constraints, who insist on additional preparation, or who disagree with his timeline. Following this logic, purging the most senior uniformed official — even one as symbolically significant as Zhang — is not reckless. It is a precondition for acting.
Whether Xi will launch a military operation in the next two or three years still depends on many factors, international as well as domestic. But Xi’s decision to thoroughly purge the PLA’s top command might be a sign of preparation — not a reason for Taiwan to relax. Instead, Taiwan and the world should listen more carefully to the rhythm of history.