How China’s leader lost faith in his generals

The purge China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has inflicted on the military elite was plain to see at a recent legislative meeting. A year earlier, state television footage showed around 40 generals in the room. This time, there were only a handful.

Yet Xi indicated that an upheaval that rivaled those of the Mao Zedong era was not over. Stony-faced, he warned the remaining officers to beware of disloyalty.

“The military,” he said, “must never have anyone who harbors a divided heart toward the party.”

It was a rare public reference by Xi to one of the worst political crises of his 13 years in power: He had lost faith in the military leadership that he had spent a decade remolding.

“When Xi uses the words ‘divided heart,’ they are heavy with meaning,” said Chien-wen Kou, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. The phrase is found in ancient Chinese treatises that counsel rulers against treacherous generals, including a volume Xi has kept on his bookshelf.

“Even his most trusted and important confidants have fallen,” Kou said. “Who else can gain his trust?”

The crisis threatens one of Xi’s great feats: the transformation of the Chinese military into a formidable force with new aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles and an expanding nuclear arsenal. And it comes as China’s rivalry with the United States has intensified, and as the Trump administration has put American firepower, and its limits, on vivid display in Venezuela and Iran.

China’s war readiness may be disrupted for years by the very cleanup that Xi has said is necessary to purify and strengthen the ranks. What once looked like a limited crackdown on corruption became a sweeping dismissal of dozens of top officers, and culminated in the downfall early this year of Zhang Youxia, China’s top uniformed commander, who had appeared to be a confidant of Xi’s.

The final break between them came, by some accounts, when Xi sought to promote the general leading the cleanup to a position rivaling Zhang’s. Zhang objected. Months later, he was out.

The gravity of the campaign was on stark display again this past week, when a military court sentenced two former defense ministers to death, suspended for two years, for bribery. They will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison.

“This is Xi Jinping’s military,” said Daniel Mattingly, an associate professor at Yale University who studies China’s politics and military. “Why does he break the thing that he built?

“It’s not what people would have expected of Xi, even five years ago. Something profound changed,” he said.

The corruption Xi has been hunting is real. But earlier internal speeches by Xi, not previously reported in detail, reveal another factor: a leader who saw in any sign of disobedience the seed of a political threat to his rule. He became convinced, analysts say, that the commanders he had chosen to modernize the military could no longer be trusted, their loyalty and effectiveness eroded by graft and cronyism.

Analysts say the upheaval has also exposed the tensions between Xi’s two imperatives — preparing for combat and enforcing loyalty. Ultimately, Xi ousted a battle-experienced general who helped remake his military and replaced him with an inquisitor, who is now, alongside Xi, the sole other remaining member of China’s top military council.

“Xi Jinping’s rule is slowly entering its late stage,” Kou said. “His political calculations change in this stage, his anxieties become increasingly about members of his own inner circle.”

Early on, Xi appeared determined to avoid the fate of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who was widely seen to have failed to establish his authority over China’s military commanders.

Hu’s weakness was exposed in 2011 during a visit to Beijing by Robert Gates, then the U.S. secretary of defense. Gates asked Hu about the test flight of a Chinese stealth fighter jet, news of which had emerged that morning on Chinese websites.

Hu seemed to have no knowledge of it. “The civilian leadership seemed surprised by the test,” Gates told reporters later.

Hu’s directives to army commanders were “more like suggestions they would consider,” said John Culver, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution. “Basically you had a system that was no longer responsive to the party.”

After coming to power in 2012, Xi launched investigations against commanders who had grown wealthy, and overweening, under Hu, including some previously deemed untouchable because of their status.

In 2014, Xi summoned hundreds of senior officers to Gutian, a town in eastern China where, according to party histories, Mao in 1929 established the fundamental principle that defines the Chinese state today: The party commands the gun.

Xi used that historical backdrop to warn that the Communist Party’s control of the armed forces had eroded to a dangerous degree.

At Gutian, Xi laid out the problems he had inherited. Faith in the party’s values had decayed. Corruption, cronyism and insubordination was brazen. He cited training exercises so fake that soldiers used shovels and sticks instead of guns.

To Xi, the rot was exemplified by Gen. Xu Caihou, who was a retired vice chair of the Central Military Commission, a position that had put him near the top of the People’s Liberation Army. Xu had been placed under investigation, accused of taking huge bribes, including for arranging promotions for officers.

“Xu Caihou always solemnly professed undying loyalty and love toward the party,” Xi said, according to a previously unreported version of a speech he made in Gutian that circulated inside the military. “But really, deep in his soul he had long ago fallen away from the party and into corruption and depravity.”

Xi was also alarmed by events abroad. He cited cautionary stories of leaders in the Middle East and the Soviet Union who were toppled after their militaries abandoned them in the face of insurrections.

Xi came to the job with a reverence for the People’s Liberation Army. His father was a revolutionary leader who had fought under Mao. In his early career, Xi worked as a secretary to the minister of defense. Xi believed that to instill loyalty in the military to the Communist Party and to him, he had to revive “political work” — the indoctrination, vetting and monitoring that made officers and troops trustworthy.

To drive home the new spirit of discipline that he demanded in Gutian, Xi was shown eating coarse rice and pumpkin soup, the humble, storied meal of the early Red Army.

“Absolute loyalty to the party rests on the word ‘absolute,’” Xi said. “It is a loyalty that is singular, total, unconditional and free from any impurities or fakery.”

From his first years in power, Xi also began entrenching a “chairman responsibility system,” an overhaul that tightened his control over the military by giving him intelligence and control deep into its ranks. He declared his confidence in his own ability to spot the right commanders for promotion.

“The key to building a strong military lies in picking the right people,” he said in an internal speech in 2016, describing how he vetted and spoke to prospects for promotion. “Senior and mid-ranking officers are the backbone for building and running the military, and as chairman of the Central Military Commission, I should personally handle this.”

He also replaced decades-old military regions with new theater commands, and he dissolved central People’s Liberation Army departments that he saw as barriers to effective control. His goal was to give China the ability to combine land, air and sea forces to project power abroad, while ensuring that this modernized force stayed unflinchingly loyal.

Gen. Zhang Youxia was among the commanders entrusted with executing Xi’s vision. Zhang was a gruff, charismatic officer who had distinguished himself on the front line of China’s yearslong border war with Vietnam from 1979. He was the son of a revolutionary general who had fought alongside Xi’s father.

Xi had earlier promoted him to the Central Military Commission and made him head of the military’s general armaments department. The department was in charge of acquiring new weapons, which are vital to Xi’s modernization plans, but had also become a mire of corruption, fed by its control over funds and contracts.

“He came from a privileged Communist Party background, and it showed,” said Drew Thompson, who was working at the Pentagon and met Zhang in 2012 when he took part in a Chinese military delegation on a visit to the United States. “I think that combination of his background, his combat experience, his self-confidence, his comfort with weapon systems and his openness to change made him attractive to Xi.”

By 2018, Xi appeared satisfied that his overhaul was paying off. While he acknowledged to the Central Military Commission that problems remained, he said the changes were a “historic transformation” that had “saved the military.”

When Xi won a third term as leader in 2022, he unexpectedly retained Zhang in the military commission. At 72, the commander had been expected to step down. Xi instead made him China’s top general, tasked with pursuing Xi’s goal of a breakthrough in military capabilities by 2027.

China faced an increasingly perilous world, Xi said two weeks later during a visit to the Joint Operations Command Center. “Direct all our energies to combat readiness,” he said.

But just over half a year later, in 2023, the veneer of stability cracked. Xi abruptly replaced the Rocket Force’s top commander and his deputy — an extraordinary move in the arm of the military that controls nuclear and conventional missiles. The purge was never publicly explained. Then China’s defense minister was dismissed without explanation.

Suddenly, Xi’s transformation of the People’s Liberation Army looked plagued by the same problems of corruption and disobedience that he claimed to have excised.

This time, Xi brought his commanders to Yan’an, the hallowed base of Mao’s revolution, where Xi called for a deepening campaign of “political rectification.” In the two years that followed, dozens of high-ranking officers were removed or disappeared from public view.

As the campaign widened, so did the power of Gen. Zhang Shengmin, the commander steering the investigations. He had risen through the ranks despite having little experience in military operations. In the Rocket Force, he was a political commissar, enforcing party loyalty. He was known for his love of Chinese brush calligraphy.

He was later promoted to a newly created agency that investigates graft and disloyalty in the military. His ascent reflected the importance Xi gave to ideological control and political loyalty, even as he also called for battlefield readiness.

“In Xi’s analysis, failures of readiness stemming from corruption are merely an outgrowth of ideological impurity,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior fellow at the National Defense University in Washington who studies China’s military. “The rot was perhaps deeper than Xi imagined in 2023, and so he needed to take more drastic steps.”

Gen. Zhang Shengmin’s powers were most likely enhanced by pervasive surveillance technologies that gave investigators more tools to spy into the lives, and financial flows, of officers and their families, said Culver, the researcher at Brookings.

By late 2025, the purges were reshaping not just the ranks but the balance of power among remaining commanders. Analysts suggested that as the investigations deepened, there was growing turbulence inside the military elite, including between commanders focused on warfighting goals and officers tasked with enforcing political loyalty.

“Xi is trapped in a red versus expert contradiction,” said Thompson, the former Pentagon official, referring to “red” as loyalty to the party.

With China’s next leadership transition due at a Communist Party congress late next year, in this reading, Xi appeared more sensitive to perceived threats to his authority. His top commander, Gen. Zhang Youxia, seemed more dominant, with many potential rivals toppled. But he was not untouched: The investigations had also brought down other generals linked to him, potentially implicating him.

And the chief investigator, Gen. Zhang Shengmin, was rising.

The final straw came when Xi moved to promote Gen. Zhang Shengmin to vice chair of the Central Military Commission, said Christopher K. Johnson, a former U.S. government intelligence officer who is now president of China Strategies Group, a consultancy firm.

Gen. Zhang Youxia, backed by his second-in-command, Gen. Liu Zhenli, objected to that proposal because placing an investigator in such a powerful position risked painting the People’s Liberation Army as an unserious combat force, Johnson said.

Modern Chinese history offers examples of commanders who overestimated how far they could push their leaders. Zhang appears to have done the same. “Zhang Youxia thought, ‘I’ve got the credentials to say this,’ and it turns out he didn’t,” Johnson said.

When he and his deputy were removed early this year, the official military newspaper accused them of having “gravely trampled on” the chairman responsibility system, which Xi had built up to cement his control over the military.

Xi is not stopping there. In April, he launched a program of “ideological rectification” and “revolutionary forging” within the military — an indoctrination drive, in other words. Xi addressed the assembled senior officers, described as the first batch of attendees in Beijing, suggesting that the campaign to instill loyalty would roll on.

Television footage of the meeting showed rows of officers diligently taking notes as Xi spoke. Sitting next to him was Gen. Zhang Shengmin, the enforcer.