In Xi's purge of the military, a search for absolute loyalty

When Xi Jinping rang in the new year from Beijing, he called on China to remember the legacy of Yan'an, the rural stronghold where Mao Zedong transformed revolutionary guerrilla fighters into a disciplined force under his command that would go on to take the country.

It may have been a hint of what was to come. Yan'an was also where Mao launched his party's first major "rectification," a campaign of political terror that eliminated rivals and cemented his absolute authority over the party. Three weeks after Xi's speech, China effectively purged the military's top commander Gen. Zhang Youxia, who had once been seen as a confidant of Xi's.

Like Mao, Xi is pursuing a kind of spiritual renewal of the party and the military he commands, what he calls constant "self revolution." And like Mao, that has taken the form of constant purging of enemies, associates and now, those in his inner circle, too. It is a new level of ruthlessness for a man who has already concentrated power in himself to a degree not seen since Mao.

Over the past three years, Xi has essentially ousted five of the six generals in China's top military body, the Central Military Commission, which controls China's armed forces. Only two members are left: Xi himself and a vice chair who has overseen Xi's purges.

"It is quite astonishing," said Yue Gang, a retired colonel of the People's Liberation Army.

In the weeks after, Chinese officials have offered little explanation as they sought to project normalcy. Xi hosted foreign leaders in Beijing and convened a meeting with party officials on policy work. On Wednesday, he met with military units by video conference and conveyed his greetings for the Lunar New Year. Acknowledging that the past year had been "very unusual and very extraordinary," Xi sought to show that the rank-and-file were loyal to him, saying that the troops were still "completely reliable and trustworthy."

Online discussion has been restricted as social media platforms filter search results and comments related to Zhang.

The few official editorials released on the subject hark back to the campaign of ideological cleansing first modeled at Yan'an and suggest that at the heart of the ouster is Xi's control over the military, a powerful empire within the party.

A front-page editorial in the People's Liberation Army Daily characterized the investigation as a necessary hygiene, a process of "uprooting sick trees" and "removing hidden cancer" so that the military would be "reforged and reformed." Another editorial in the same paper described Xi's leadership as the "the source of strength, direction, and future" for the military.

"Mr. Xi believes he needs to build a foundation of absolute ideological unity and personal loyalty for future battles," wrote John Garnaut, a founder of Garnaut Global, a geopolitical risk advisory firm. He noted that the language used by the party showed that Xi was drawing on Maoist and Stalinist playbooks absorbed in his youth as the son of a revolutionary fighter.

Over his 13 years in power, Xi has often cited Yan'an, the Communist Party's main revolutionary base until 1948, as inspiration for his own culling of cadres as well as a way to signal his own supreme authority in the party in the tradition of Mao. After Xi secured a third term as head of the party, breaking with precedent, he visited the city with his top officials.

He and Zhang also made the pilgrimage to Yan'an in 2024 for a meeting, heavy with symbolism, on "political work" in the Chinese military. Xi exhorted the senior military officers, which included three other senior generals that he would later also purge, to remember their original revolutionary mission.

Visiting the former residences of revolutionary leaders like Mao and Zhou Enlai on that trip, he declared the importance of the party's "absolute leadership over the military."

"For Xi Jinping, he sees that legacy and that kind of campaign as one of the party's greatest treasures. He wants to go back to history and use those methods," said Joseph Torigian, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at American University in Washington. "He thinks he can do it right."

Securing control over the People's Liberation Army has been the key challenge of every leader since Mao, who immortalized its importance by declaring that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Yue argued that Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, struggled to manage the military and had been outmaneuvered by two vice chairs of the commission.

"We've had this lesson before," Yue said, who argued that Zhang may have tried and failed to weaken Xi's hold over the military. The "smooth" takedown of Zhang, he said, shows how "impossible it is to shake the leadership of Xi Jinping."

"The attempt to undermine the power didn't succeed. Instead, it resulted in a disastrous outcome," he said.

Since Xi came to power in 2012 he has overseen an intense campaign to clean up the military, where corruption had been on the rise since market reforms in the 1980s and as military spending soared. He sees absolute loyalty as vital to one of his key goals of building a 21st-century, combat-ready force capable of defending China's interests -- like its claim over Taiwan.

And as Beijing competes more directly with the United States, ensuring the military's loyalty in times of crisis and possible conflict is even more important.

"The party must always command the gun, never the other way around," said Chinese military expert Song Zhongping.

When Xi talks about the spirit of Yan'an, he glosses over details of the purging of thousands of party members at Yan'an through psychologically brutal sessions of self-criticism that led some to suicide. Xi uses some of those methods of political indoctrination, including mandating study sessions of his personalized doctrine, Xi Jinping Thought, and encouraging the reporting of one's peers or superiors for violating Xi's edicts, according to Wen-Hsuan Tsai, a scholar of elite Chinese politics at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

"It turns the whole party into a trial of mutual reporting, so no one can be trusted -- not your parents, not your superiors, no one," Tsai said.

"His type of regime needs constant enemies and purges to maintain fear," he said.

Xi's rectification campaign, while not as bloody or extreme as Mao's, extends across the party apparatus, targeting graft as well as perceived disloyalty. Last year, 983,000 officials were punished for violating party rules, the highest number on record, according to data released by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party's internal anti-corruption body.

The sudden removal of senior officials with no explanation has become a hallmark of Xi's rule, inspiring uncertainty and fear among Chinese officials in what analysts say is either a sign of his increasing paranoia or a tactic to keep the leader's enemies, as well as his allies, guessing.

Rather than quietly retire Zhang at the next leadership transition, in 2027, Xi chose to publicly and loudly disown him.

"This purge manifests a position of strength," said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. "Xi can move his finger and remove the most powerful leader of the Chinese military."