‘Total annihilation of the high command’: Xi’s purge of China’s military brings down its top general

Taipei: China’s top general, second only to Xi Jinping, the nation’s leader, in the military command, has been put under investigation and accused of “grave violations of discipline and the law”, the Ministry of National Defence said, the most stunning escalation yet in Xi’s purge of the People’s Liberation Army elite.

The general, Zhang Youxia, is a vice chair of the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party body that controls China’s armed forces. Another member of the commission, General Liu Zhenli, who leads the military’s Joint Staff Department, was also under investigation, the Defence Ministry said. Its announcement did not say what either general was alleged to have done wrong.

Zhang’s downfall is the most drastic step so far in Xi’s years-long campaign to root out what he has described as corruption and disloyalty in the military’s senior ranks. It is all the more astonishing because Zhang seemed to be a confidant of Xi, who has known him for decades.

“This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents the total annihilation of the high command,” Christopher K. Johnson, a former CIA analyst who follows Chinese elite politics, said of the investigation of Zhang.

With the two generals effectively out, the Central Military Commission has just two members left: its chair, Xi, and General Zhang Shengmin, who has overseen Xi’s military purges. Xi has now removed all but one of the six generals he appointed to the commission in 2022.

Johnson, the president of China Strategies Group, a consulting firm, said Xi seemed to have concluded that problems in the military ran so deep that he could not trust the top command to cure itself and must look to a new cohort of rising officers.

“The purging of even a childhood friend in Zhang Youxia shows there now are no limits to Xi’s anti-graft zeal,” Johnson said.

Zhang Youxia and Liu were the People’s Liberation Army’s two top commanders for practical operational tasks, and their removal would leave a gap in experience, said Shanshan Mei, a political scientist at RAND, a research organisation, who studies China’s armed forces.

“There’s no one right now at the highest level who has operational experience or who is in charge of training and exercises,” Mei said. “This is going to cut very deep, and there’s more to come, possibly.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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