Xi Jinping purges military elite, Beijing buzzing with conspiracy theories: what is really going on?
26 January 17:02
Chinese President Xi Jinping has launched an investigation into one of the country’s most influential military leaders, continuing his crackdown on corruption and disloyalty in the army.
This was reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
Two top-ranking generals have been targeted. Among them is Zhang Xuya, senior deputy chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, who de facto commanded the armed forces.
Along with him, General Liu Zhengli, head of the Joint Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army, responsible for operational planning and conducting military operations, is also being investigated. Both are suspected of serious violations of party rules and Chinese law.
The 75-year-old Zhang Xuya is the highest-ranking general in the country and a member of the 24-member Politburo of the Communist Party of China.
The cases against Zhang and Liu, key players in military modernization and among the few Chinese generals with real combat experience, demonstrate the scale of Xi Jinping’s intentions to remove officers who are considered corrupt or politically unreliable.
In recent years, dozens of high-ranking military and defense industry leaders have been removed, which, according to the WSJ, calls into question China’s ability to quickly build an army capable of competing on equal terms with Western forces.
Zhang’s removal signals Xi Jinping’s desire to concentrate all power in his own hands.
“In fact, only Zhang had the level of military authority that allowed him to potentially challenge Xi,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “Now all power is completely concentrated in Xi’s hands.”
Zhang survived previous waves of purges among the generals and remained in office well beyond the established retirement age. His removal signals Xi’s urgent desire to crack down on the system.
The changes in China’s military leadership come amid Xi Jinping’s plans to accelerate the modernization of the army and achieve strategic goals, including the declared intention to invade Taiwan by 2027.
Internal risks for China: why a coup scenario cannot be ruled out
In an exclusive comment for "Komersant Ukrainian", Taras Zagorodniy, managing partner of the National Anti-Crisis Group and political expert, outlined a number of internal factors that pose potential risks to the stability of power in China.
According to the expert, even within the Chinese political establishment, there is no complete consensus on Beijing’s current foreign policy course.
“Not everyone shares China’s aggressive policy, or rather, its demonstration of that policy. Some of the elite suspect that this could end badly for the country, because the US remains the US and has a huge set of tools at its disposal,” Zagorodniy notes.
The expert cites the departure from the principle of power rotation established by Deng Xiaoping as one of the key problems of the current leadership of the PRC.
“Xi Jinping has effectively broken the rule that the leader should change every 10 years and cannot be re-elected. The Chinese introduced this rule at the time, looking at the degradation of the Soviet Union,” he explains.
According to Zagorodniy, the Soviet example showed what lifelong rule leads to:
“When the same people remain in power for 20-30 years, the system becomes ossified and loses its ability to adequately perceive reality.”
The political scientist emphasizes that the concentration of power in the hands of one person inevitably creates tension among the lower and middle ranks of the party nomenclature.
“In fact, Xi Jinping has re-elected himself as emperor for life. This creates pressure from below. Imagine a 30-40-year-old ambitious functionary who understands that nothing will change in 10 or 20 years,” says Zagorodniy.
According to him, the lack of prospects demotivates and radicalizes the elites:
Autocracy, repression, and historical parallels
Zagorodniy draws a direct analogy with the Soviet system, where stability was maintained not by elections but by fear.
“Under Stalin, there were no elections, but there were constant purges. Paradoxically, this ensured a constant influx of new personnel,” the expert notes.
He adds that the end of repression led to stagnation:
“When Khrushchev stopped the executions and began to ‘treat personnel with care,’ officials began to remain in their positions for 30 years. This created dangerous trends in the government.”
According to the expert, the main threat of such a system is the risk of fatal mistakes at the highest level.
“When all power is concentrated around one person and there is no rotation, the likelihood of a strategic mistake that could collapse the entire system increases dramatically,” he emphasizes.
Zagorodniy acknowledges that autocratic systems can be effective in the short term. At the same time, he emphasizes their fragility:
“Democracy often looks clumsy, but it is more resilient. In autocracy, there is always the risk of a ‘black swan’ that will destroy everything.”
In conclusion, the expert notes that such processes are characteristic of any autocratic state.
“I do not rule out that such a scenario is possible in China. This is a universal problem: either the regime compensates for the lack of rotation with effective repression, or the system begins to crack from within.”
Thus, the events surrounding the removal of China’s top military leaders indicate that Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is increasingly becoming a tool for the ultimate concentration of power. The removal of figures of Zhang Xu’s stature not only eliminates potential competitors, but also destroys the balance within a system that has long been based on rotation, compromise, and internal restraints. Abandoning these mechanisms makes the regime more manageable in the short term, but at the same time significantly increases the risks of systemic failures, misguided strategic decisions, and internal turmoil. In this sense, China is increasingly moving toward classical autocracy, whose stability is based not on institutions but on personal loyalty to a single leader.
