The purge of China’s highest-ranking military officer, Gen. Zhang Youxia, last week stands out amid what has been the period of greatest instability atop the People’s Liberation Army since the 1970s, when Mao Zedong purged his second-in-command, Lin Biao. Lin later died in a plane crash after allegedly trying to mount a coup against China’s aging leader. In the two decades after that crisis, China’s military was given economic opportunities that tamed it politically but also facilitated vast amounts of corruption. Subsequent Chinese leaders, notably Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, attempted to curb the graft and professionalize the military, but to little avail.
Xi Jinping has changed all that. While unprecedented, the purge of Zhang is not a complete surprise, as Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, including within the military, has proceeded since 2013 with remarkable potency. He has taken down several dozen “tigers,” as high-ranking Communist Party and military officials are known, in addition to the lower-level “flies” targeted by previous campaigns. Since his third term as party leader began in 2022, five out of seven members of the Central Military Commission, or CMC, have been removed, leaving only Xi and one other official, Zhang Shengmin, who was only promoted to vice chair of the CMC last year and is in charge of internal discipline.
With the purge of Zhang Youxia, it is clear that Xi now dominates the People’s Liberation Army—which is, after all, the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party—in a way that other recent Chinese leaders have not. Whether he has solved the corruption problem, however, is still unclear. It is a much more fraught problem than simply bribery and graft. Corruption, including payments for promotions, is baked into the system and facilitated by the importance of factions and personal loyalties in career advancement. While these problems extend to the whole Communist Party, in which connections and networks have replaced elections as the means of selection, they are especially problematic in an organization whose purpose is to prepare and fight wars. On top of that, Xi wants his army to win any wars it ends up fighting, and corruption makes it less likely that the PLA is truly prepared and meritocratically selected.