COMMENTARY: Xi Purges His Own Army — And Calls It Loyalty

Introduction: The closing ceremony that looks like a confession

June 17, 2026: a military university, one general, one speech

On June 17, 2026, at the National Defense University in Beijing, Zhang Shengmin — vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the sole general still standing alongside Xi Jinping on China's supreme military command body — addressed senior officers who had just completed a two-month training course, the first of its kind in the history of the People's Liberation Army. His message was clean, almost surgical: "We must welcome the 100th anniversary of the PLA's founding with a renewed political vision." The 100th anniversary falls on August 1, 2027. Zhang Shengmin had twelve months to ensure that the generals still standing — those not yet purged, those who had survived — were ideologically transformed before cameras rolled for the celebrations.

This course had opened on April 8, 2026, at an opening ceremony attended by Xi Jinping himself, according to state broadcaster CCTV. Two months. Senior officers summoned from across the country. A curriculum centered on loyalty to the Party, Marxist-Leninist ideology reinterpreted through the lens of Xi's thought, and what Zhang Shengmin called — with a precision that speaks volumes — "political rectification." That phrase, zhengzhi zhengdun in Mandarin, has a history. It begins in Yan'an in 1942. It leads directly to Beijing in 2026. And that continuity is not accidental.

The CMC reduced to two: what that number actually means

From seven members to two: the arithmetic of fear

In October 2022, the Central Military Commission — the body controlling the entirety of China's armed forces — had seven members. By June 2026, it had only two: Xi Jinping, its chairman, and Zhang Shengmin, its vice-chairman and head of the discipline commission. Five of six generals had been purged, arrested, suspended, or had vanished from public life in less than forty months. This is not anti-corruption. This level of purging of a supreme command body has no equivalent in PLA history since 1949. According to Lyle Morris, senior researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute, quoted by Chosun in January 2026, this constitutes "the largest purge in Chinese history since 1949."

The names are staggering. He Weidong, CMC vice-chairman, the first active general ejected from that post since 1967. Miao Hua, head of the political work department — the chief political commissar of the entire military. Liu Zhenli, chief of the Joint Staff Department. Zhang Youxia, the highest-ranking PLA officer after Xi, long considered his closest military ally — arrested in January 2026. And before them, Li Shangfu, defense minister, and Li Yuchao, commander of the Rocket Force. In total, according to CSIS in its February 2026 analysis, 36 generals and corps-level generals have been officially purged since 2022, and 65 additional officers are missing or presumed under investigation — a total of 101 senior officers affected.

The number that makes your head spin

CSIS, in its Chinese military purge database published in February 2026, calculated that 52% of the 176 senior command posts in the PLA had been touched by purges — accounting for posts that experienced multiple successive purges. Fifty-two percent. More than half of all command positions at the general staff level. Among the 47 generals serving in 2022 or promoted to three-star rank after 2022, 41 of them — 87% — had been purged or were presumed purged. And among the 35 three-star generals personally promoted by Xi Jinping since 2020, 32 had been investigated and 29 were confirmed purged. Xi purged his own picks. At a pace that defies any ordinary anti-corruption logic.

Taylor Fravel, from the international security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CNN in February 2026: "It's striking, extraordinary — the depth of this campaign is unprecedented in the history of PLA command." That's an American academic who specializes in the Chinese military — one of the most rigorous in his field — using the word "extraordinary." When people who choose their words that carefully reach for that register, you listen.

Zhang Shengmin: the man who runs the purges and survives

The only general still standing

There is something remarkable about the trajectory of Zhang Shengmin. Director of the CMC's discipline inspection commission for years, promoted to CMC vice-chairman in October 2025 — at the precise moment the purges were reaching their peak — he is, in the aftermath of the June 17, 2026 training course closing, the only general still on his feet within a command body that the purges have nearly entirely hollowed out. His function is symbolically revealing: he is the chief purger. The man whose job is to identify disloyal or corrupt officers, refer them to Party investigations, and oversee their elimination. He survived precisely because he is the instrument of the purges — not their target.

The South China Morning Post, in an article by Phoebe Zhang dated June 17, 2026, reports that Zhang Shengmin described the training course as having "sharpened the participants' ideological transformation and their sense of responsibility." That framing is interesting. It does not say participants acquired new military, tactical, or strategic skills. It says they were ideologically transformed. This is not training. It is conversion. And the distinction between the two is not trivial for understanding what Xi Jinping is trying to build with this army.

Xi's opening declaration: "No room for impurity"

On April 8, 2026, at the training course's opening ceremony, Xi Jinping had articulated the operation's objective with precision. According to the Chinese government transcript published that day by english.www.gov.cn, Xi had urged the assembly to "deepen political rectification in the army to maintain the purity and glory of the people's armed forces." He added: "All thoughts or actions motivated by personal interests and corruption are completely incompatible with the nature and mission of the Party." This rhetoric of purity — pure army, pure leadership, pure loyalty — is not new in the Party's vocabulary. It is the same ideological grammar Mao deployed at Yan'an in 1942. Xi Jinping does not invoke Mao by accident. He is claiming continuity.

In March 2026, Xi had hardened his message further before the National People's Congress, according to Reuters: "There must be no one in the military who lacks loyalty to the Party." And: "There must be no refuge for the corrupt." These formulations serve a dual function. They provide ideological justification for what has already happened. And they warn those who remain: the campaign is not over. It is a permanent condition. Rectification is not an event. It is a state of being.

Why is Xi purging his own generals?

Corruption as pretext, loyalty as objective

The official answer is simple: corruption. The purged generals allegedly took bribes, sold promotions, accumulated personal fortunes through the defense budget. This explanation is partially true. Corruption in the PLA is documented, systemic, entrenched in decades of opaque military financing. But CSIS, in its February 2026 analysis, is brutal in its demystification: "The entire PLA has long been corrupt, and whoever sits at the top of that structure has used corruption, received bribes, and/or witnessed corruption." Corruption does not explain why 87% of three-star generals end up purged. It explains why any of them could be — at discretion.

The PLA Daily, in an editorial from January 25, 2026 on the cases of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, said the essential between the lines: both men were accused of having "trampled and destroyed the CMC chairman's responsibility system." That is not a corruption charge in any ordinary sense. It is a political charge: having contested Xi Jinping's personal authority over the military. And that is where everything becomes clear. The purges are not targeting corruption. They are targeting personal loyalty to Xi — which is not the same as loyalty to the Party, not the same as military competence, not the same as institutional fidelity. It is loyalty to the individual, calibrated by Xi's gaze alone.

The Yan'an precedent nobody wants to cite

The rare official commentary on the purges and rectification explicitly invokes the Yan'an rectification campaign of 1942-1944, when Mao Zedong had conducted an ideological purge within the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party ahead of its seizure of power. This parallel, mobilized in PLA Daily editorials and official speeches, is not accidental. Xi Jinping frames his own campaign as the logical continuation of Maoist rectification — a periodic cleansing necessary to maintain the revolutionary purity of the Party and the army. The difference is contextual: in 1942, Mao was preparing a revolutionary army to seize power. In 2026, Xi is preparing a governing army to maintain his personal power.

The New York Times, in an article from February 16, 2026, noted that Xi's campaign was "not as violent or extreme as Mao's," but that it extended across the entire Party apparatus — corruption and disloyalty alike — with an intensity unprecedented since the Maoist era. In 2025, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 983,000 functionaries faced disciplinary measures — an increase of more than 10% over 2024, the equivalent of roughly 1% of the Party's total membership punished in a single year.

The impact on combat capability — the question Beijing refuses to ask

When the general staff empties, who thinks the war?

The central military question — the one allied general staffs are asking with the greatest urgency — is the impact of the purges on the PLA's actual combat capability. The commander of the Eastern Theater Command, responsible for operations around Taiwan, was purged. The head of the PLA Rocket Force — which controls the nuclear and conventional ballistic missile arsenal — was purged. The chief of the Joint Staff was purged. These posts, often unfilled for months, created command vacancies without equivalent in the recent history of any major military. Who was planning the exercises around Taiwan in December 2025 while the ETC commander was under investigation? Who was managing the operational continuity of the Rocket Force?

A partial answer is provided by a researcher from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, cited by Al Jazeera in March 2026: the ETC's military exercises around Taiwan in December 2025 took 19 days to organize, compared to 12 days for a similar exercise months earlier, and just 4 days in 2024. That slowdown in organizational responsiveness — from 4 days to 19 — is concrete evidence of the friction created by the purges. Not proof of impotence. But confirmation that the PLA is paying a real operational price for its political cleansing.

The paradox of apparent strength and real fragility

CSIS, in February 2026, framed this paradox with unusual directness for a Washington think tank: "The CMC has ceased to function as an effective decision-making body, reduced to only Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin, the anti-corruption czar." A body that normally comprises seven members and provides collective leadership of the world's largest military, reduced to two — one of whom is the purge specialist, not a war strategist. This is a concentration of power that even Mao had not fully achieved in the 1950s and 1960s.

On the surface, the PLA continues to exercise, deploy carrier strike groups, and accumulate armaments. Beneath the surface, its command structures are in disarray, its senior officers replaced at a pace that prevents doctrinal consolidation, its generals caught in the permanent tension between military effectiveness and the demonstration of loyalty. An army where professional ambition can trigger a corruption investigation, where independent judgment can be read as disloyalty, is an army in which the best officers learn to make themselves invisible — which is precisely the opposite of what effective military command requires.

August 1, 2027: the deadline that structures everything

A centenary as political horizon

The date of August 1, 2027 structures all of China's military and political discourse in 2026. It is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army, during the Nanchang Uprising of 1927. Xi Jinping has invested that date with considerable symbolic weight: presenting a "renewed" PLA — ideologically purified, Party-loyal, ready for the challenges of the century. Zhang Shengmin, in his closing speech on June 17, 2026, explicitly tied the training course to that deadline: "Welcome the 100th anniversary with a renewed political vision." That sentence is not addressed only to the officers in the room. It is addressed to Xi Jinping — a public promise that rectification is advancing at a pace that will allow the demonstration when the moment comes.

The centenary is also a domestic political horizon. By August 2027, Xi Jinping needs to present an army he can claim is purified, loyal, and ready. Not to fight — we sincerely hope — but for the theater of legitimacy. A PLA stained by corruption, fractured, its generals under investigation one after another, is an institutional humiliation in the narrative of "national rejuvenation." Zhang Shengmin's training course is therefore as much a political communications tool as an instrument of real military development. The goal is to be able to say, on August 1, 2027: "The army is clean. The army is loyal. The army is ready."

Staging a normalcy that does not exist

What strikes me in the official discourse around rectification is the meticulous staging of institutional normalcy. A "training course," not reeducation. A "closing ceremony," not the end of a surveillance period. A "two-month course," not a forced loyalty audit. The institutional vocabulary masks the reality of what is happening: senior officers whose peers have been purged at an 87% rate, summoned to a military university for two months, under the supervision of the one man who survived all the purges, to learn that their future depends on their ability to demonstrate absolute personal loyalty to Xi Jinping. This is not routine. But it is presented as routine. And that normalization of the extraordinary is one of the Chinese Communist Party's most effective rhetorical techniques.

A diplomat posted in Beijing, cited anonymously by Chosun in January 2026, had described the situation with brutal clarity: "The army will be entirely populated by loyalists, focusing on systemic improvements to build a strong military in preparation for the 100th anniversary next year." Loyalists. Not strategists. Not tacticians. Loyalists. The order of priorities says everything.

The most troubling historical precedent: Stalin's purges

1937-1938: when Stalin beheaded his own army

Twentieth-century military history offers a precedent worth confronting directly: between 1937 and 1938, Joseph Stalin conducted a massive purge of the Red Army. Tens of thousands of officers — including three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, thirteen of fifteen army commanders, fifty of fifty-seven corps commanders — were executed, imprisoned, or dismissed. Stalin's purge directly contributed to the Soviet military disasters of 1941-1942, when the Red Army, stripped of its experienced officer corps, collapsed before the German offensive. Twenty-seven million Soviets perished.

The comparison has limits: Xi's purges are not mass executions. The geopolitical context is different. The PLA of 2026 is not the Red Army of 1937. But the structure of the problem is similar: an army whose command is decimated by the political distrust of its leader, whose officers learn that independence and competence can attract investigators, and whose strategic decisions are concentrated in the hands of a single man surrounded by a loyalist. This is the besieged citadel syndrome at the top of a general staff — and military history, on this point, offers no reassuring precedents.

What Western allies are concluding

In allied capitals — Washington, Tokyo, Canberra, Seoul — analysis of the PLA purges feeds a contradictory debate. On one side, hope: a disorganized army is an army less capable of executing a complex military operation, such as an invasion of Taiwan. On the other side, concern: an army whose command is concentrated in the hands of a single man, without institutional counterweights, without generals capable of saying "no" to an irrational decision, is an army capable of things a collective command structure would not do. The worst-case scenario is not necessarily a strong PLA. It may be a poorly commanded PLA — one driven by ideological conviction rather than strategic analysis, triggering a crisis through miscalculation rather than deliberate planning.

The CNA analysis, published in November 2025, noted that the purges had "potential implications for the PLA's operational capability and, by extension, for American policymakers seeking to restore deterrence in the Indo-Pacific." That is not an alarm bell. It is something subtler and more troubling: the admission that the strategic readability of the PLA has been reduced — that it has become harder, since the purges, to accurately model the decisions Beijing will make in a crisis.

Rectification as a tool for institutionalizing personal power

Beyond corruption: the architectural overhaul of power

It would be reductive to read the rectification campaign solely as an anti-corruption hygiene operation or as a political purge in its crudest sense. It is also, and perhaps above all, an architectural overhaul of how military power is organized in China. Xi Jinping is not only eliminating corrupt or disloyal generals. He is rebuilding the PLA from the ground up — doctrine, command structure, institutional culture — around a new principle: the direct personal authority of the chairman over every military command node.

The "CMC chairman responsibility system" — mentioned in the PLA Daily editorial on the Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli cases — is the keystone of this overhaul. It means that Xi Jinping is not only commander-in-chief on paper, but direct commander in practice — every strategic decision, every significant deployment, every operational doctrine must reflect and validate his personal authority. This is no longer a Party army with a symbolic supreme commander. This is the leader's personal army — an instrument of Xi's will as much as of state power.

The long-term consequences nobody is projecting

What is rarely projected is the long-term institutional impact of this concentration. An army whose officers learn that independence and ambition generate investigations transforms into an army of followers. Where generals capable of tactical innovation, unconventional thinking, initiative in crisis — precisely the qualities that win wars — are discouraged, even eliminated. Where demonstrative loyalty replaces operational competence as the criterion for selection and promotion. This is not a problem today, when there is no war. But if a war were to come — if an incident in the Taiwan Strait escalated, if a confrontation in the South China Sea exceeded every actor's calculations — this army would be tested under conditions no "political rectification" course can simulate.

It is legitimate, and even necessary, to note that serious observers argue that Xi's purges also have a positive effect: eliminating real corruption, renewing sclerotic structures, forcing doctrinal modernization. These effects may exist. But they unfold in a context where the primary survival criterion within the PLA command is loyalty to a single man — and it is that context that ultimately defines the institutional culture of the army Xi is building.

What the democratic world should learn from this spectacle

Transparency as a security system

There is an inverse lesson that democracies can draw from the PLA's command crisis: the value of institutional mechanisms that limit the concentration of military power in a single individual's hands. In democracies — imperfect, noisy, slow — major military decisions involve checks: parliaments, independent chiefs of staff, civilian bureaucracies, a free press, public opinion. These mechanisms are frustrating for short-term efficiency. They are protective over the long term. They produce armies whose generals can say "that's a bad idea" without risking arrest. And armies whose generals can say "that's a bad idea" are armies that make fewer catastrophic mistakes.

The PLA's command crisis illustrates, by contrast, why democracies maintain these institutional guardrails. Not because their leaders are necessarily more honest or less tempted by concentrated power — recent history offers sufficient counterexamples. But because their systems generate friction mechanisms that slow, complicate, and sometimes block catastrophic decisions before they become irreversible. That is a real, documented, measurable value — even if it does not sell well on the campaign trail.

Do not underestimate the resilience of the Chinese system

It would be naive and even dangerous, however, to conclude that the PLA purges mean China is militarily collapsing. The Chinese political system has a capacity for resilience and adaptation that Western observers regularly underestimate. Massive purges — even at the 87% level of three-star generals — do not necessarily produce an impotent army. They produce a different army, with different vulnerabilities and new strengths. The officers appointed to replace the purged — still poorly documented publicly — represent a new generation, trained in modern warfare doctrine, accustomed to contemporary weapons systems, motivated to prove their worth in a context where promotion depends on both loyalty and competence.

The question is therefore not: is the PLA weak? The question is: is the PLA predictable? And the answer, given the purges, the concentration of command, and the substitution of personal loyalty for institutional collegiality, is: decreasingly so. An unpredictable army — even one less powerful than the one it replaces — is often more dangerous in a crisis, because it does not do what its adversaries have modeled it doing.

Zhang Shengmin and the solitude of the last general

The man managing the aftermath

Let us return to Zhang Shengmin — because his trajectory says something important about what Xi Jinping is building. Promoted to CMC vice-chairman in October 2025, as his predecessor He Weidong was being purged, Zhang is the heir to a power architecture where the CMC no longer functions as a body of collective deliberation but as an instrument of Xi's will. His role is not to counterbalance Xi. His role is to ensure nobody else can.

What Zhang Shengmin did during the training course — summoning senior officers from across the country, subjecting them to two months of ideological formation, closing the session by demanding a "renewed political vision" for the PLA centenary — is institutional risk management. The goal is to ensure that the generals who remain, those who survived the purge, correctly internalize the rules of the game: loyalty to Xi is the non-negotiable condition of survival. This message does not need to be stated explicitly. It is communicated by the context itself — by the fact that everyone who was there in 2022 and is no longer there in 2026 learned it at their own expense.

The course that changed everything — or nothing

Two months. Senior officers from across China. Xi Jinping at the opening. Zhang Shengmin at the closing. This symbolic architecture is carefully crafted, calculated, designed to produce an effect of normalization: the PLA is not in crisis. It is undergoing rectification. And rectification is a normal, healthy, institutional process. The problem is that this staging of normalcy cannot, on its own, rebuild an institutional culture that the purges have profoundly damaged. The officers present at the June 17, 2026 closing ceremony return to their commands with two months of ideological training — and with the awareness that 87% of their peers at equivalent rank have been purged. These two data points coexist. And it is their coexistence — not one or the other in isolation — that genuinely defines the PLA's command culture in June 2026.

What this means for Taiwan

Deterrence in an opaque command environment

For Taiwan, the United States, and their allies, the practical question is direct: how do you deter an army whose command is concentrated in the hands of a single man, whose generals are selected for their loyalty rather than their ability to say no, and whose institutional structures of collective deliberation have been nearly entirely dismantled? Classical deterrence rests on the assumption that the adversary conducts a rational cost-benefit calculation before acting. But a command structure where nobody can reasonably contradict the chief — where counter-argumentation risks being read as disloyalty — is a command structure in which that calculation may be skewed by ideological confirmation rather than strategic analysis.

This is precisely what the Al Jazeera analysis noted in March 2026, citing Taiwanese experts: the purges "do not appear to have disrupted Chinese military activities around Taiwan." The exercises continue. The gray-zone patrols continue. Naval construction continues. The PLA is not paralyzed. But it operates within a command structure whose decision quality in a crisis remains an unknown variable — an unknown that allied planners must integrate without being able to resolve.

The West facing growing opacity

One of the secondary effects of the purges — undocumented but real — is the growing opacity of Chinese military decision-making. With a two-member CMC, theater commands in transition, and officers selected for loyalty rather than public profile, the early warning signals of Chinese military escalation become harder to detect. The usual interlocutors have disappeared. Informal communication networks have been severed. And the officers who remain have every reason not to communicate substantively with their foreign counterparts, for fear it might be interpreted as feeding intelligence to the adversary — or worse, as a form of compromise.

That opacity is itself a geopolitical risk. Military crises — in the straits, in the South China Sea, around disputed islands — are often managed through informal communication channels between officers who know each other, trust each other, and can send de-escalation signals without exposing themselves politically. These channels, in the PLA of 2026, have largely been destroyed by the purges. De-escalation in a crisis requires stable interlocutors. And Xi's purges have eliminated most of the interlocutors that Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra had identified as stable.

Back to the June 17 ceremony: what the silence says

What Zhang Shengmin did not say

In the transcript of Zhang Shengmin's closing speech as reported by the South China Morning Post, there is nowhere any mention of tactics, operational doctrine, combat readiness, crisis scenarios, or relations with neighboring militaries. Zhang spoke of loyalty, political vision, ideological transformation, responsibility. That is not an artifact of reporting. It is an accurate reflection of what the course actually taught — and of what Xi Jinping considers the absolute priority twelve months before the PLA centenary.

That silence on the military in favor of the ideological, in the closing ceremony of a training course for senior officers, says something essential about the state of the PLA in June 2026: the priority is not combat readiness. The priority is political readiness. This is not necessarily contradictory with combat readiness — in Xi's logic, an ideologically pure army is a politically ready army, and therefore a militarily reliable one. But it is a logic with its own blind spots — and those blind spots reveal themselves in crisis, not in training.

The sentence that will stay

"We must welcome the 100th anniversary of the PLA's founding with a renewed political vision." That sentence from Zhang Shengmin, delivered on June 17, 2026 before the surviving officers of an unprecedented purge, may be the most revealing phrase about the state of the Chinese military in 2026. Not because it says something new. But because it says exactly what Xi Jinping has decided the PLA needs to hear — and because no one in the room could reasonably respond in any way other than approval. Forced consensus is not consensus. It is its imitation. And armies that run on the imitation of consensus rather than its reality — armies where doubts are never voiced aloud — are the armies that fail most spectacularly when reality does not match the plan.

Other armies are watching — and drawing their conclusions

What Tokyo, Canberra, and Seoul are observing

Allied general staffs are watching the PLA purges with meticulous attention and an ambivalence their official representatives never express publicly. On one side, opportunity: a PLA whose command structures are in disarray is a PLA less capable of executing a complex amphibious operation against Taiwan in the next three to five years. The exercises around Taiwan that now take 19 days instead of 4 to stand up — according to Taipei data published by Al Jazeera in March 2026 — are concrete evidence of those frictions. On the other side, concern: an army whose command is concentrated in the hands of a single man, without institutional counterweights, is an army capable of unpredictable decisions in crisis.

Tokyo is drawing the conclusion — made public by its defense officials — that it must accelerate the development of Japanese military capabilities, especially in long-range strike. Canberra is advancing its nuclear submarines under AUKUS. Seoul is developing its own conventional deterrence capabilities. The uncertainty generated by the Chinese purges is not slowing allied rearmament: it is accelerating it. Because an unpredictable army is one against which you must prepare for every scenario, including the least rational ones.

The PLA of 2027: stronger or more fragile?

The honest answer is that nobody knows with certainty. The new officers appointed after the purges have not yet proven themselves in real conflict. Operational doctrine is being rewritten. Command structures are being rebuilt. In August 2027, at the centenary, the PLA will showcase a renewed force, with new faces, new doctrines, a new generation of loyalists trained by Zhang Shengmin. If these officers are as competent as they are loyal — and some probably are — the PLA of 2027 may be more strategically coherent, even if less tactically seasoned. If loyalty has systematically trumped competence in appointments — which several signals suggest — the PLA of 2027 will be an army formidable in its armaments and fragile in its command. That is not a reassuring contradiction.

The PLA in 2026: an army that still has to prove it can win

The PLA facing its own mirror

The two-month training course that concluded on June 17, 2026 at Beijing's National Defense University is, in a sense, the perfect symbol of the PLA's state at the midpoint of Xi Jinping's purges: an army in the midst of ideological reconstruction, whose surviving officers publicly commit to renewed political loyalty, under the supervision of the one general Xi has not yet purged. This is not an army preparing for war. This is an army preparing for an anniversary. And there is an abysmal difference between those two types of preparation.

The political rectification that Zhang Shengmin is calling for — a PLA that is ideologically pure, Party-loyal, ready for the centenary — is a coherent political project. But it is a project that collides with an inescapable military reality: armies do not win wars because they are ideologically pure. They win because their officers think fast, decide well, and have the institutional courage to speak truth to power when the plan stops working. And that culture — the culture of truth spoken to power, of initiative in crisis, of local decision-making without waiting for top-level approval — is precisely the culture that Xi Jinping's purges have destroyed.

What remains after the centenary

On August 1, 2027, cameras will film the PLA's centenary. Xi Jinping will be there. Zhang Shengmin will be there. The new generals — loyalists, trained in rectification, bearers of "renewed political vision" — will be there. It will be a polished spectacle, carefully orchestrated, broadcast on every state channel. And the next day, the PLA will continue to exist in the reality of what it has become: an army formidable in its armaments, uncertain in its command, loyal to a single man, and confronting a world that did not wait for the purges to end before reorganizing, rearming, and recalibrating its alliances around the threat it represents. Rectification can purify an army ideologically. It cannot give back the generals it lost.

What rectification cannot buy

The PLA's "political rectification" is coherent in its internal logic — the logic of control, of concentrated power, of eliminating potential rivals. Zhang Shengmin stated it with precision on June 17, 2026: ideological transformation, sense of responsibility, renewed political vision for the centenary. That is a program that satisfies Xi Jinping politically. But none of those three objectives — not ideological transformation, not sense of responsibility, not political vision — replaces operational doctrine, combat experience, or command capability in a crisis. Those last three cannot be purchased with two months of training at the National Defense University. They are built over decades — and they are destroyed in thirty-six months of purges.

The PLA in 2026: what I retain

Here is what I take from all of this: China is building the most powerful military in its history — in armaments, naval tonnage, personnel, budget. Simultaneously, it is beheading its own general staff with an efficiency that would have given Stalin pause. These two movements coexist. They may feed each other in Xi's logic — build an army whose weapons are invincible and whose people are beyond reproach. But in the reality of war, when plans meet the enemy, it is the people — their judgment, their institutional courage, their capacity to innovate under adversity — who decide. And those people, the PLA has lost in considerable numbers since 2022. This is not analysis. This is what the data from CSIS, the Pentagon, and the defense institutes of Tokyo and Taipei say. Data does not get purged.

Conclusion: What the missing generals leave behind

The void that remains

101 senior PLA officers — confirmed or presumed purged since 2022. 36 generals officially removed. 52% of senior command posts affected. The CMC reduced from seven members to two. A two-month training course to normalize the abnormal. A closing speech that promises "renewed political vision" for a military centenary. These numbers are the portrait of an institution under forced reconstruction — not because it had failed its military mission, but because it had failed to satisfy the primary political condition of an authoritarian regime: absolute loyalty to a single man. That is an understandable logic of power. It is also a logic that tends to produce catastrophes when it meets the resistance of the real.

The stone in Beijing's shoe

Xi Jinping can purge 101 generals. He can train their replacements for two months. He can proclaim the PLA's purity for the August 2027 centenary. But he cannot purge experience, initiative, and the institutional culture of collective command. Those qualities — built over thirty years by PLA officers — are not replaced by ideological decree. They are rebuilt over a generation, if the conditions allow. And the current conditions — purging the competent in favor of the loyal, concentrating command in the hands of two men, cultivating a culture of fear in general staffs — are not conditions for reconstruction. They are conditions for regression. The PLA that Xi Jinping is building is an army that belongs entirely to him — and that may be its greatest vulnerability.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency box

Editorial positioning

This commentary is written from a position of pro-Western democracies and the conviction that the concentration of military power in the hands of a single authoritarian leader constitutes a systemic risk to regional and international stability. I do not claim neutrality: I am a columnist-analyst, not a journalist. My role is to interpret and take positions on the basis of verified facts — not to report neutrally. I explicitly acknowledge that China has legitimate perspectives on its own security and military modernization that I do not share, but which I account for in my analysis.

Methodology and sources

This commentary draws on published and verifiable sources: the SCMP (June 17, 2026 — Phoebe Zhang), CSIS (February 24, 2026), Al Jazeera (March 18, 2026), Reuters (October 17, 2025), CNN (February 25, 2026), Chosun (January 26, 2026), CNA (November 19, 2025), the New York Times (February 16, 2026), and english.www.gov.cn (April 8, 2026). No figure is invented. No quote is fabricated. All statistical data (36 generals officially purged, 101 total, 52% of posts affected, 87% of three-star generals) comes from CSIS and is cited with source and date.

Nature of the analysis

This commentary constitutes an analysis of military policy and authoritarian governance, grounded in public data and assessments from recognized experts. References to Stalin's purges of 1937-1938 are explicitly limited historical parallels — I do not claim they constitute a prediction. The officers evoked in filigree (those with "fear-smiles") represent realities documented by analysts — specifically the impact of fear on military institutional culture — within a transparent rhetorical frame, without fabrication of individual testimony.

Sources

Primary sources

South China Morning Post — Phoebe Zhang: "Top PLA graft-buster urges more loyalty, 'political rectification' as training ends" — June 17, 2026

Chinese Government (english.www.gov.cn) — "Xi stresses deepening political rectification at training session" — April 8, 2026

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) — "Assessing Xi's Unprecedented Purges of China's Military" — February 24, 2026

ChinaPower Project / CSIS — Chinese Military Purges Database — February 24, 2026

Secondary sources

Reuters — "China expels two top military leaders from Communist Party in anti-corruption purge" — October 17, 2025

Al Jazeera — "Xi Jinping's anticorruption drive sweeps up senior Chinese military chiefs" — March 18, 2026

CNN — "Xi's purges of Chinese military run deep, raising questions of readiness" — February 25, 2026

Chosun — "Xi Jinping Concludes Military Purge With Top Officials' Removal" — January 26, 2026

CNA — "Military Purges at China's Fourth Plenum Have Implications for Readiness" — November 19, 2025