The Deeper Pattern Behind China’s Military Purges |
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On April 8, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) convened a “rectification” training session for the remaining senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Chairman Xi Jinping delivered the opening speech. On the dais beside him at the National Defense University in Beijing sat a single colleague: Zhang Shengmin. The CMC’s discipline inspection chief had become, alongside Xi, the only other member of China’s top military body, after two of its most powerful generals were placed under investigation in January.
Most outside readings have treated this scene as a purity ritual, another turn of the screw in Xi’s decade-long campaign to make sure the army is under the total control of party leadership. The content of his speech, which urged officers to maintain “the purity and glory of the people’s armed forces,” invited that reading. But the more interesting text that day was not the speech. It was the seating chart. In past sessions of this kind, the front row overflowed with full generals. This time, only two sat there, flanked by lieutenant generals.
On April 8, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) convened a “rectification” training session for the remaining senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Chairman Xi Jinping delivered the opening speech. On the dais beside him at the National Defense University in Beijing sat a single colleague: Zhang Shengmin. The CMC’s discipline inspection chief had become, alongside Xi, the only other member of China’s top military body, after two of its most powerful generals were placed under investigation in January.
Most outside readings have treated this scene as a purity ritual, another turn of the screw in Xi’s decade-long campaign to make sure the army is under the total control of party leadership. The content of his speech, which urged officers to maintain “the purity and glory of the people’s armed forces,” invited that reading. But the more interesting text that day was not the speech. It was the seating chart. In past sessions of this kind, the front row overflowed with full generals. This time, only two sat there, flanked by lieutenant generals.
Over the past 18 months, Xi has dismantled two of the most powerful networks in the Chinese military. Given the PLA’s extreme opacity, networks are analytical shorthand that observers reconstruct from career patterns and shared posting histories, rather than formal factions. But they describe a real feature of an army whose “mountaintop” mentality predates the People’s Republic. The first was the so-called Fujian faction, built around officers whom Xi had........