After the fall of two top generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, in late January, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was left with only Chairman Xi Jinping and one vice chairman, Zhang Shengmin. Over the past two years, many senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been investigated. By an incomplete count, more than a dozen active-duty full generals have gone down.

Xi has moved against his generals with greater severity than against civilian officials. That vigor is especially evident in the systematic cleanup of the CMC, the PLA’s highest command body.

After the fall of two top generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, in late January, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was left with only Chairman Xi Jinping and one vice chairman, Zhang Shengmin. Over the past two years, many senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been investigated. By an incomplete count, more than a dozen active-duty full generals have gone down.

Xi has moved against his generals with greater severity than against civilian officials. That vigor is especially evident in the systematic cleanup of the CMC, the PLA’s highest command body.

In officialdom, it is rare to find someone without at least a suspicion of corruption; the real question is whether the leadership chooses to act. Xi’s predecessors did not refrain from anti-corruption because they lacked the will. The decisive difference was the power structure. Xi has built a system of personal authority second only to Mao Zedong—how he built it is not the subject here.

His opponents like to describe his rule as totalitarian. As an expression of moral outrage, that’s fine, but in stricter analytical terms, Xi’s system has not become the kind of totalitarianism associated with Mao or Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. This is not merely a difference in degree but a partial difference in kind.

Classic totalitarianism has three salient features: first, a grand project to remake society and human nature, typically expressed through........

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