Lonely reign after Xi Jinping’s military purge leaves him with just one ally

And then there was one.

The zany team behind South Park created 20 years ago a movie, Team America, that parodied British puppet series Thunderbirds.

In it, the then North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il sings poignantly, with a speech impediment: “I’m so lonely, so lonely and sadly alone. There’s no one, just me only, sitting on my little throne … There’s nobody I can relate to, feel like a bird in a cage … It’s firing my body with rage …”

Xi Jinping was appointed to lead the Communist Party, and thus China, in November 2012. His second most important role was to chair China’s peak military body, the Central Military Commission, which had 11 members.

In 2022, Xi reduced them to a new board of seven. Today only two are left – the boss, Xi himself, and General Zhang Shengmin, the top army political commissar who acts as his enforcer. Xi has purged all the rest.

It must be feeling increasingly lonely at the top.

A week ago the People’s Liberation Army’s daily newspaper ran a page one editorial that explosively excoriated the Chinese military’s top-ranking officer, Zhang Youxia, and Liu Zhenli, another general who was also a member of the CMC. It announced their investigation for “serious disciplinary and legal violations”, which presupposes their guilt. Two other generals on the commission were purged last year, and another in 2024.

In the past three years alone, more than 20 generals were purged, with the entire Rocket Force command replaced, even ­before Zhang and Liu were given their marching orders.

Corruption – with massive procurement programs under way as the PLA continues to modernise its technology – and incompetence are doubtless factors. But towering above these in driving Xi’s purge is a perceived lack of transparent personal loyalty. Such disloyalty is painted as corruption.

This portrays a very different image of the PLA’s capabilities from the images – intended to intimidate neighbours and to boost Chinese pride – from the massive September 3 military parade in ­Beijing, its immaculate goosestepping, and revelations of new hi-tech weaponry, watched admir­ingly by VIP guests including Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, and the hereditary ruler of China’s only military ally, North Korea – Kim Jong-un, the son of “so lonely” Kim Jong-il.

Although much wild and unprovable speculation is still swirling about these latest and most consequential sackings, they do further our understanding of three important features of the obsessively secretive black box that comprises China’s political and military decision-making.

They underline the extraordinary and persisting personal power of Xi. They also point, despite this, to the impossibility of his ever fully extinguishing rivalry or alternative thinking within the party.

And they reveal the intrinsic instability of such authoritarian command structures, where it appears impossible to rely on anyone.

The former value placed on “guanxi” – networks – has fast evaporated, since one’s trusted contact may disappear tomorrow.

Xi was chosen by the elders of the Chinese Communist Party to succeed Hu Jintao as General Secretary because he was viewed as “a safe pair of hands” – a princeling of “red genes” born into party royalty and friendly to the then-powerful Shanghai Clique.

More importantly, he was chosen because he vowed to haul the party back from its increasingly unpopular wealthy elitism to a claimed former state of purity.

After assuming power, he accordingly launched a massive “anti-corruption” blitzkrieg.

The party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection says that by this time a year ago, more than six million people had been disciplined in some way during this purge-that-has-never-ended.

The “tigers” taken down have included the strongman controlling the country’s internal ­security and legal forces, Zhou Yongkang; the scion of the famous party family that most rivalled Xi’s, Bo Xilai; and the chief of the party organisation, Ling Jihua. All three were sentenced to life imprisonment.

As a result, fear is widespread within officialdom, leading to a degree of inertia, which in turn drives Xi to crank up his “anti-corruption” drive even more fiercely.

After 13 years in power, he is now removing chiefly leaders he himself appointed.

James Palmer writes for Foreign Policy that this purge culture has helped the mediocre to rise across Chinese state institutions, often boosted by attacking more competent rivals as disloyal, while the ­talented and assertive have either had their careers stymied or fled to the private sector.

And the vast number of colleagues, friends and relatives of the six million, who have been affected indirectly, extends greatly the circle of people disinclined to leap to fulfil every new Xi ideological or administrative direction. This further compounds Xi’s sense of constant struggle, an underlying theme of his speeches.

Zhang Youxia’s father, Zongxun, and Xi’s father, Zhongxun, came from the same district of Shaanxi province and fought alongside each other including during the epic Long March with the communists’ First Field Army. Zhang, long viewed as one of Xi’s few close friends or allies in the top level of the party – of which he became a Politburo member – is one of just a handful of generals who saw combat, fighting against Vietnam in 1979.

Although Zhang should have stepped down for age reasons – he is now 75 – Xi oversaw his rare reappointment. He might have simply let Zhang drift into retirement, but instead chose to take him down.

Jonathan Czin, former director for China at the USA’s National Security Council, wrote for Brookings Institution that “Zhang’s removal means that truly nobody in the leadership is safe now”.

This compounds a growing sense that closeness to Xi, to apex power that Xi seeks to elide with Communist Party purity, brings danger more than opportunity. There is a strongly religious aspect to this phenomenon. As in the Old Testament, where a person approaching holy objects or the divine itself while remaining impure risked being engulfed in consuming fire.

The PLA Daily railed that Zhang and Liu had “caused immense damage to the military’s political construction, political ecology, and combat capability construction, and have had an extremely vile influence …” and further had “seriously trampled upon and undermined the CMC Chairman Responsibility System.”

Typically, while the latter may appear obscure, it probably refers to the generals’ core “crime” – calling into question the system, introduced a decade ago by Xi himself, under which the CMC chairman personally holds the final say on every key military matter, representing that “the party commands the gun”.

Chinese military expert James Mulverson wrote for China Leadership Monitor that this newly framed Responsibility System has become a central element of Xi’s ­effort to consolidate his personal control over the PLA “during a ­period of both aggressive modernisation and political turmoil caused by the anti-corruption campaign”.

The system also comprised a message “designed to portray Xi Jinping as the strongest Chinese leader since Mao Zedong … at the expense of the previous emphasis on collective leadership”, said Mulverson.

“But if the anti-corruption campaign should fail to achieve the desired results … Xi will not have the luxury of ‘collective leadership’ to share the blame.”

Alongside Xi’s core position as party General Secretary, from which all power derives, his control of the military is his most crucial role. For the PLA is not China’s army. It is unequivocally the party’s army.

The Red Army, renamed the PLA in 1947 two years before civil-war victory over the Nationalists, played the decisive role in the communists gaining power in China, and in 1989 fought decisively against protesting civilians to secure the party’s absolute political control.

Thus the weight of the PLA Daily’s editorial that further condemns the generals for “severely fuelling political and corruption problems that threaten the party’s absolute leadership over the armed forces and undermine the party’s governance foundation”.

Lingling Wei and Chun Han Wong of The Wall Street Journal reported exclusively that at an internal briefing, senior party officials were told that Zhang is further ­accused of leaking about China’s nuclear weapons program to the US and receiving a bribe to promote an officer to become Defence Minister.

But they explain in an important caveat: “Internal explanations provided to the party elite – such as those in Saturday’s briefing – don’t always reflect the complete or true motivation behind Xi’s decisions.”

It is usual to throw the kitchen sink at leading officials being purged – greed and theft, sexual immorality, treachery with foreigners. And Zhang had many meetings with American counterparts at which nuclear issues would have been discussed, providing Xi’s purge team with quotes that skilful editing could turn against him.

More significant is the claim made at the briefing that, according to the Journal reporters, Zhang is also “under investigation for allegedly forming political cliques”.

That is a very great sin in Xi’s brave new party world. Xi used his anti-corruption purge to smash the factions – both official and informal – which had helped the party become a broader umbrella of views and aims, but which held an implicit threat to the leadership that if it failed to take them into account, including through relevant appointments, then they might destabilise it. Xi cannot countenance any remote prospect of his rule being questioned, let alone destabilised.

The opacity at the highest reaches of the party gives oxygen to rumours that, for instance, Xi was being managed out of the system by “elders” led by Zhang himself, or that Xi has been fighting a rearguard action to stall PLA adventurers from pushing prematurely into invading Taiwan. The “nuclear secrets” line is one almost certainly made up mischievously by Zhang’s investigators.

And an article in the Spectator magazine this week that began with the least promising phrase any journalism can conjure, stated that “According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia sent a company of troops to Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on January 18. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping.” Xi’s own Central Guards were then said to have ambushed them, killing dozens of Zhang’s ­soldiers and losing nine of the own. Almost certainly, sheer fiction.

In contrast, former US Pentagon official Drew Thompson has written a compelling account on his own Substack on the General Zhang who he knew and liked, including touring US military bases alongside him. As Thompson writes:

The PLA is a political organisation, the armed wing of the Communist Party, not a national army sworn to protect the constitution or the country. Loyalty and ideology are more important than warfighting ability. Independent thought can be a liability rather than an asset. This is the PLA’s ­culture.

However, “Zhang Youxia stood out. He had seen combat and been humbled by it. He is educated, intellectual, intuitive. He had an aura of competence. The other PLA generals and staff officers could see it, and they respected him for it. They gave him their best.”

Thompson hoped Zhang would stay at the top, because “he could assess US and Taiwan military capabilities objectively and explain to Xi what the military risks and costs of an operation to take Taiwan would be,” while “a sycophant with no combat experience has to tell Xi what Xi wants to hear. Without Zhang on the CMC, the risk of miscalculation goes up.”

Xi’s constant remoulding of the PLA – its structures as well as its leaders – is driven by his cornerstone project of “modernisation”. While this incorporates providing the military with advanced weaponry, its core meaning and purpose are to ensure full alignment with and responsiveness to the goals of the Communist Party and especially those of its General Secretary, Xi himself.

Jonathan Czin says that “the persistence of corruption undermines Xi’s confidence in the PLA … Xi is quite serious when he says that he wants the PLA to prepare to ‘fight and win battles’ – a turn of phrase that itself implies that the PLA is not ready”.

Xi claimed at the last national party congress that the PLA “has always been a heroic army that the party and the people can fully trust”. But not, it would seem to judge by his endless purges of its ­officers, Xi himself.

Can Xi trust a PLA with an existentially important mission for the party – especially the seizure of Taiwan – if he can’t fully trust its most senior officers, however impressive the modern kit with which he has equipped it?

As Louis-Vincent Gave wrote this week for Gavekal Research: “As Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demonstrated before Russia was invaded by Germany in 1941, a purge of top officers is hardly the best way to prepare for war.”

While the PLA’s centenary and the party’s five-yearly congress loom large for China next year, the latest top-level sackings make it even less likely that any plans for a Taiwan invasion to celebrate these events and to cement Xi’s place in history will proceed. James Palmer rightly concludes Xi appears not to have “succumbed to the kind of delusional nationalism Putin experienced before invading Ukraine.”

Xi will push on, though, with his project to make the PLA fully fit for any purpose that its owner, the CCP, assigns it. And it would be dangerous to underestimate such single-mindedness.

Assured of remaining in power for a decade more or beyond, he will continue to view this as his time, his world, albeit a lonely time and a lonely world.