CROSSPOST: ADRIAN MONCK: The End of China’s Central Military Commission
“What the Zhang Youxia purge tells us about Xi Jinping’s China” is Adrian Monck’s subhead. I see a through-line from the story of Sergei Kirov to Zhang Youxia, as Xi Jinping turns China’s army into a perpetual inquisition machine, and has taken a chainsaw to the top of his own military, purging five of six uniformed members of the Central Military Commission. But what is Xi to do when he believes that a corrupt army is no army at all—and has that belief reinforced by watching Muscovy ’Rus’s kleptocratic forces die by the tens of thousands in Ukraine each month to no rational purpose?...
Zhang Youxia, Liu Zhenli, He Weidong, Li Shangfu, Wei Fenghe, Miao Hua, He Hongjun, Wang Xiubin, Lin Xiangyang, Qin Shutong, Yuan Huazhi, Wang Houbin, Wang Chunning—all central committee members, all senior military-politicians of great authority and weight, all purged, and they are only the tip of the iceberg.
This AM we have:
Adrian Monck: The End of China’s Central Military Commission <https://7thin.gs/p/china-military-purge>: ‘What the Zhang Youxia purge tells us about Xi Jinping’s China:
1. Xi Jinping has gutted his high command: On Saturday, China’s Ministry of National Defence announced that Zhang Youxia – the country’s most senior uniformed officer – was under investigation for ‘serious violations of discipline and law.’ Also swept up: Liu Zhenli, chief of the Joint Staff Department. With their removal, China’s top military body, the seven-member Central Military Commission appointed at the 2022 Party Congress, has essentially ceased to exist. The only remaining members are President Xi himself and the head of the Discipline Inspection Commission. Five of six uniformed officers have been purged in less than three years. China’s military leadership is now a politician and someone from internal affairs, with no one between them and an officer corps that has just watched every senior general disappear.
2. Zhang wasn’t expendable – which is why he’s gone: Zhang was from China’s revolutionary aristocracy. He served in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War and the 1984 Battle of Laoshan. His father, Zhang Zongxun, fought alongside Xi’s father during the revolution. The two families could trace their connections to the same region of Shaanxi. In 2017, a retired PLA officer told the South China Morning Post that Xi once saw Zhang as a kind of elder brother. But even families have feuds.
Former Pentagon China hand Drew Thompson met Zhang during a 2012 delegation to the United States. He says Zhang stood out from his peers: intellectually curious; willing to engage with foreigners; respected by his staff as a soldier rather than a pen-pusher. He jumped at the chance to fire a machine gun at Fort Benning. He asked smart questions. He had, says Thompson, ‘an aura of competence around him,’ but not an aura of indestructibility…
The rest Adrian has put behind his paywall.
So I get to continue this by saying what I think we should draw from this bizarre chain of events—which, I think, is largely aligned with Adrian’s point of view. A
drian puts what I think is the right big conclusion in an if mode: “If Xi genuinely believes that a corrupt PLA is no PLA at all—that selling ranks poisons everything downstream—then the purges follow their own logic, whatever the cost to institutional continuity.” I would make that stronger: it is not an if hypothesis but has a very high probability of being a correct description of what is going down.
Because Xi believes, and all the stories the CCP tells itself about how it won the 1945-9 civil war reinforce his belief, that a corrupt army is no army at all, Xi now believes that he has no choice but to continue the purges until all of the corrupt rot in the PLA is, well, purged.
To that end, Xi Jinping has constructed a bureaucratic machine to carry out purges of the corrupt: a political order whose main tool is permanent, performative purging—much like what Stalin did in the 1930s when he concluded that something big had gone wrong when Stalin’s hand-picked senior party officials like Sergei Kirov more than they liked him. And so Stalin built a machine to find and root out the disloyalists. And, ultimately, it turned out nearly everybody old enough to have known Kirov before Stalin had him assassinated was disloyal. As Adrian says: When you build an Inquisition, you should not be surprised that it keeps finding and burning heretics.
This dynamic is reinforced by three other things very much in the forefront of Xi Jinping’s mind:
The first is that everyone and everything in the junior-senior leadership of the PLA is and has long been deeply corrupt.
The second is that Muscovy ’Rus’s corrupt army failed, and is now churning up 30,000 or so young Muscovite men a month killed and maimed. (Cf. likely Ukrainian killed-and-maimed pace of 10,000 a month.)
The third is that espionage allegations raise the stakes—their corruption knows no bounds, as they will do anything for money.
Hence when the purge trail reached Zhang Youxia, not princeling status, not war veteran status, not longtime Xi ally status, not having been at one time Xi’s “elder brother” in the party, could keep him from becoming a subject of the purge. So now Xi has completely dismantled the Central Military Commission: purged five of six uniformed members since 2022, leaving the PLA’s top command effectively beheaded. Lower down, the number of officers in some way disciplined really has now probably risen into the six figures.
I reach for analogies as to what this is doing to the PLA as an organization—both a peacetime bureaucracy and something that might actually be tasked with doing something violent—and I find myself at sea.