DEEP DIVE – In China, the generals keep losing their jobs.
On February 26, nine senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – five generals, one lieutenant general, and three major generals – were stripped of membership in China's top legislature, in the latest episode of a purge that has eviscerated the leadership of the PLA and raised questions about its readiness for a possible invasion of Taiwan.
The move came less than a week before the opening of China’s most important annual political gathering, the “Two Sessions,” and just one day after the release of a report showing that Xi’s purges have been far more sweeping than was previously known. The report, which was published by the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), represents the first systematic assessment of the purges, which began in 2022 and culminated in last month’s removal of two of China’s most senior and experienced generals.
The report chronicles an "unprecedented purge of China’s military” that has swept all service branches and jettisoned more than half of the PLA’s senior officers.
Retired Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, a former Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, said the purges were greater in scale and scope than any in the nearly eight-decade history of the People's Republic of China.
“Xi Jinping has gone beyond even Mao’s purges,” Adm. Studeman told The Cipher Brief, referring to Mao Zedong’s elimination of the PLA high command in the early 1970s. “And he has fundamentally reshaped the way that the military is going to be led.”
The report found that the purges – carried out in the name of ridding the PLA of corruption – have led to a drop in the number and size of major military exercises, and raised questions about the PLA’s current capacity for complex operations.
“In the near term, given the significant vacancies, it would be incredibly difficult for China to launch large military campaigns against Taiwan,” Bonny Lin, the director of the China Power Project, wrote in an assessment of the report’s findings. “Even below that threshold, there is evidence that the purges have negatively impacted China’s exercises around Taiwan in 2025.”
“This is not the command that Xi Jinping wants to go to war with,” Brian Hart, the China Power Project’s Deputy Director and one of the report’s authors, told The Cipher Brief. “You don’t choose to go to war with half of your commanders missing.”
Mapping a Crackdown
The new report includes a database of China’s military leadership and identifies those officers who have been removed – including several with critical portfolios: the PLA’s head of military training; a general who commanded forces preparing for possible operations against Taiwan; and the two top officers dismissed in January – General Zhang Youxia, China’s most senior military official and by many accounts Xi’s most trusted military aide, and General Liu Zhenli, who headed the Joint Staff Department. Zhang and Liu were members of the Central Military Commission (CMC), China’s highest-level military body. As The Cipher Brief reported in January. Xi’s campaign has now claimed all but two of the CMC’s six leaders (one of whom is Xi himself); experts said the U.S. equivalent would be the firing of all but one member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with dozens of other high-ranking generals.
In all, the China Power Project’s report found that 36 generals and lieutenant generals have been ousted since 2022; another 65 officers are listed as missing or “potentially purged”; and taken together, 101 of 176 officers in the PLA’s highest ranks — general or lieutenant general — are no longer at their posts. All five of China’s military theaters have seen their leaders ousted, and 56 deputy theater commanders have lost their positions as well.
Lyle Morris, a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis, said he had followed the purges for years but was startled by their scope.
“Beyond the four-star general level, you have the three-, two-, one-stars and all their underlings who appear to have been fully purged or in the process of being removed,” Morris, who formerly served as Country Director for China at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), told The Cipher Brief. “This has ramifications for the leadership, trust, and execution of training and missions of the PLA.”
Some of the military leaders have been fired, others placed under “investigation” – typically a career-ending proposition for a PLA officer – and others have simply vanished from public view. The report also documents a recent escalation; more than 60 top figures were removed from their posts in the last year alone. And experts believe the cleansing may not be over.
“I think we’re likely to see more purges,” Hart said. “This is not the end.”
Rebuilding the PLA
The report’s authors and several outside experts said that in the wake of the disruption – whenever it ends – Xi will face enormous challenges in rebuilding the world’s largest military.
“Having gutted the PLA’s leadership, Xi Jinping will have to turn to reconstituting the military high command in the coming years,” the report found. “Depending on what Xi intends to do, this could take years or even longer to see the full transformation.”
Experts stressed that when it comes to elevating officers to top positions, Xi will have to balance two key factors – political loyalty and competence.
“I think he’s more focused on getting it right than he is on doing it quickly,” Hart said, and he and others suggested that loyalty would be paramount. “Xi Jinping’s top priority in reconstructing the leadership is not the competence of his commanders. That’s very important, but his top priority is political loyalty to him and to the party.”
Some experts said that the full “transformation” is unlikely to be complete until late 2027, when the next Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is set to convene. In the interim, as newly-minted leaders are brought in, they may be less willing than their predecessors to present unvarnished assessments to Xi.
“The general sense is that anybody that’s going to be freshly appointed is going to be far more dependent on Xi, who has accelerated that person into the higher ranks,” Adm. Studeman said. “There will likely be more ‘yes men’ that have more to fear by crossing Xi Jinping.”
The Asia Society’s Morris concurred. The new leaders “are going to be much more accommodating to what Xi wants to do,” he said. “They’re not going to be giving bad news because that would mean the end of their careers. So for example, they’re going to be the folks who say, ‘Yes, sir, the PLA invasion plans are ready,’ even if they know internally they’re not ready.”
The Taiwan impact
You don’t need to be a China expert to grasp the potential impact of the purges – at least in the short term – when it comes to conducting major military operations, against Taiwan or anywhere else. At every level of the PLA – from top war planners to the generals who would execute those plans to lower-level officers in the Eastern Theater (the relevant command for a Taiwan operation) – multiple key positions are now vacant.
Morris said that having reviewed the scope and scale of the purges, he wouldn’t “lose any sleep” this year or in 2027 over a possible invasion of Taiwan.
“I think [Xi] and everyone in the party now knows that 2027 is not a good time to invade Taiwan,” he said. “You have to have the institutional leadership in place to give commands across the services, up through the CMC, and all of those relationships are now frayed or in disarray. I’m not sure how the PLA could actually execute it with so many senior leaders gone.”
Experts stressed that smaller-scale operations – basic training exercises, or dealing with minor skirmishes in the South China Sea – are unlikely to be affected by the purges, and that the PLA would not hesitate to respond to a crisis or engage in a war of necessity. But a conflict in the Taiwan Strait would be a large-scale and highly complex military operation, requiring the mobilization of all of China’s military services and forces – and for Beijing, it would be a war of choice.
For all those reasons, a half dozen experts interviewed by The Cipher Brief were unanimous in thinking that the 2027 time frame – which was widely reported to be the deadline Xi had given the PLA to be prepared to act against Taiwan – was no longer operative.
“If Xi had plans for 2027, I think they’re delayed,” said Dennis Wilder, a former senior CIA official and top White House adviser on China, in an interview conducted prior to the report’s publication. “There's no way that they're ready to take on a major military confrontation in these circumstances.”
“You’ve got to say this is not going to happen [by 2027],” Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA Director of East Asia Operations, told The Cipher Brief. “I just don't see how Xi Jinping could feel even remotely confident that China’s military would be prepared, or is prepared, to use kinetic means to take over Taiwan.”
Adm. Studeman said Xi may have carried out the purges now because he never intended to move against Taiwan until 2028 or later – given the fact that a late-2027 Party gathering will determine whether he gains a fourth term as leader.
“Typically when a leader wants to get another term they need the backing of the PLA,” Studeman said. “If in fact the senior leadership in the PLA thought that Xi Jinping was being over aggressive [regarding Taiwan], then they might not be willing to cast our full support behind Xi.
“Xi Jinping may have thought, ‘I’m tired of the resistance, I want to move forward and I also need more yes men to be able to ensure an endorsement when it comes time for my fourth term.’”
The long view
Several experts said that the effects of Xi’s purges should be understood in two distinct time frames – short- and longer-term – and that for all the warnings about near-term readiness, a stronger, less corrupt and more effective PLA may ultimately emerge. They also noted that China’s military modernization and spiralling defense spending are likely to continue.
“Short term, it’s bad in many ways [for China],” Morris said. “But I think in the medium- and long-term it’s probably better, assuming – a big assumption – that they are less corrupt and cleaner, having gone through what will likely be an especially stringent vetting process.”
Meanwhile, the purges are unlikely to alter U.S. preparations for China conflict contingencies. As Morris put it, “IndoPacom [the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] is not going to rest any easier, because their job is to prepare for worst-case scenarios.”
And while some suggested that the PLA turmoil would benefit the U.S. because it would buy time for preparations – “You've got a wonderful opportunity [with] a longer timeline,” Wilder said – others argued that the upheaval actually creates greater urgency for the U.S. and Taiwan.
Adm. Studeman made that case, warning that with more pliant leaders likely entering the PLA’s top echelons, there would be a greater need to demonstrate resolve and support for Taiwan.
“If anything, we need to impress upon these people coming into the CMC or taking some of these positions that despite their boss’ desires and hopes to solve these things through coercion, that there’s likely to be a very strong reaction that they may not be able to handle,” Studeman said. “It’s even more important, if you get somebody that’s more inclined to be rash, to ensure that they see what the consequences could be, and that means putting more material forward, strengthening the alliance system, and communicating support for Taiwan.”
In other words, while Gen. Zhang and other long-serving officers had combat experience and were willing to warn Xi Jinping of the perils of a major Pacific war, their replacements may need to be shown just what those perils are.
“That’s a way to keep the peace,” Studeman said. “To show the consequences and the dramatic effects of what could occur.”
Need a daily dose of reality on national and global security issues? Subscribe to The Cipher Brief’s Nightcap newsletter, delivering expert insights on today’s events – right to your inbox. Sign up for free today.
Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity. You can also watch the interview and other conversations with Cipher Brief Experts by subscribing to The Cipher Brief’s Digital Channel on YouTube.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
