Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Investigations of the PLA's top two officers follow a process the party has run for a century
A Foreign Affairs essay counts three dozen generals formally purged since 2022 and argues the discipline strengthens the party. The problem it says the method cannot fix is succession, and Xi has named no one.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- China's Ministry of National Defense announced in January that General Zhang Youxia and General Liu Zhenli, the PLA's most senior uniformed officer and its top operational commander, were under investigation.
- That announcement came only months after party leaders expelled nine senior military officers.
- Xi Jinping abolished presidential term limits in 2018, hollowed out collective leadership and has declined to designate a successor.
- Foreign Affairs argues that the party's century-old practice of disciplining and retaining cadres explains part of what has kept communist rule in China durable.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Permanent rectification can keep the ranks obedient while the question of who follows Xi stays open. That is the risk the discipline process leaves in place, and nobody can put a date on it.
- exposure Anyone whose China dealings run through the military hierarchy has counterparts whose tenure holds at the party's discretion, up to and including the officer at the top of the PLA.
- precedent If discipline at this rank is ordinary process, the next investigation of a serving general is maintenance, and reading each one as a stability signal will generate false alarms.
Rectification is the essay's word for discipline that keeps an official inside the party, sometimes at greatly diminished status. Foreign Affairs separates it from the Stalin-type purge, which ends in incarceration, exile or death, and from which the victim does not come back [10]. The Chinese term for that harder version, qingdang, means to "cleanse the party" [11]. The softer process targets cadres, evaluates them and forces them to seek clemency to retain their standing [8]. Its aim is to reform them and keep them, and the essay says that strengthens the party by encouraging obedience and dedication to the party's cause [9].
Nine expulsions at once is a quarter of the 36 generals and lieutenant generals the Center for Strategic and International Studies counts as formally purged since 2022 [17], so the recent months carry a large share of the period's disclosed total. That 36 is a floor: Foreign Affairs puts many more senior officers in the category of conspicuously missing [5].
A skeptic in Washington would say this is a leader consumed by suspicion and obsessed with holding power, and the essay reports that reading as the common one there [6]. Foreign Affairs answers that the party has shown no signs of falling apart and that Xi and the party "appear to have only gotten stronger" [7]. The essay puts that as an appearance, and the argument underneath it is conditional: if the party's strength really came from the freestanding institutions built after Mao, the purges would be a warning sign of fragility and even a potential crackup [18].
The sequence matters for anyone turning this into a country risk model. Term limits, collective leadership and merit-based promotion were the newer layer, credited by scholars for two decades [1], while the discipline process has run in nearly identical form for a hundred years [8]. Foreign Affairs says that process "can explain part of what makes it durable" [14]. Trading one single explanation for another goes further than the essay does. The record supports something narrower: the calendar-driven element of elite politics was removed in 2018 [2], and what remains is continuous by design, which Xi calls "self-revolution" [12].
On the horizon the essay actually addresses, the party's longevity, the indicator is succession [13]. Foreign Affairs argues succession is the one problem this strategy cannot solve and can even make worse [13]. The link runs through the same discipline: a system that makes senior figures ask for clemency to keep their standing [8] leaves no room for a designated heir to accumulate a following, and Xi has named no successor [2].
Both methods remain available to the party. Mao executed more than 700 army officers in 1930 in a show of total control [15]; across its history the CCP has sought to rectify cadres far more frequently than to eliminate them [16].
What to watch
- Whether Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli reappear in reduced posts or are formally expelled. Which of the two outcomes arrives will show which method is in use.
- Any party move to name a successor or restore a term limit, the only development that would put a date on the transition.
- Whether the CSIS count of formally purged generals keeps climbing, or the conspicuously missing officers are quietly restored.