Early in 2026, General Zhang Youxia, until recently the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s most senior active-duty officer, faded from the public stage. In a system that prizes discipline and unity, the absence itself was telling: Xi Jinping’s close comrade-in-arms – the man who had helped Xi consolidate control over the military – had plainly run into serious trouble. On January 24, 2026, China’s Defense Ministry confirmed that Zhang, the senior vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), was under investigation. It is the highest-profile military purge in years. Xi has purged retired heavyweights such as Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, and he has also swept aside serving leaders, including the Rocket Force’s top command. Of the seven CMC members Xi elevated at the Twentieth Party Congress, five have been purged in a little over three years: two vice chairmen and three other members. The commission now looks unusually hollowed out, with Xi as chairman and only one vice chairman left, Zhang Shengmin.

The purges are striking but the near-total silence around them is even more revealing. The PLA’s senior leadership has been repeatedly purged – there have been three major waves since Xi Jinping came to power – yet the institution’s response has been one of quiet endurance and obedience: no sign of resistance, and not even the faintest audible note of complaint.

Outside China, analysts sometimes describe top generals as power brokers who can bargain with or even rein in the party leader. Zhang’s quiet removal suggests the opposite direction of travel. PLA generals aren’t a free-standing power centre in elite politics; their influence runs through and depends on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Leninist machinery. Mao Zedong put the principle bluntly in 1938: ‘The Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.’ In the PRC, real authority has consistently rested with party institutions, not with commanders simply because they control troops. The military matters politically only insofar as it is tied to party patrons at the top. As some scholars argue, including Phillip C. Saunders and Daniel Mattingly, since the 1990s senior officers’ influence has come less from command authority than from their position within party patronage networks, especially within the CMC, and, in the current period, from personal access to Xi Jinping. As an institution, the PLA has limited capacity to arbitrate succession, coordinate collective resistance, or defy a party decision once the centre turns against an officer. When generals have tested those boundaries – through conscience-driven hesitation or alleged plotting – the party has moved quickly to isolate and neutralise them. That is why Xi can purge even trusted lieutenants without facing a plausible threat of a coup.

The political passivity of China’s generals is not accidental. It is built into the DNA of the PLA itself as ‘the Party’s army.’ Unlike national militaries elsewhere, the PLA exists to secure CCP rule above all else. From its earliest days, the CCP established absolute control over its armed wing, embedding Party cells at every level of the military. As early as 1928, Mao implemented the ‘branch building in companies’ to guarantee that soldiers answered to Party commissars as well as their military officers. To this day, the CCP maintains a dual command structure in the PLA: every unit is overseen not just by a commander, but by a political commissar charged with enforcing loyalty and ideology. Political departments weave surveillance and indoctrination through the ranks, and all senior officers are CCP members. Over time, this has produced an organisational culture where loyalty to the Party is treated as the first professional obligation.

This Leninist legacy means the PLA has been ‘coup-proofed’ by design. Nationalising the military – placing it under state or constitutional control rather than Party control – is a taboo idea that CCP leaders have vigilantly opposed as an ‘existential threat.’ For the Party, the PLA is not a neutral national institution but a partisan tool for maintaining power. The CMC, chaired by the CCP General Secretary, Xi Jinping himself, sits atop the PLA command structure to ensure Party directives trump military autonomy. Under this system, it is virtually unthinkable for PLA generals to act collectively against the Party leadership. Every general’s career and personal fate depend on Party approval. Indeed, the notion that ‘the PLA could obey the state instead of the Party’ has been treated as dangerously subversive. In 1989, for example, even a passing suggestion by one general, Xu Qinxian, that the National People’s Congress might have a say in troop deployments was viewed as ‘existentially threatening’ to Party supremacy.

As a result, the PLA has rarely acted as a kingmaker in Chinese politics. Leadership struggles have occurred, but they have been settled inside the party, not by a standalone military intervention. Surveillance of the officer corps, coupled with party control of appointments, has kept the gun from turning on its owner. When the PLA has mattered at decisive moments, it has usually done so by backing a party faction that already had institutional authority, rather than by choosing a winner on its own. Even under Mao, when the military’s prestige was immense, generals were co-opted, rotated, and purged by party leaders instead of operating as an autonomous political force.

Two historical episodes – one of mild dissent and one of an alleged grand conspiracy – illustrate how decisively the CCP moves to quash any hint of military insubordination. The first is the case of General Xu Qinxian in 1989. As commander of the elite 38th Group Army, General Xu was ordered to lead his troops into Beijing to enforce martial law during the Tiananmen Square protests. Xu balked. He argued to his superiors on May 18, 1989 that deploying combat troops against unarmed civilians would lead to needless ‘chaos and bloodshed,’ warning that a commander who mishandled such an order would go down as ‘a sinner in history.’ Instead, Xu urged that political means be used to defuse the situation. It was a principled, if mild, dissent – Xu did not call for mutiny or side with the protesters, he simply refused to participate in a massacre as a matter of conscience and professional judgment.

The Party’s response was immediate. Within hours, the order went out to remove General Xu from command. CMC vice-chairman Yang Shangkun had already decided to strip Xu of his command the very night he refused the orders. Xu’s 38th Army was quickly reassigned a new commander and eventually entered Beijing under different leadership – ironically, that unit would later become known for its zealous enforcement of the crackdown. As for General Xu Qinxian, he was arrested and court-martialed. He would spend five years in prison for his act of defiance, and remained under a cloud long after. Isolated and swiftly punished, Xu’s lone protest proved futile. It sent a stark signal to the rest of the PLA: even the slightest deviation from Party commands would be met with persecution, not persuasion. Indeed, in his secret trial, prosecutors accused Xu of endangering Party control by suggesting the army should obey the state legislature rather than the CCP – a charge he denied, fully aware of the core rule: ‘the Party absolutely command the gun.’ His stance – respected in hindsight as a matter of conscience, but utterly powerless at the time – underscored the PLA’s structural subordination to the Party’s will.

An even more dramatic example came two decades earlier with the Lin Biao incident of 1971. Marshal Lin Biao was China’s Minister of Defence, Mao’s trusted comrade, and officially designated ‘heir apparent’ during the late Cultural Revolution. Yet as Mao grew distrustful of his too-powerful lieutenant, Lin and his inner circle allegedly plotted a coup d’état – a plan code-named Project 571 – to assassinate Mao and seize power. In September 1971, events came to a head. According to the official account, Lin Biao’s coup attempt was discovered and foiled. Lin, along with his wife and son, fled Beijing in a military plane, apparently aiming to defect to the Soviet Union. The plane never made it: it mysteriously crashed in Mongolia on September 13, 1971, killing all on board. The truth of Lin’s intentions remains shrouded in mystery – historians still debate why a man at the pinnacle of power would risk everything – but for Mao and the Party leadership, Lin Biao’s fall was treated as an attempted military usurpation of Party authority.

The response was nothing short of purge on a massive scale. Mao Zedong, despite Lin’s status as a war hero and CMC vice-chairman, moved ruthlessly to cleanse the PLA of Lin’s influence. In the months following Lin’s death, thousands of PLA officers were interrogated, demoted, or expelled. Virtually the entire top echelon of the PLA – including the chiefs of the General Staff, Air Force, and Navy – were removed or ‘struggled against’ as supposed Lin Biao sympathisers. What became known as the ‘Lin Biao Incident’ thus ended with a thorough decapitation of the military’s command. The Party’s message was unmistakable: no matter how senior or celebrated, any military leader seen as a threat to CCP supremacy would be eliminated. In truth, it is unclear whether Lin Biao genuinely attempted a coup or was ensnared by court intrigues and Mao’s suspicions. But in a Leninist system, the mere possibility of a military leader acting autonomously was intolerable. Lin’s demise and the ensuing purge reinforced a lesson that has echoed through the decades: the PLA could only ever be the Party’s blunt instrument – never an independent political force.

Taken together, the Xu and Lin episodes point to the same pattern. Even limited or ‘hedged’ dissent within the PLA has resulted in immediate sidelining, and any perceived challenge at the highest level has provoked decisive purge and persecution. At no point did either episode spark a broader resistance within the military. No other generals rallied to Xu Qinxian’s side in 1989; no PLA units rose up in revenge for Lin Biao in 1971. Instead, the Party’s monopoly on power ensured that the military hierarchy fell in line, however grudgingly. The mild dissenter was quietly imprisoned and later lived in obscurity; the aspiring ‘usurper’ met a violent end and became a non-person in Party lore. The PLA as an institution neither intervened in leadership struggles nor could protect its own chief officers once they lost the Party’s trust. These historical precedents help explain why the PLA remains politically neutered today – its obedience enforced by a mix of ideological conditioning and the ever-present spectre of purge.

The Lin Biao incident and the Cultural Revolution’s denouement underscore a hard reality: even at the pinnacle of authority, commanding elite forces, a Chinese military leader cannot mount an effective challenge unless the Party’s top leadership fractures first. According to Chinese historian Gao Hua, in fact, even when Lin’s power seemed greatest, he could not move so much as a company without Mao Zedong’s approval. The PLA’s organisational design – its chain of command, its internal monitoring, its fusion of operational authority with political oversight – makes independent action difficult to conceal and harder still to sustain.

Once Mao suspected Lin, the Party’s machinery moved at speed: surveillance, propaganda, and rival patronage networks converged to isolate him. Deprived of allies and room to manoeuvre, Lin’s only ‘coup’ amounted to a futile flight abroad. The official portrait of an earth-shaking plot was, to a significant extent, a retrospective political fiction: a justification for Mao’s cleansing of the leadership and a weapon to discredit those who might still feel sympathy for Lin.

Other pivotal episodes in PRC history follow the same script. In 1959, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai criticised the Great Leap Forward – this was not mutiny, but frank policy dissent – and he was quickly removed and branded the head of an ‘anti-Party clique,’ his political influence extinguished. After Mao’s death in 1976, a potentially violent succession crisis was not ‘resolved’ by generals rising on their own initiative; it was settled through an intra-Party coup. Hua Guofeng, Mao’s designated successor, joined with figures such as Marshal Ye Jianying and used security forces loyal to Mao to arrest the ‘Gang of Four.’ The PLA did not spontaneously revolt; it executed orders to eliminate one faction in the Party’s name.

In 1992, Deng Xiaoping used a comparable method against the so-called ‘Yang family clique’ – President Yang Shangkun and his half-brother, General Yang Baibing – because Deng feared they were building an independent military base. Deng forced them into retirement to secure the new Party General Secretary, Jiang Zemin, as the unchallenged authority over the gun. The takeaway is simple: no faction inside the PLA gets to choose Beijing’s leader. The Party decides – and the military follows.

Since coming to power, Xi Jinping has treated tightening the Party’s grip over the People’s Liberation Army as a first-order political task. The guiding instinct is preventive: acting before a crisis can expose hesitation, divided loyalties, or the kind of ambiguity that authoritarian systems cannot tolerate at decisive moments. In practice, he has relied on purges, reorganisations, and loyalty campaigns – measures pursued with an intensity rarely seen in recent decades.

The timing of these crackdowns has been as important as what they involve. Some crackdowns have coincided with politically sensitive junctures – major Party anniversaries, heightened tension in the Taiwan Strait, or bouts of international turbulence involving the United States. The pattern suggests leadership is acutely alert to any sign of wavering precisely when coercion might be required. Xi’s preferences have been unmistakable: commanders should not remain bound to past patrons; no uniformed ‘local warlords’ should be allowed to consolidate personal followings; and, above all, in a future emergency there must be no space for hesitation, second-guessing, or delay.

These measures have strengthened Xi’s personal authority. Under current conditions, it is difficult to imagine a PLA commander defying orders in the manner of Xu Qinxian – still less attempting a coup. Party penetration runs through the institution: senior officers are Party members, embedded in Party committees, and constrained by political organs that monitor and discipline the chain of command. A dissatisfied general who tried to resist would likely find himself isolated, watched, and blocked by colleagues whose careers – and safety – depend on demonstrated loyalty to the centre.

Any ‘Chinese-style’ military coup would therefore require exactly what the system is designed to prevent: coordination across operational units, political departments, and internal security organs. That breadth is difficult to assemble quietly, and the party’s monitoring apparatus is built to detect the early stages and crush them.

That leads to a final question: if the PLA is structurally ill-suited to challenge the Party’s top leader, why does Xi purge again and again? Why does he continue to purge an institution that already lacks the capacity to resist him? Beyond the official anti-corruption narrative, internal party documents and the timing of recent purges suggest two plausible logics.

First, purges can be understood as preparation for external conflict through the removal of internal risks. If Xi anticipates a major confrontation, he may see it as essential to neutralise political or military figures who might collude with foreign powers or exploit a crisis – what authoritarian regimes have long feared as a ‘fifth column.’ Present loyalty, in this view, offers no guarantee of future steadfastness once the system is tested by a serious international conflict and intense internal political struggle, especially if succession becomes contested. Put differently, the more capable an individual is, the more likely he is to become a target.

Second, they serve to prevent institutional autonomy. Xi appears unwilling to tolerate the PLA as a professional body with independent corporate interests. Periodic rectification reasserts a hierarchy in which political loyalty outweighs expertise and makes clear that military autonomy will not be allowed to harden into leverage.

Seen in that light, the purges are not merely an expression of ‘paranoia.’ They are extreme measures, but they follow the logic of a system marked by insecurity and unconstrained power: in the shadow of anticipated international confrontation, the leader seeks absolute personal safety by dismantling any military grouping capable of independent organisation – or even independent thought.