Thinking Like Beijing

Why Xi’s Purge Matters More Than It Looks

A part of my professional life was spent inside what we used to call the “China problem set.” In the late 1990s and early 2000s, first as a staff officer on the Joint Staff and later as a contractor supporting the Pentagon and a strategic assessment team in the Intelligence Community, my job was to think like Beijing. I was paid to red-team China, to examine its choices, incentives, and constraints, and to ask a simple but uncomfortable question: If I were them, what would I do next?

That was never easy. The Chinese system was opaque then and remains opaque today. Even so, signals were always there if you knew where to look. The problem was not a lack of indicators, but how we interpreted them. At the time, we largely treated China as an aspirational threat. It was ambitious and rising, but not yet capable of translating intent into sustained military power. China mattered, but it did not yet dominate the threat landscape.

What we did understand, even then, was that China takes a long view of strategy, competition, and geopolitics. It plans in decades, not news cycles. That habit of cumulative action, rather than dramatic breaks, is precisely why the recent purge inside the People’s Liberation Army caught my attention in a way routine authoritarian crackdowns do not.

For years, observers have watched a steady attrition of senior PLA officers. Some were retired “for health reasons.” Others were reassigned into obscurity or investigated for corruption. Each case, taken alone, could be explained away as routine discipline inside a closed system. Taken together, they pointed to something larger unfolding beneath the surface of the PLA. This is how China typically signals change: not with announcements, but with patterns.

That slow-motion process reached its apex in January 2026 with the removal of General Zhang Youxia and General Liu Zhenli, China’s top uniformed officer and chief of staff. This was not routine turnover. It was the most dramatic shake-up of China’s senior military leadership since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Their removal effectively annihilated the PLA’s top leadership cohort that had been in place since 2022, leaving the Central Military Commission in disarray and exposing an unprecedented internal crisis within the PLA.

While nearly as consequential as Tiananmen, the nature of this moment is fundamentally different. The 1989 crackdown was a systemic, societal, and geopolitical rupture that reshaped the Chinese state and its relationship with the world. The purge of Zhang and Liu, by contrast, is a highly concentrated exercise of power aimed squarely at the uppermost echelons of the military. Its purpose is narrower but no less significant: to enforce absolute loyalty and remove any remaining ambiguity about who ultimately controls the PLA.

What really stands out in this purge is not just the rank or seniority of the officers involved, but their pedigree. Both men were princelings, members of the same revolutionary elite as Xi Jinping himself. They were neither expendable nor peripheral figures. Their removal signals that whatever informal constraints once limited Xi’s reach into the military no longer exist. This was not the opening act of a purge. It was its culmination. And that is a signal we should pay close attention to.

Understanding why this matters requires stepping back to the broader arc of China’s rise. After 9/11, like many of us, my professional focus shifted to the Middle East. I remained interested in China, but I did not fully appreciate how quickly the ground was shifting. In hindsight, the real inflection point did not come in the mid-1990s, when China began its long military modernization. It came between 2008 and the early 2010s.

The global financial crisis rattled Chinese confidence in American competence and durability. Beijing emerged from it more assertive and more convinced that U.S. primacy was neither permanent nor inevitable. By the middle of the next decade, China was building advanced warships at a pace the world had never seen, fielding modern air defenses, anti-ship missiles, cyber capabilities, and emerging technologies designed explicitly to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities. Somewhere in that window, China crossed a line. It stopped being a rising power and became a genuine peer competitor.

Once that threshold was crossed, the internal logic of Xi’s consolidation changed with it.

In examining Xi’s purge of the officer corps, some observers (myself included) began reaching for historical analogies, most commonly the purge conducted by George C. Marshall before World War II. On the surface, the comparison is appealing. Marshall cleared out a generation of senior U.S. Army officers he believed were unfit for the war he saw coming. He accepted disruption in the present to avoid catastrophe later. In both cases, a leader saw a military that looked formidable on paper but was deeply flawed.

But this is where the analogy breaks down.

Marshall’s purge was driven by professional judgment, not political dominance. He sought adaptability, initiative, and honest feedback. He decentralized authority and promoted officers precisely because they would challenge assumptions and speak hard truths upward. His purge strengthened institutional resilience.

Xi’s purge is doing the opposite.

To understand it, you have to return to 2012, when Xi took power and immediately launched the most expansive anti-corruption campaign in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. From the beginning, the campaign was about more than graft. It was about discipline, control, and regime survival. Once China possessed credible military, economic, and technological strength, extending that campaign fully into the officer corps was inevitable.

Xi’s purge of the PLA is not a professional housecleaning. It is a political act designed to reinforce personal authority and party supremacy. Corruption matters, and it undermines readiness. But corruption alone does not explain the targeting of revolutionary elites Xi once elevated and protected. The deeper purpose is to demonstrate that no lineage, faction, or prior loyalty confers independence from his will.

Internally, the message is unmistakable and unforgiving. Loyalty now outweighs pedigree, patronage, and professional pride. The elevation of discipline officials such as Zhang Shengmin, the only remaining uniformed member of the Central Military Commission besides Xi himself, signals a decisive shift in what the regime values. Political reliability has been elevated above operational experience. The officers replacing the old guard are not being chosen primarily to fight wars better, but to enforce Xi’s Chairman Responsibility System and ensure that orders flow downward without hesitation, interpretation, or resistance. The PLA is being reshaped less as a professional military institution than as a tightly controlled political instrument.

Externally, the message is just as deliberate but aimed in the opposite direction. Xi wants Washington to see a PLA stripped of factionalism, purged of divided loyalties, and capable of executing orders with speed and discipline. The signal is meant to convey resolve and coherence: whatever turmoil the purge has created internally, the Chinese military that emerges will be loyal, controllable, and prepared to act. In short, Xi is telling the United States that he would rather accept short-term disruption than tolerate a military whose loyalty or responsiveness might be in doubt.

However, Xi’s actions create several risks.

Unlike Marshall’s Army, which emerged more adaptable and professionally confident, Xi’s PLA may become more brittle even as it becomes more obedient. Younger generals are not only promoted because they are untainted by old corruption networks, but also because they lack the institutional confidence to push back when political leaders edge toward disaster.

In a system where advancement depends on demonstrating zeal and loyalty, caution becomes suspect. Hesitation can look like disobedience. Prudence can look like weakness.

All of this comes to a head around Taiwan, where deterrence is no longer an abstract concept but a daily, operational reality.

For years, U.S. planning has rested on some combination of deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment. Denial aims to convince Beijing that it cannot achieve its objectives at an acceptable cost. Punishment aims to convince it that even if it succeeds tactically, the consequences will be strategically devastating. Both approaches assume a degree of restraint, judgment, and professional skepticism inside the opposing command structure. The purge of senior officers will now test that assumption in an unforgiving environment.

A PLA reshaped by political purges may be more loyal and more responsive to Xi’s directives, but it may also be less capable of absorbing the signals on which deterrence depends. Denial requires an adversary that can accurately assess risk and recognize when a military option is unlikely to work. Punishment requires an adversary that believes escalation will be controlled and proportional rather than cascading and existential. A command culture trained to prioritize obedience and zeal over judgment risks misreading both.

In practical terms, this means denial may be tested more aggressively at the tactical level. Gray-zone actions, air and maritime harassment, missile signaling, and coercive demonstrations become tools not just of strategy, but of career advancement. At the same time, punishment becomes harder to calibrate. Leaders who equate restraint with disloyalty may discount warnings, dismiss off-ramps, or assume that resolve alone can overcome material disadvantage.

The danger is not that Xi has decided to go to war tomorrow. The danger is that he has built a military that is structurally less capable of stopping itself once events begin to move. In that environment, deterrence depends less on dramatic threats and more on clarity, consistency, and credibility at every rung of escalation.

Marshall purged to create an army that could think, adapt, and speak hard truths before catastrophe struck. Xi is purging to ensure compliance when decisions are made. For Taiwan, and for U.S. deterrence strategy, that difference matters profoundly. Denial and punishment still matter, but they now operate against a force that may be increasingly confident, increasingly political, and increasingly prone to mistaking obedience for wisdom at precisely the moment when restraint is most needed.