In a bombshell announcement, China’s Ministry of Defence has said it is investigating General Zhang Youxia, China’s most senior general and a man who was second only to Xi Jinping himself on China’s top military decision-making body.
His removal marks the most senior scalp taken in a spate of high-level military purges, and it’s sparked frenzied speculation about what’s caused his downfall and what it all says about the consolidation of Xi’s absolute control of China’s armed forces.
Saturday’s announcement explained how Zhang and another senior general, Liu Zhenli, are under investigation for “serious violations of party discipline and law”.
Often in these cases, that’s a sort of code for “corruption”, but there are a number of indicators that this time, there might be more to it.
Firstly, it’s hard to overstate what a big deal this is. It’s not just the seniority of Zhang’s rank that makes it extraordinary.
Zhang the latest in a series of military purges
Yes, he was the top military figure in China behind Xi himself, he had a key role in the modernisation of the military and was one of the few Chinese generals with actual combat experience.
But he was also a close and longstanding ally of President Xi, they grew up in similar circles, as both men are the sons of communist revolutionary heroes, and he has for some time been considered Xi’s most trusted military man.
His ousting says something remarkable about the lengths the president is willing to go to overhaul what is being billed as the “rot” of corruption in his forces.
Indeed, Xi’s military purges on the grounds of corruption have been seismic and unrelenting. In just the last few years, dozens have been ousted and have disappeared from public view.
They include men who served in the army, navy, air force, paramilitary police and “Rocket Force” – China’s missile and nuclear command force.
The probes have taken down generals, commanders, a defence minister and now a total of five of the seven-man Central Military Command (CMC), China’s top decision-making body.
It means the group that makes China’s most important military calls now comprises just Xi Jinping and one other, an overhaul matched only by the purges seen under Mao Zedong, according to analysts.
But whether corruption is the whole story here is really the million-dollar question, and because China’s elite politics is such a notorious black box, there is space for speculation to run rife.
And run rife it has. Rumour has swirled, for instance, that Zhang and Liu were involved in a high-level coup plot to take down Xi.
And reporting by the Wall Street Journal suggests that top figures have been briefed that Zhang was passing China’s nuclear secrets to the US.
Both would be utterly astonishing if true, both have good reasons to be relatively unlikely, and both are next to impossible to substantiate.
But there are some indications that this latest purge might be about more than just corruption.
A fast-moving situation
First is the speed of the announcement.
In previous cases like this, generals have disappeared from the public eye for months before their alleged crimes are announced; this time, it was just a matter of days.
Has something so bad happened that the system felt it needed to get ahead of the narrative?
And second, is some of the language being used.
A Sunday editorial in the PLA Daily, a military publication, said the two men “seriously fuelled political and corruption issues that affect the Party’s absolute leadership over the military”.
The hint, perhaps, is that Xi felt in some way personally undermined.
And that is perhaps the most intriguing question within all this: what do Xi’s military purges say about his power? And what do they say about his ultimate military ambitions, especially in relation to Taiwan?
Could Taiwan be the motivation?
On the first point, China watchers were initially divided.
Particularly in the early stages of these purges, some maintained that they might signal a paranoia, a loss of control or a weakened leader grappling with a military too inclined to have its own ideas.
But as time has passed and the scalps have mounted, it feels more likely that the opposite might be true.
Perhaps instead, Xi’s actions speak to a complete confidence in his position of absolute power; that he can take down even someone as mighty as Zhang and consolidate his total control of the military in the knowledge that no one can or will challenge him.
And Taiwan might well be the motivation. Xi has long maintained that China could retake the self-governing island by force if necessary.
It is certainly feasible that he perceives an entrenched system of corruption as genuinely compromising the military’s ability to achieve that goal – that this is all about making his army truly battle-ready.
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And while analysts, including from the Pentagon, have judged that the leadership vacuums will likely compromise the military’s effectiveness in the short term, the medium term could look quite different.
Indeed, younger generals being promoted to replace the old guard are more likely to be of the more highly nationalistic “wolf warrior” brand, perhaps less likely to caution restraint.
The reality is that we will probably never know the true reasons behind this historic overhaul or the detail of how it played out, but it nonetheless paints a fascinating picture of power and control within a ruthless and unforgiving system.
