China’s purges of top military commanders spur questions about war-waging ability — SkimNews
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- Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli were expelled from the Communist Party and the military in the latest move of Xi's long-running crackdown, which originally targeted procurement corruption in the Rocket Force before taking on a sharper political edge.
- Five of seven seats on the ruling Central Military Commission remain vacant; analyst James Char of Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School said he does not expect the top panel to be fully reconstituted until the Communist Party's full congress in late 2027.
- Zhang Youxia, Xi's closest military ally and the most senior officer with combat experience (1979 Vietnam border war), had served as Xi's CMC deputy and met then-US national security adviser Jake Sullivan in Beijing in 2024 — a meeting seen at the time as a breakthrough in US-China military ties.
- The PLA Daily editorial on Sept 23 said Zhang and Liu "caused enormous damage to the military's political development, political ecosystem, and combat effectiveness," signalling the political dimension now driving the purge.
- Ruby Osman of the Tony Blair Institute said upheaval on this scale "is hard to imagine" wouldn't create issues for complex operations including a full-scale Taiwan contingency, though she noted routine PLA operations have been insulated from the turmoil.
- Defence Minister Dong Jun remains in place but sits on neither the Politburo nor the CMC, and Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund said Xi may be making some decisions on his own in the interim.
Why it matters: With Zhang gone and five CMC seats empty until at least 2027, Beijing has no clear counterpart to engage Washington at the senior military level — the very channel that produced the 2024 Sullivan meeting. That gap persists as China boosts deployments around Taiwan and regional tensions run high, leaving fewer de-escalation backstops at precisely the moment diplomats say they are most needed.
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