China’s Central Military Commission held a promotion ceremony in Beijing on Friday at which Xi Jinping personally presented new rank to two officers: Wang Gang, now the Air Force Commander, and Zhang Shuguang (also known as Wang Shuguang), newly appointed head of the anti-corruption division at the CMC itself. The promotions were driven in part by the need to fill vacancies created by a long-running anti-corruption purge that has effectively reduced the seven-member CMC to just two active members — Xi himself and a single vice chair. Two former CMC vice chairs, including the military’s top general, have been removed. A broader CMC reorganisation is expected to be announced in autumn 2027 at the end of the current commission’s five-year term. The ceremony was framed domestically as a strengthening of party control over the military and a continuation of Xi’s anti-corruption drive.
The received wisdom
The mainstream Western commentary on China’s military purges tends to frame them as evidence of Xi’s thoroughgoing dominance. Here is an authoritarian leader who has broken the unwritten rule that party elders and senior military commanders are untouchable, who has demonstrated that no rank protects you from the anti-corruption machinery, and who has thereby consolidated a degree of personal control over the People’s Liberation Army that no previous PRC leader — not even Deng Xiaoping, who actually fought in the civil war — achieved. The promotions of loyalists to fill vacated roles confirm the story: Xi is not weakening the PLA but purifying it, ensuring that when China eventually moves on Taiwan or confronts the United States in the Pacific, its military will execute orders rather than pursuing factional agendas. On this reading, Western analysts who point to the purges as evidence of institutional weakness are confusing disorder for transformation.
China’s state media reinforces this narrative energetically. The anti-corruption drive is presented as cleaning out graft that had corroded operational readiness — generals who sold promotions, officers who embezzled procurement funds, commanders who were more interested in luxury apartments than war-fighting. The new generals are loyalists, yes, but also professionals. The CMC’s thinned membership is a transitional condition, not a permanent one.
A different read
The optimistic-for-Xi version of events is not entirely wrong, but it contains a structural contradiction that the promotion ceremony does not resolve.
The purpose of an anti-corruption purge in an authoritarian military is inherently dual: it removes genuine graft, and it removes potential rivals. These two objectives are analytically separable but operationally entangled. When the anti-corruption machinery is controlled by a single leader and directed by his political priorities, the officers most likely to be purged are not necessarily the most corrupt — they are the most independent-minded, the most competent in ways that generate independent institutional prestige, and the most connected to networks that predate Xi’s own rise. The result is a military that is loyal in the sense of being personally dependent on Xi, but potentially less capable in the sense of having lost officers who were promoted on military rather than political grounds.
The NPR/AP report notes that the CMC has been effectively reduced to two active members — an extraordinary condition for the command structure of the world’s largest standing army. The seven-member commission is the institutional mechanism through which Xi’s personal preferences are translated into operational military doctrine, procurement decisions, and strategic planning. With five of seven slots empty or compromised, that translation mechanism has been severely disrupted. Organisations — including military ones — that lose institutional memory and distributed leadership experience a documented degradation in planning quality that takes years to repair.
The historical analogies are uncomfortably instructive. Stalin’s purge of the Red Army in 1937–38 removed approximately 35,000 officers, including three of five marshals and most of the corps and divisional commanders. The immediate result was near-catastrophic military performance in the Winter War against Finland in 1939–40, which in turn emboldened Hitler’s assessment that the Red Army was a hollow force. The Soviet military recovered — eventually — because of massive industrial mobilisation, Western aid, and the basic operational lessons of catastrophic defeat. The PLA under Xi has not been tested in anything resembling major combat operations since 1979. Its record in those operations, against Vietnam, was not flattering by the standards its own doctrine would now require.
This does not mean a PLA invasion of Taiwan would fail. Modern warfare involves too many variables for that kind of static comparison to be predictive. But it does mean that Western analysts who take PLA capability at face value based on equipment procurement and Xi’s projection of confidence are making an analytical error. The political purge of military leadership is not a neutral event with respect to operational readiness. The appointment of an anti-corruption chief as one of only two new generals promoted suggests the machinery is being rebuilt to police itself rather than to fight wars. That is a governance priority that reveals something about where Xi’s actual anxieties lie.
The deeper contradiction in Xi’s governing logic is this: genuine military readiness requires officers who can exercise independent professional judgment, adapt to unexpected battlefield conditions, and disagree with superiors when circumstances require. Genuine political loyalty under an authoritarian system requires the opposite — predictability, deference, and the suppression of independent institutional bases. These two requirements cannot both be maximised simultaneously. Every authoritarian leader who has tried to build a loyal military has faced this trade-off, and most have resolved it in favour of loyalty. The military capability consequences have generally appeared only when the guns started firing.
What to watch
The autumn 2027 CMC reorganisation will be the key data point: watch whether Xi fills the vacant slots with additional anti-corruption figures or with operational commanders from the new generation trained on the post-2015 reformed doctrine. Watch also whether the Air Force’s new commander Wang Gang’s elevation reflects a prioritisation of air power capability in Taiwan contingency planning. And pay attention to how China responds to the Ukraine drone campaign — particularly the demonstrated effectiveness of cheap, long-range drone swarms against energy infrastructure — as evidence of what lessons the PLA is drawing for its own operational planning.
— J