It was a bitterly cold and overcast winter day when China’s top general left for a meeting with hundreds of senior Communist Party officials, including their leader, Xi Jinping.
General Zhang Youxia never succeeded in this.
Security personnel sent by Xi intercepted Zhang on his way to the rally at the Central Party School in Beijing, people close to the Chinese government’s decision-making said. While the general was secured at an undisclosed location, officers also raided Zhang’s home and arrested his son, a military researcher, the sources said.
Zhang’s arrest on January 19 was a stunning downfall for a man whose political lineage and loyalty once made him the cornerstone of the Chinese ruler’s military wing. But it also represented something deeper for China: the consolidation of absolute power by Xi Jinping, once again asserting his primacy over the world’s second-most powerful military.
Zhang’s fall was the culmination of more than a decade of military purges that sidelined dozens of senior officers and consolidated Xi’s control. A childhood friend whom Xi described as a “big brother,” Zhang rose to prominence following initial waves of dismissals — a move seen as putting a trusted ally at the head of the military. Analysts said Zhang’s ouster shows that even under authoritarian control, Xi has difficulty finding a leadership circle he can fully trust.
“Zhang Yuxia’s fall suggests that Xi’s ‘one-man rule’ has reached a point where systemic trust — the belief that loyalty ensures safety — has completely evaporated,” said Minxin Bi, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California and editor of the quarterly journal China Leadership Monitor. “At this point, he no longer rules through a stable coalition. Rather, he relies on a cycle of endless political purges to maintain his grip on power.”
Days before Zhang’s arrest, Xi quietly appointed a new commander to lead the elite force responsible for Beijing’s security. He appointed a trusted figure from the armed police in Shanghai, breaking the tradition of appointing an army officer. People close to the decision-making process say the unusual move is aimed at ensuring that the defense of the capital is led by a figure personally owned by Xi, rather than military networks linked to the purged general.
After Zhang’s disappearance, the Chinese leadership kept its military officers in the dark about why their most senior leader did not attend the January 20 “study session” with Xi Jinping, a can’t-miss event. Senior civilian party officials were briefed within 24 hours of his arrest, but the military high command did not learn until a few hours before the news was broadcast to the world on January 24.
During a high-level military conference that morning, Zhang was accused of leaking key technical data related to China’s nuclear weapons program to the United States, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. The newspaper reported that other accusations included forming “political blocs,” abusing his power within the military committee, and accepting bribes to promote officials.
The newspaper was unable to independently verify these allegations. Party leaders have a history of smearing their enemies with allegations that may be unfounded. A Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman warned against “groundless speculation,” referring to an official statement that the investigation concerns violations of party discipline and state law.
Xi began his latest round of purges in the summer of 2023 after watching his strategic partner, Russian President Vladimir Putin, suffer a direct challenge to his authority — a failed coup orchestrated by his once-trusted aide, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s now-dead private army operator.
For the party, according to people close to its decision-making, the Russian experience was a cautionary tale. Moscow’s inability to achieve a quick victory against both Ukraine and then Prigozhin, despite multibillion-dollar modernizations of its military, suggested to Chinese leaders that ambitious modernization does not automatically produce formidable fighting power.
With Xi already concerned about corruption undermining his country’s fighting power, he appears to have concluded that military hardware alone is insufficient if it is not backed by absolute political loyalty.
As the son of a major revolutionary, Xi began his career in a senior position at the heart of the defense establishment. In 1979, the 26-year-old Xi was appointed personal secretary to Geng Biao, who was then general secretary of the Central Military Commission—the People’s Liberation Army’s decision-making body—and a close companion of Xi’s father. This early access gave Xi a front-row seat to the raw mechanics of military power — and taught him that a leader who does not fully control the generals is a leader standing on quicksand.
Upon ascending to the party’s top job in late 2012, Xi wasted no time in launching a sweeping reform of the military, driven by the conviction that it was riddled with corruption and structurally ill-equipped for modern, integrated warfare. He began an anti-corruption purge and dismantled the military’s top administrative fiefdoms in favor of joint central commands for the theater of combat operations that reported directly to the Central Military Commission, which he chaired.
More than a decade later, he went further. Since mid-2023, Xi has dismissed five of the seven members of the Central Military Commission. Instead of refilling the body, he left most of the seats empty. On the same day that Zhang was pushed aside, another member of the committee, General Liu Xinlei, was also placed under investigation.
Today, the committee consists only of Xi Jinping, its chairman, and a general known as a conventional warrior as much as a political enforcer.
Analysts say these purges have effectively transformed the Central Military Commission from a decision-making body into a personal secretariat, cementing Xi as the sole arbiter of military power.
Dennis Wilder, a former US intelligence officer who has spent decades analyzing China’s military establishment and the corridors of power in Beijing, describes Zhang’s ouster as “the most surprising development in Chinese politics” since Xi came to power.
Wilder, now a professor at Georgetown University, notes that the fallout is far from over, with Zhang and other senior officers likely to “sweat” the detention centers to produce confessions and expose wider patronage networks, signaling a much deeper wave of political purges to come. In Xi’s view, people close to the decision-making process say these networks represent a serious threat to his power.
In a sign of the depth of the current investigation, Xi assigned a task force to conduct an in-depth investigation into Zhang’s tenure as commander of the Shenyang Military Region, one of the most strategically sensitive and historically entrenched military centers in China, the newspaper reported.
As the traditional cradle of Chinese heavy industry, the region provides the industrial backbone for advanced marine and aviation production. It is a vital node for China’s Strategic Missile Forces. Specifically, the region hosts a major base for the Missile Force, which operates a network of regional ballistic missiles.
Zhang’s tenure in Shenyang spanned five years from 2007 to 2012, a time during which he built the kind of deep loyalties in the military ranks that Xi eventually found untenable. Investigators specifically chose to stay at local hotels in Shenyang, rather than military bases, where Zhang would have a support network.
In an apparent attempt to boost morale after Zhang’s arrest, Xi used a video speech on February 11 to directly appeal to troops on the ground. He said the rules had become more stringent “in the fight against corruption” and praised them as “completely trustworthy.”
With an institutional vacuum at its highest ranks, the Chinese military is now suffering from… How the chain of command works, say analysts inside and outside China. Xi is more at risk of being cut off from professional military advice, just as the armed forces build up their capabilities and increase pressure on Taiwan.
John Chen, a former senior China analyst at the CIA, said Xi’s leadership style has changed. Previous purges targeted political rivals or distant peers, but Xi has now moved toward marginalizing partners and is “really going after his friends” like Zhang, he said.
Zhang and Xi are both “princes” whose fathers fought side by side in the civil war of the 1940s that shaped modern China.
When Xi, 72, assumed the presidency, he made Zhang, 75, the architect of his military vision. By personally elevating Zhang to the rank of general number one in 2022 even after he passed the usual retirement age, Xi signaled that Zhang was the indispensable hand behind the modernization of the military.
As a battle-hardened veteran and a trusted confidant, Zhang has been instrumental in helping Xi concentrate power at the top. For many years, he has been the chief guardian of Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” of national rejuvenation, serving as a bridge between the party’s revolutionary past and its high-tech militaristic future.
Chen, currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, said Xi is stripping the top leadership “to the lowest levels,” demonstrating a complete loss of patience with the military itself. The move suggests that even lifelong revolutionary ties – such as the “princely” relationship Xi shared with Zhang – offer no protection.
As investigations continue, the purge highlights a new, darker phase of Xi Jinping’s tenure. The Brookings Institution’s Chen calls this “the ultimate proof of Xi Jinping’s coldness,” proving his willingness to abandon “a lifetime of revolutionary ties to ensure the military lives up to his unforgiving standards.”
The specific reasons behind Zhang’s decline remain shrouded in mystery.
Official statements from the Ministry of National Defense and state media avoided details, saying Zhang was being investigated for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law.”
However, a prominent military editorial accused Zhang of “dangerously trampling on and undermining the system of ultimate responsibility that rests with the president.” This rare wording suggests that the arrest was a response to a perceived direct challenge to Xi’s absolute leadership rather than routine graft.
The allegations regarding nuclear secrets add a strategic development that affects China’s readiness to fight. Evidence of the weakness has emerged in recent years through a series of reports by American researchers detailing China’s rapid nuclear expansion.
Wilder, the former intelligence official, noted that the public unveiling of nearly 300 new nuclear missile silos in western regions such as Gansu and Xinjiang would likely upset Beijing. He said this tension was exacerbated by subsequent US intelligence reports that claimed rampant corruption had rendered some of these missiles inoperable, including allegations of faulty silo covers. Wilder said such reports may have made the Chinese leadership feel weak and “paranoid.”
For Xi, the fact that Western intelligence was able to identify such humiliating technical flaws suggests a breach of trust, Wilder said, leading him to suspect “someone is saying something to someone” from within the defense industrial complex.
Even if not proven, the alleged espionage charge serves a political function, reframing the power struggle as a national matter and precluding any narrative of Chang as a “loyal dissident,” Seung-Hyun Lee of the George H. W. Bush Foundation wrote in a recent article published by the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
Such accusations also justify a closed trial, to avoid public scrutiny.
The fall of Cho Yong-kang, the former homeland security czar, in 2014 provides a possible model. As the most significant “tiger” arrested in Xi’s early anti-corruption campaign, Zhou was sentenced to 10 years to live in prison after a secret trial found him guilty of bribery, abuse of power, and leaking “party and state secrets.”
Chinese historians say the historical similarities to the era of Mao Zedong are unmistakable. They point to the 1971 downfall of Lin Biao, who was dubbed the “Invincible General” for his decisive role in winning the Chinese Civil War.
By 1970, Lin had become what many party insiders called the “second center” of power. Mao became paranoid that the army’s loyalty to Lin exceeded its loyalty to him. This tension reached a breaking point in September 1971, when Lin attempted to stage a failed coup before dying in a mysterious plane crash in the Mongolian desert while fleeing to the Soviet Union.
The downfall of both Lin and Zhang reflects a recurring pattern in Chinese communist history in which the person closest to the leader becomes the primary target of his suspicions.
Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com
