Power and paranoia: what’s behind Xi’s military purges
Xi Jinping has showered his People’s Liberation Army with massive amounts of new kit over the past decade. But the PLA lacks a quality that simply can’t be bought: Xi’s trust.
But the PLA lacks a quality that simply can’t be bought: Xi’s trust.
And this raises questions about not only when but whether China’s military forces are going to be deemed ready to push the country’s borders out significantly beyond the present steady expansion through the South China Sea, most importantly by seizing democratic Taiwan.
Xi’s second-most significant role, after general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, is as chairman of both party and state Central Military Commissions, a task taking up much of his time. His exclusive control over the military forms a core base for his concentration of power.
He vows that by the PLA’s centenary in 2027, it will have become “a modern military … a strategic requirement for the comprehensive construction of a socialist modern country”.
The propaganda videos of the army are, as intended, awe-inspiring, everyone goose-stepping immaculately in time, firing missiles, landing fighters on the PLA navy’s two new aircraft carriers – a third is undergoing sea trials – and generally looking scarily purposeful.
China’s overall military expenditure has increased three times this century, during which its spend on hardware has risen almost eight times. But providing kit to match the Americans is almost the easy part.
For Xi’s take on “modernisation” differs from merely providing modern equipment. He posits developing “a new model, a brand new form of human civilisation,” no less.
Zhang Zhanbin, the Marxism dean at the Central Party School, explains what this means in practical terms – that “the leadership of the party is the unique political advantage of the new path of Chinese-style modernisation”. Ensuring the PLA is fully responsive to party directions is thus the central requirement. It’s about control.
This makes sense. For the PLA is not China’s military. It is very specifically the party’s army. Political security is paramount, meaning the secure retention of power by the party, with the PLA acting as its guarantor – as it did so effectively and harshly when the party’s leadership was confronted by nationwide protests in 1989.
But since Xi took control of the party a dozen years ago, the PLA has experienced constant organisational and personnel churn, driven by Xi personally – indicating a lack of confidence.
Structurally, Xi swiftly dismantled the General Staff Department, removed the service commanders’ seats from the Central Military Commission, and gave the chairman – himself, as it happens – and the party greater functional control over the PLA at large.
He ordered the PLA’s army to cut its numbers by about 300,000. He reduced the seven military regions to five theatre commands intended to integrate service operations within them. But achieving the new required “jointness” in mentality and in operational habit remains very much a work in progress.
At the same time, the PLA Second Artillery Force became the PLA Rocket Force, which appears to have control over ballistic and cruise missile forces, and the nuclear armoury, and which reports directly to the CMC and is thus on a par with the PLA army, navy and air force.
Xi also introduced a Strategic Support Force, centralising control of space, cyber, electronic, informational and psychological operations, also reporting directly to the CMC. But this was disbanded in April – due to poor implementation and/or corruption – being replaced by the Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force and Information Support Force. All three forces, like their SSF predecessor, will report directly to the CMC, though it is unclear how they will each interact with theatre commands and individual services.
And the old scandal-prone General Logistics Department that formerly oversaw military spending, especially procurement, has under Xi had its responsibilities divided up between the CMC’s own General Logistics Department, the Audit Office, and dispersed accounting and resource management centres.
The churn of top officers has been no less convulsive. In July 2022 the minister for industry and information technology, Xiao Yaqing, went. In March last year former defence minister Wei Fenghe, who earlier commanded the Rocket Force, disappeared from public view. Soon after, foreign minister Qin Gang and defence minister Li Shangfu, perceived as Xi confidants and with Li especially highly regarded previously as a military-industrial leader, were also purged.
Last December, nine generals were removed, including the commander of the Strategic Support Force that has since itself been wound up, and also three top aerospace executives from the Military-Civil Fusion sector that is at the centre of Xi’s program to reboot flagging economic growth through “new quality productive forces”. In January, Wang Xiaojun, who had been president of the China Rocket Academy, lost his position. It appears that the entire Rocket Force key leadership was replaced during 2023.
Last weekend, news broke of the purging of Admiral Miao Hua, a member of the CMC, the PLA’s top political commissar, for “serious violations of discipline”.
A few months ago, Xi said at the Military Political Work Conference held in Yan’an that the party required a strong, loyal, corruption-free and capable military under party guidelines and supervision. He stressed ideological transformation and the revitalisation of the commissar system.
We see constant institutional and personnel turmoil at the PLA, driven it would seem personally by Xi, who finds it hard – maybe with good cause – to trust the loyalty, competence and honesty of senior officers, even those he has appointed. At the same time as elevating a new cohort of military-industrial leaders, he needs to curb any potential threat to his own authority that may come from their emergence.
Top-down governance systems create such dilemmas, even as they struggle to resolve them. Military structures are all naturally hierarchical, intensifying the need to get personnel selection right, which is complicated in an authoritarian-tending-towards-totalitarian one-party state favouring micromanagement over delegation, and where professional effectiveness must be matched by irreproachable political correctness.
The last time the PLA was deployed substantially outside China – its first major action since the Korean War ended in 1953 – was early in 1979 when 220,000 troops surged into Vietnam, which had formed an alliance with the Soviet Union. About 30,000 had been killed by the time Beijing called a unilateral ceasefire a month later.
The situation today is vastly different, but the PLA lack of combat experience could be telling if it were to face, say, American forces hardened by almost constant conflict in recent decades. And despite the patriotic appeal, a military career may trouble families with just one child. The earliest second children born since that policy changed are not yet nine.
It’s impossible to rule out the PLA becoming bogged down or even failing in an epic task such as taking Taiwan. This being the party’s army, many Chinese people might respond by questioning the continuing authority of the Communist hierarchy to which they have deferred for 75 years.
Xi is not a status quo guy, but any risk that appears existential for the party to which he has devoted his life must weigh his mind against taking it.
Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.
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Xi Jinping has showered his People’s Liberation Army with massive amounts of new kit over the past decade. China spends more on its military than India, Japan, South Korea and The Philippines combined.