Paranoia or premonition? Could Xi’s purges be a sign he is losing his grip on power?
As well as the 100 People’s Liberation Army generals, Xi Jinping has purged hundreds of thousands of lesser military figures, civilian officials and citizens across the decade and more of his personal rule. Is he fighting off the possibility of a military coup?
There have been extensive purges of senior military and civilian officials going on in China in recent years. Scores of top military officers (58 major-generals alone) and more than 100 high-level civilian administrators have been charged with serious “violations of discipline”, sacked or arrested and imprisoned. Strangely, speculation is rife that the purges are being carried out against Xi Jinping, not by him. That seems unlikely. But why the purges?
Communist dictatorships have always run purges. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin pioneered the process, from the Red Terror to the Great Terror. Mao Zedong purged ruthlessly. There’s no case on record of a political opposition being able to purge the supporters of a ruling tyrant. So, what are we to make of claims that it’s happening in China in the 2020s?
Platforms such as China in Focus, Mirror Now, Taiwan Talks, Decoding China, China Insider, China Uncensored, China Update, NSI and Lei’s Looking Glass, among others, are running with the claim that Xi is on the way out and that this will finally become clear no later than October. It’s breathless and portentous stuff.
Many a common punter may be seduced by it. But the narratives they are spinning range from absurd imaginings to outright disinformation. Social media, in its many forms, works on hype and emotion, polemic and fantasy, intended as clickbait and confusing rather than clarifying things.
That’s what is happening in this instance. The idea that Xi’s demise is imminent is a big story, with serious implications – if true. But an old maxim goes: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In this case the extraordinary evidence is lacking.
The purges, however, are real. The question is, what’s behind them? As well as the 100 People’s Liberation Army generals, Xi has purged hundreds of thousands of lesser military figures, civilian officials and citizens across the decade and more of his personal rule. This is, plainly, a deeply dysfunctional political and economic system.
Is Xi fighting off the possibility of a military coup? Is he trying, with or without success, to rein in rampant corruption in the system he runs? Is he inventing excuses, as Stalin and Mao did (far in excess of credible evidence of organised opposition) to impose arbitrary rule by instilling fear across the board?
Is it possible, nonetheless, that there is a rift within the party and that there could be or could have been a move against Xi of the kind carried out against Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union in 1964, or the intra-party coup against the Gang of Four and then against Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, in the late 1970s?
In 2021, British diplomat, merchant banker and financial markets analyst Roger Garside published a book titled China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom. It described a scenario in which premier Li Keqiang, politburo member Wang Yang and General Zhang Youxia plotted and carried out a coup against Xi to take China back to the reform and opening he had derailed and to launch liberal political and judicial reforms – the Fifth Modernisation called for, decades before, by Democracy Wall hero Wei Jingsheng.
Such highly reputable China scholars as Ian Johnson, Arthur Waldron and Minxin Pei praised the book as highly credible.
In what must have been a serious embarrassment to Li, Garside wrote: “Their objective is not a simple change of leaders. They have come to the conclusion that many of China’s problems have arisen precisely because the economic reforms after 1979 were not accompanied by political reforms. The tension between social and economic change on the one hand and an unchanging political system on the other has made the status quo unsustainable.”
But a year later, Li and Wang stepped down from their government positions. There was no coup. Zhang held his position and still holds it. Garside’s speculation had been provocative but the coup he described did not take place.
Who has been purged?
The purges in the armed forces have taken down:
• Two defence ministers (Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu).
• Two senior members of the Central Military Commission (He Weidong and Miao Hua).
• Two commanders (Zhou Yaning and Li Yuchao), two deputy commanders (Wu Guohua and Li Chuanguang) and the chief of staff (Sun Jinming) of the Rocket Forces, which includes China’s nuclear arsenal.
• Two deputy commanders of the army (Deng Zhiping and You Haitao).
• The Central Guard Bureau director since 2015 (Wang Shaojun).
• The commander of the PLA Air Force (Ding Laihang).
• The deputy chief of the Joint Staff (Zhang Zhengzhong).
• Three deputy directors of the Equipment Development Department of the PLA (Zhang Yulin, Ja Xinchun and Rao Renmin).
• The deputy commander of the Central Theatre Command (Li Zhizhong).
• The chief of staff of the PLA Navy (Li Hanjun).
Never mind lesser military figures. As for civilian officials, there are too many to list but they begin with foreign minister Qin Gang and include more than 100 senior figures at the level of minister, vice-minister, chairman or director.
All of this prompts two questions: what kind of state works this way and how can a state function with this kind of thing going on? The answers are: a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship; and China, contrary to its own propaganda and the naive boosterism of its useful fools in the West, is not functioning well. It is, in fact, floundering.
Why remove Xi?
There are good reasons Xi should be removed. Garside was right about what could and should motivate his removal. The question is simply whether that has happened or could, in any near term, actually take place.
At the height of Stalin’s Great Terror (1936-39), in which millions were incarcerated in the notorious Gulag archipelago and hundreds of thousands executed, Adolf Hitler himself, according to his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, was astonished and declared that Stalin had to be “diseased in the brain. Otherwise one cannot explain his bloody rule.” Stalin gutted his military general staff, starting with his most brilliant general, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, as well as the Communist Party and his own intelligence and security agencies.
As Stephen Kotkin remarks in the second volume of his masterful biography of Stalin, Waiting For Hitler (2017), “Contemporaries could not fathom what was going on.” Western diplomats in Moscow, including German ambassador Werner von der Schulenburg, were dumbfounded by the purge trials and mass executions, from 1936 on. They tried to understand them in terms of power politics, but it all beggared such analysis.
The purges were so destructive that many, such as Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, inferred that the military officers, starting with Tukhachevsky, must have been guilty because otherwise “what was happening was incomprehensible”.
Why the purges matter
Xi hasn’t had all the senior figures tortured and shot, as Stalin did. And they number in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands purged by Stalin (or Mao). So, we could wave them away without looking too closely.
But they matter because China has been preparing for war, with a massive military build-up in peacetime; and because after three decades of spectacular but unbalanced economic growth China is beginning to hit the rough. The worst is yet to come.
We need to be paying attention because our own future is at stake in both those respects.
Given his policies and mode of rule, the removal of Xi by a coalition of party elders, reform-minded generals and party powerbrokers is devoutly to be wished – let’s be clear.
However, it would be formidably difficult to organise such a coup, given how the surveillance and repression apparatus work, especially within the leadership compound at Zhongnanhai in Beijing. Not perhaps impossible but very difficult.
Furthermore, any such coup, of its nature, would have had to proceed more swiftly and would have had to declare itself to rally support at home and abroad.
In Garside’s telling, Li, Wang and Zhang wanted a market-oriented and politically open China aligning itself with, not against, the US. Why hide your coup if that was your agenda? Only palace coups motivated by power rather than principle do that kind of thing. Keeping it secret requires staying your hand and risking a deadly counter-strike.
In any case, the level of surveillance even of top figures is now so intense that all communication, even within Zhongnanhai, is fraught with danger.
That almost all those purged have been Xi appointees, not political opponents, lends itself, at first glance, to speculation about why he would purge his own people and thereby undermine his own power. But to this there are several answers. The most basic is that communist states work this way.
Stalin purged and purged again, eliminating Old Bolshevik comrades in droves, then purging countless cadres he had raised within the party during the so-called Lenin Levy of the early to mid-1920s.
He outmanoeuvred Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka (forerunner of the KGB), then raised up Genrikh Yagoda to do much of his dirty work for a decade, only to purge him and replace him with the appalling Nikolai Yezhov, who conducted the bloodletting of 1937-38. He then purged Yezhov and replaced him with the truly awful Lavrenty Beria, in 1938. His nearest subordinates feared him – and with good reason. No one could trust him or find a means to bring him down.
Mao did similar things in China, not just once he had seized power but all the way back to the Jiangxi Soviet days, in the late 1920s and early 30s, when he had thousands of his own cadres and officers tortured and executed on mad charges of being Guomindang (Nationalist) spies – what he labelled “the Anti-Bolshevik League”. Or during the so-called Party Rectification at Yan’an, in the early 40s. Or during the Gao Gang affair of 1954. Or during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. He repeatedly brought down old comrades and nominated heirs.
Rotten to the core
By his own account, Xi has simply been trying to check rampant corruption without making any concessions to the need for more open accountability and a more transparent incentive system.
This problem is as old as Lenin’s time. Why, however, have so many of his own appointees ended up falling foul by his declared standards? We could imagine him in despair at the impossible task he has set himself. But this clearly implies that the system he is enforcing simply doesn’t work. It is rotten to the core.
And that should be no surprise. Corruption and political opportunism are general human proclivities that are exacerbated by the kind of conditions Marxism-Leninism creates – with or without “Chinese characteristics”.
Suppose, instead, that it isn’t just actual corruption or “violations of discipline” he is targeting. Rather, like other “princes” and totalitarian dictators, he is imposing his authority by instilling fear and uncertainty. This, however, further undermines the workability of the dreaded system.
You can achieve certain things with the knout, but enthusiasm, efficiency and motivation are not generally among them. Stalin caused enormous harm to his own state with his Great Terror.
Xi may be able to hang on to power this way. Stalin did, despite the enormous destructiveness of his policies. The Kim family in North Korea has done so since 1945, at immense cost to its people. But unlike Stalin’s Soviet Union, which attempted “socialism in one country”, or North Korea, which is a hole-and-corner criminal enterprise, the population of which is half-starved and brutally repressed, China had emerged as a major industrial and trading state before Xi took the helm.
By his own account, he aspires to change the world order and position China as the global hegemon in a “Common Destiny for Mankind”. His ghostwritten books propagate an ideology of benign order, but one introduced and enforced by an authoritarian state and indoctrination. There’s a conundrum. He brooks no contradiction, does not comprehend economics, cannot fathom why things keep going wrong and has undertaken a series of policies that have failed.
All this is reminiscent of Khrushchev’s time at the helm of the Soviet Union. A former toady and betrayer of party comrades in Stalin’s Great Terror, before he put all the blame on his old boss in his Secret Speech of 1956, Khrushchev was an impulsive gambler in domestic and foreign affairs as party leader. His colleagues, led by the conservative Leonid Brezhnev, moved against him and brought him down without violence or the disruption of party rule. So, it can be done. The question is whether it is under way in China right now.
Let’s underscore why it would serve China well. Deng Xiaoping, between 1977 and 1997, attempted a pragmatic reform and opening of China while insisting the party retain a monopoly of political power and that Marxism-Leninism “with Chinese characteristics” remain the national ideology – whether people wanted it or not. He introduced sensible but highly circumscribed political reforms.
Deng promoted first Hu Yaobang (1980-87) and then Zhao Ziyang (1987-89) to general secretary, only to sack each of them for being too liberal. They were in fact genuinely gifted and thoughtful reformers. Sacking them triggered mass demonstrations that ended in mass bloodshed in Tiananmen Square.
Economic growth seemed to smooth the problem over. But Xi has abandoned Deng’s pragmatic reforms in both economics and politics. This is deeply regressive.
Dangerous games
Bloggers and podcasters, most notably one Liu Xin, nicknamed Lao Deng (“Old Lamp”), who seems to live in Canada, have claimed to be getting all manner of leaks or hints from within China that a coup is happening.
They appear to be reading too much into their tea leaves, where they aren’t simply fabricating stories ranging from the barely plausible to the absurd.
Documents from deep inside the communist leadership and security system have leaked out to the West at times, notably The Tiananmen Papers (2001) and the secret journal of Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State (2009). And Xi’s mode of rule has increased the incentives to leak. But it also has made it more dangerous. Around the time Xi took over, a network of CIA informants within the system was blown and a dozen or more such informants were brutally executed. Leaking or spying are a dangerous game in China.
So what is the bottom line? The political and economic system in China is under stress on several fronts. Xi has made bold calls about the “China Dream”, a “Common Destiny for Mankind” and imposing Chinese sovereignty on Taiwan.
Yet he is purging his military high command and his administrative apparatus.
Marxist-Leninists and Maoists have always talked of the “contradictions within capitalism”, but Xi’s China is plainly riddled with them. This complicates the analytic task.
Feverish and overconfident clickbait forecasts should be distrusted. The relevant intelligence assessments must be extraordinarily detached and rigorous. We should certainly want a reformist change of regime in China, but we have many reasons to tread very carefully in predicting one.
Paul Monk is the former head of China analysis in the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the author a dozen books including Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (second edition, 2023) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018).
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