On April 8, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) convened a meeting of “modification“A training session for the remaining senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Chairman Xi Jinping gave the opening speech. On the podium next to him at the Beijing National Defense University sat a colleague: Zhang Shengmin. The head of the CMC’s disciplinary inspection was, along with Xi, the only other member of China’s supreme military council, after the appointment of its two most powerful generals. under investigation the month of January.
Many outside readers have treated the incident as a ritual of purity, another twist in Xi’s decade-long campaign to ensure that the military is under the full control of the party leadership. The content of his speech, which urged officers to maintain “the purity and glory of the people’s armies,” invited such reading. But the most interesting writing of the day was not the speech. It was a seating chart. In previous sessions of this type, the front row was flooded with full generals. This time, only the two of them were sitting there, surrounded by the lieutenant general.
On April 8, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) convened a meeting of “modification“A training session for the remaining senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Chairman Xi Jinping gave the opening speech. On the podium next to him at the Beijing National Defense University sat a colleague: Zhang Shengmin. The head of the CMC’s disciplinary inspection was, along with Xi, the only other member of China’s supreme military council, after the appointment of its two most powerful generals. under investigation the month of January.
Many outside readers have treated the incident as a ritual of purity, another twist in Xi’s decade-long campaign to ensure that the military is under the full control of the party leadership. The content of his speech, which urged officers to maintain “the purity and glory of the people’s armies,” invited such reading. But the most interesting writing of the day was not the speech. It was a seating chart. In previous sessions of this type, the front row was flooded with full generals. This time, only the two of them were sitting there, surrounded by the lieutenant general.
Over the past 18 months, Xi has done just that broken two of the most powerful networks in the Chinese military. Given the extreme openness of the PLA, networks are shorthand for analysis that observers reconstruct from work patterns and share publication history, rather than formal groups. But they describe the real character of the army which “over the hill” thinking. before the People’s Republic. The first was the so-called Fujian Groupbuilt around officials with whom Xi had developed relationships during his time climbing the party ranks in the southeast between 1985 and 2007. It was anchored by He Weidong, who had served as vice chairman of the CMC, and Miao Hua, who as director of the Political Work Department had spent nearly a decade controlling the personnel files of almost every official in the force. Miao was suspended in November 2024. He disappear last spring. They both were dismissed from the party and the army in October 2025, along with seven other generals associated with their cycle.
The second network, a former ground military establishment based around CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and Joint Chiefs of Staff Liu Zhenli, collapsed this January. Theirs official investigation it marked the top of a cleaning cycle that had left the general working work bench almost bare. Many within the system considered Zhang’s fighting record and illustrious background—he was great king in uniform, and multi-generational family ties to Xi-ngao against purification. As it turned out, however, any internet asset was a dangerous place to be.
The common reading is that Xi is installing loyal, politically elected officials as the external environment becomes increasingly demanding. That answer is not bad, but it is empty. Miao and Zhang Youxia, after all, were chosen for that criterion. Before they were cleansed, who would judge them as disloyal? In theory, Xi could subject every remaining official to new loyalty checks. But time is not on his side. He is bound by previous commitments, including, in particular, “strategic importance” to build a “world-class” PLA before its centenary in 2027. The high command in ruins cannot achieve those goals victoriously.. Xi has had to rebuild it according to a simpler structure.
Across the CMC departments, base services, and theater commands, about 20 major billets are now filled in acting positions (what the PLA calls “accommodation work”) by lieutenant generals awaiting official appointments. Given the shortage of experienced replacements and the looming deadline, many are expected to be confirmed in similar posts. Almost all of them share one important feature: Their careers were shaped by networks that the now refined groups never controlled. In other words, it appears that Xi has been promoting officials his last generals had demoted. But what has made these officers politically safe—years on the sidelines—has also left them without the respect, loyalty, and experience that collective warfare requires. The group that gets Xi’s endorsement may be the group ill-equipped to fight the war he is preparing.
Xi’s announcement is connecting from two primary networks. First, discipline monitoring. Disciplinary review is one branch in the broad tree of political work. That single branch has now pushed its way to the top of the tree, two services out of four, and the height of CMC. Zhang Shengmin, the new vice chairman of the CMC, is a political career officer who built his career in the Second Armored Corps (now the Rocket Corps) and later took over the Discipline Inspection Commission of the CMC, a position he has held since 2017. Xiong Zhaoyuan, who is now the deputy director in the Political Labor Department and the latest meeting of the Political Labor Department with Zhang. Artillery a decade ago. The acting political commissars of the army and air force, Zhang Shuguang and Shi Honggan, respectively, are both disciplinary inspection secretaries who report directly to Zhang Shengmin.
The operational side tells a parallel story. Most of the officers running the CMC’s central nervous system are air force generals with air force backgrounds, including Dong Li, acting director of the Joint Operations Command Center; Liu Di in Studies and Administration; and Chen Chi in Hardware Support. Lei Kai, the acting commander of the Rocket Force, is not a rocket at all. He led groups of fighters over Tiananmen Square in the 2009 and 2015 parades. The two newly promoted three-star show commandersYang Zhibin in the east and Han Shengyan in the middle, both are air force generals, a break from the long tradition that ground forces should hold those seats.
These officials are following the legacy of Xu Qiliang, an air force general who served as CMC vice chairman from 2012 to 2022 before him. death in 2025. As deputy group leader of Xi’s military reform commission, Xu pulled joint operations with air power at the center of the PLA’s future. He was also the guardian of a generation of air force officers who were promoted during those years. After his retirement, the group lost its top sponsor. Miao’s Political Work Department was the institutional channel for the promotion of senior officials across the country. Zhang Youxia held her suggestion pipe to Xi on the side of the chain of command. No human had to stop Xu’s old aviators; he just had to defend himself. The pilots were not lost. Their jobs stopped moving—until now.
To illustrate the pattern, consider two officers, Lin Xiangyang and Yang Zhibin, who reached the rank of lieutenant general within about nine months of each other, in April 2020 and March 2021, respectively, at the same age and career stage. A year and a half after his promotion, in September 2021, Lin rose to the rank of general. Yang had to wait four years and nine months, rotating through three theater deputy posts, before reaching the total in December 2025. The difference was Lin’s home network, the 31st Army Group and the Eastern Theater Command, anchored by Miao and He, respectively. Yang’s was an air force air group, promoted by Xu and set aside after his retirement; His promotion only came after Miao and He were out of the picture.
Taken together, the bullish pattern emerging from the effects of Xi’s demilitarization is hard to miss. Disciplinary inspection officers now holding political jobs and the air force generation now running joint operations and service portfolios share a common history: They all spent the Miao-Zhang Youxia years watching promotions pass through other hands. Xi has not created a new group from scratch. He has promoted officers on purpose, the new networks that were dismantled were gone.
This reading is narrower than “honesty test“A frame, but it gives a much sharper prediction.” It suggests that Xi’s talent pool was not as deep as the number of missing people suggested; it was just buried. As the PLA approaches its centenary, the expected wave of formalization will favor officials who can document disengagement from old networks, not just adherence to new ones.
Of course, there is a known controversy. Refined networks leave behind adversaries who profit from their downfall; flight attendants and disciplinary inspectors were only the largest pools of uncompromising senior officers. That is always true. But special selection means more than clean scraps. Air force officers now run five medium billets. Disciplinary review secretaries are simultaneously acting commissioners of two of the four services, crossing branch lines within the normally respected political work system. A combination of unblemished officers does not produce that structure. The selection is discriminatory and deliberate, not just residual.
What remains to be seen is whether this group will cooperate under operational stress. The pilots who grew up under Xu spent their last working years waiting for the networks to defeat them; the political career officers now filling out the commissar’s papers spent those same years in a device built to watch other officers, rather than fight them. Neither background produces the kind of cross-service loyalty that joint warfare requires. The shortage is not seen in peacetime parades. Faced with a wartime order. Will a ground force commander abandon a theater commander whose career was in the air force, a service that has long been considered peripheral in the military-dominated PLA? Will the executive commander speak openly with a political commissar whose entire career was spent seeking influence over other officers? These are the times when cross-service trust makes or breaks. By promoting the last of his detained generals, Xi has bought himself a high political security command. Whether he has bought himself one that can fight together is a different question.
