On October 17, China announced the ouster from the Communist Party of General He Weidong, the second-highest ranking officer in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and a member of the 24-man Politburo, for corruption. His dismissal, and that of Admiral Miao Hua, are shocking.
President Xi Jinping had helicoptered He into the Central Military Commission (CMC) just three years ago and promoted Miao Hua in 2017 to rejuvenate the leadership of the military high command. Now He has become the first CMC vice chairman to be removed from power in over four decades. Moreover, the ouster follows an unprecedented number of dismissals and disappearance of senior military officers since mid-2023. In fact, amid the successive ousters, the CMC is now down to just four members.
My assessment is that this is a purge triggered by a power struggle between the CMC’s first-ranked vice chairman, Zhang Youxia, and the ambitious up-from-the-troops ordinary soldiers, He Weidong and Miao Hua.
Zhang represents the old, princeling elite of the PLA. His father was a Red Army hero of the 1920s and 1930s and was equal in stature to Xi Jinping’s father. Zhang Youxia built his military career on being a hero during the 1979 border war against the Vietnamese. My friends who have met him tell me he is a tough old soldier in the Maoist tradition: profane, entitled, and intolerant.
He, on the other hand, is younger and came up the hard way. He does not even have a high school education and, indeed, joined the PLA as an ordinary private when he was 16. He was assigned to the 31st Group Army (now designated as the 73rd Group Army) and worked his way up over three decades in that unit to become its commanding officer. The 31st Group Army has always been the front-line unit opposite Taiwan that trains rigorously for the invasion of the island. He reportedly designed the military’s operational response to then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022. It was an aggressive response that the U.S. government called an overreaction.
The He-Zhang struggle appears to have begun in July 2023 with the purge of senior officers in the PLA Rocket Force. The Rocket Force controls China’s nuclear arsenal and, because of that, has always been led by princelings, sons of the Communist elite. Bloomberg News Service reported in January 2024 that U.S. officials had intelligence that many of China’s new nuclear missiles were inoperable because of corruption in the manufacturing of the missiles. He Weidong may have used this scandal to purge the Rocket Force commander and his staff.
Zhang Youxia may have been outraged that He was going after princelings, a group in the military he would have protected if he could (however, Zhang would have had difficulty defending them if the charges were true).
The new Rocket Force commander was Wang Houbing. Wang’s career track also mirrored He’s as he joined the 31st Group Army as a private at the age of 18 and worked his way up the ranks in that unit during the 1980s and 1990s. But Wang did not last and was arrested in his office in May 2025.
He Weidong seems to have gone further in October 2023, when Minister of Defense and CMC member Li Shangfu was dismissed on corruption charges. This would have struck very close to home for Zhang, as Li was both a protégé and a princeling and succeeded him in the role of procurement czar for the PLA. As with many positions in the PLA hierarchy, there is plenty of opportunity for graft in procurement with many state-owned enterprises competing for contracts.
In April 2024, Xi’s secretary and speech writer in the CMC was quietly moved to the National Defense University, a lateral move. He was replaced by two-star general Fang Yongxiang. Fang, like He, is from Fujian and joined the 31st Group Army as a private without a college education in 1989. He rose through the ranks in the 31st Group Army for the next 24 years and would have had a great deal of contact with He Weidong.
Interestingly, Fang was not pictured accompanying Xi Jinping to Lhasa, Tibet, for a meeting with the troops in August 2025. The military secretary always accompanies the CMC chairman on inspection tours. This suggests Fang has been removed from his post.
I assess that Zhang Youxia struck back in November 2024, when Miao Hua was dismissed from the CMC. Miao and He might as well have been twins as Miao also joined the 31st Group Army at age 16 as a common soldier. He also worked his way up the command structure of the 31st Group Army and other units on the Taiwan front. Since 2022, we have seen at least 26 other senior officers removed but it is impossible to know who their patrons on the CMC were.
Despite the amazing military equipment modernization of the recent Chinese Victory Day parade, several anomalies caught my eye, showing that the PLA is hiding its problems.
First, Zhang Youxia was the only uniformed military officer on the rostrum. He was seated in the second row, just behind the Politburo Standing Committee – a place usually reserved for the retired members of the Standing Committee.
Second, the presiding military officer of the parade was not one of the five theater commanders of the PLA (as is the tradition) but a relatively low-ranking two-star general from the Air Force.
As the various military units marched past the reviewing stand, there was no identification of the officers leading each component. In the last two military parades, the general officers commanding each component were identified by name and position.
There are several striking quandaries in all these developments. First, Xi’s role is completely opaque. If he brought He up to the CMC – perhaps to advance a more aggressive Taiwan military plan – why abandon him when it came to the power struggle? Or has Xi absented himself, realizing this was a power struggle that he dared not intervene in given Zhang’s power and authority within the military? Is this just a power struggle or could it have been that Zhang thought that the younger generals were becoming too bold and reckless in dealing with the Taiwan situation? Again, why wouldn’t Xi have intervened as chairman of the CMC to resolve a policy dispute?
Finally, if this was a simple anti corruption campaign, why did it target the 31st Group Army cadres and leave the others untouched on the CMC? Other officers with a long history in the 31st Group Army were taken down as well, including General Lin Xiangyang, the former Eastern Theater Commander, and General Wang Xiubin of the CMC Joint Operations Command Center, both of whom were expelled from the party alongside He Weidong.
Zhang may have convinced Xi that the upstarts in the military were a danger to his own position. Unfortunately, there is nothing in his behavior or speeches that gives any clue to Xi’s view of the last three years of PLA purges. In fact, no one will speak a word about developments in the military.
If I am right about the behind-the-scenes power struggle, two things are clear. The mess in the PLA is not over, and it must be damaging the morale of PLA officers throughout the military. Three of the seven seats of the CMC are vacant. The new minister of defense has not been appointed to the CMC or the State Council as has been the tradition. Both these points seem to indicate that, until the dust settles, the promotion process is frozen.
In the Chinese military, when these periodic political purges have occurred, everyone becomes extremely risk averse. No one knows who next will be charged with corruption and, indeed, anyone could be. To a man they have all taken and given bribes. Corruption is endemic in the PLA despite repeated attempts by Xi to stamp out the practice. Xi must be having severe second thoughts about any plans of increasing the military coercion of Taiwan soon.
Whether this damages Xi politically is very difficult to tell. There are increasing rumors among the Chinese diaspora that Xi is in ill health, but the only real evidence is that he is taking fewer foreign trips. However, his domestic travels remain frequent; he just visited Tibet and Xinjiang.
Whatever the case, the purges add to a growing perception that Xi’s judgement is suspect, particularly when it comes to personnel appointments. The rapid downfall of former Foreign Minister Qin Gang provides further evidence. Sometime soon, the leadership will have to fill the three vacancies on the Central Military Commission, and this may give us new insights into the strange goings on in China’s high command.