So Crooked They Have to Screw Their Pants On? Leadership Stability in China After the Purge of General Zhang Youxia

James Mulvenon - Vice President of Intelligence

Xi Jinping’s decision to purge General Zhang Youxia, his longtime military confidant and the senior vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), marks the most consequential shake-up in China’s armed forces since Xi took power in 2012. In a system where personal loyalty and factional balance are usually managed behind closed doors, the public announcement that Zhang is under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law” signals not just another anti-corruption campaign milestone, but a deeper crisis in how Xi manages risk, loyalty, and war planning at the very top of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). For U.S. policymakers focused on trade, advanced technology competition, and Chinese espionage, Zhang’s fall is less about one general’s alleged misdeeds than about a leadership style that increasingly treats the PLA, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the high-tech economy as a single, securitized ecosystem.

Zhang was not a peripheral figure who could be easily scapegoated. At 75, he was the highest-ranking general in China, the CMC’s senior vice chairman, a Politburo member, and one of the few remaining leaders with actual combat experience. He had been widely understood as one of Xi’s closest military allies, having risen alongside him and helped implement a decade of sweeping reforms designed to modernize the PLA and prepare for high-end conflict, including over Taiwan. When a leader starts purging precisely the people who built his system and secured his rise, the question is no longer whether he can enforce loyalty—it is whether he trusts anyone at all. That pervasive distrust has direct implications for how China surveils foreign technology, penetrates Western supply chains, and manages the domestic political backlash from a slowing, security-obsessed economy.

To understand the dynamics behind Zhang’s purge, readers should keep in mind three key points:

• Since everyone is corrupt, all anti-corruption moves are political, not financial. This is particularly true in the PLA, which has maintained an informal pay-for-promotion scheme for decades, above and beyond the traditional corruption avenues that I explored many years ago in my PhD/book^[1] and later articles in the China Leadership Monitor.^[2]
• This is all about Xi Jinping and his consolidation of power. It is no accident that the first crime listed in the official indictment is "undermining the Chairman Responsibility System" (军委主席负责制; CRS), not enrichment and remuneration.^[3]
• Zhang’s ouster is principally about the perennial CCP civilian leadership concern about "mountaintopism" (山头主义) in the PLA, i.e., the creation of alternate military centers of power. Now we find ourselves in the dark alleys of princeling and factional politics in the Party Center. I wish I could say that we had a solid understanding of what is going on here, but as China has closed itself off since COVID we are left to look through a glass darkly, sifting through diaspora rumormongering and conspiracy theories, the shadows on the cave wall from official statements/lack of statements, and fragmentary reporting. But we know enough about the backgrounds of Xi and Zhang Youxia to know that these fights go back decades and expose deep fault lines in the “Red Family” ecosystem.

Indeed, for the stability of the Xi regime, Zhang’s purge cuts both ways. On one side, it demonstrates that Xi retains the capacity—and the will—to remove even the most senior figures in the military hierarchy, reducing the CMC’s top ranks down to Xi himself and a loyal enforcer, General Zhang Shengmin, who has overseen multiple earlier purges. Analysts have described this wave as a “crescendo” in a years-long campaign to cleanse the PLA of corruption and potential disloyalty, underlining that no status, personal history, or battlefield record provides real insulation from Xi’s scrutiny. In the near term, that sends a powerful deterrent signal to any faction considering coordinated resistance. The price of dissent has never been clearer, and the tools of discipline—anti-corruption organs, internal security services, and information control—are all firmly in Xi’s hands.

On the other side, the pattern of repeated, high-level purges reveals a system that is less stable than its tightly controlled façade suggests. Over the past few years, Xi has overseen the removal of senior Rocket Force commanders, two defense ministers, and multiple CMC members, culminating in the investigation of both Zhang Youxia and fellow CMC member Liu Zhenli. When “corruption” and “discipline violations” are invoked so frequently at the top, they begin to look less like isolated abuses and more like structural features of a regime whose informal networks, patronage systems, and opaque procurement processes are essential to how it actually functions. In that sense, every new purge buys Xi a short-term increase in fear and compliance at the cost of long-term brittleness: a command culture in which subordinates are more focused on political survival than candid assessments, especially on sensitive issues like Taiwan contingencies, strategic nuclear posture, or the risks of an escalatory tech war with the United States.

The espionage and technology dimensions of Zhang Youxia’s ouster deepen this instability. Some commentary, including a widely discussed Wall Street Journal report summarized in expert analysis, has suggested that Zhang Youxia may be accused of leaking sensitive nuclear information to the United States, a claim that, whether accurate or exaggerated, provides unusually dramatic justification for purging the PLA’s top general. By framing Zhang Youxia’s alleged offenses in nuclear and national-security terms rather than merely financial graft, Xi gains political cover to extend investigations into the former CMC vice chairman’s networks, seize communications devices, and criminalize any internal dissent as collusion with hostile foreign forces. That framing will almost certainly intensify Beijing’s already aggressive counterintelligence posture, putting additional pressure on Chinese scientists, engineers, and executives with ties to foreign firms, and raising the stakes in ongoing U.S.–China contests over semiconductors, AI, and dual-use technology.

From a U.S. perspective, this should inform expectations about China’s espionage behavior, not calm them. A more paranoid leadership, convinced that foreign penetration reaches into the CMC itself, is unlikely to scale back overseas collection; it is more likely to double down on asymmetric, deniable operations in cyberspace, corporate networks, and diaspora communities, particularly where they touch critical technologies and supply chains highlighted by U.S. export controls. At the same time, internal purges can degrade the PLA’s capacity to integrate and operationalize stolen technology by removing experienced managers, degrading trust within the command system, and pushing competent officers into early retirement or passive resistance. This interaction—hyperactive collection combined with disrupted internal integration—makes Chinese behavior more unpredictable: more attempts to leapfrog U.S. advantages, but also greater risk of technical or strategic miscalculation if those capabilities are misunderstood or misrepresented up the chain of command.

For Xi personally, the Zhang Youxia affair narrows his room to maneuver. By eliminating yet another generation of top commanders, he is effectively committing himself to rule with a smaller, younger, and more politically dependent cadre whose legitimacy derives directly from him. That may make it easier to align the PLA behind ambitious timelines—such as preparing credible options for coercion or force against Taiwan by the late 2020s—but it also means that any failure, whether in economic management, crisis signaling, or military operations, will be read domestically as Xi’s failure alone. Over time, a system that centralizes blame as well as power becomes less resilient: it has fewer credible mediators, fewer “old hands” who can quietly defuse crises, and fewer off-ramps that do not involve publicly humiliating the top leader.

The bottom line for regime stability is counterintuitive. Xi emerges from Zhang Youxia’s purge both stronger and more vulnerable. He has visibly tightened his grip over the PLA and demonstrated that no one, however senior, is beyond reach, which will discourage organized opposition and reinforce his authority in the short run. Yet each purge also strips away another layer of institutional buffering, reduces the diversity of viewpoints around the leader, and reinforces a culture of fear that is ill-suited to managing complex technological, economic, and military risks under intense external pressure. For U.S. strategists, the task is to recognize that this combination—heightened control, heightened insecurity—is precisely the environment in which ambitious, technology-driven authoritarian regimes are most prone to miscalculate, particularly when they believe time and relative advantage are slipping away.

^[1] See https://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Fortune-Military-Business-1978-1998-Contemporary/dp/0765605791

^[2] See https://www.hoover.org/research/so-crooked-they-have-screw-their-pants-new-trends-chinese-military-corruption and https://www.hoover.org/research/so-crooked-they-have-screw-their-pants-part-3-guo-boxiong-edition.

^[3] http://www.81.cn/szb_223187/szbxq/index.html?paperName=jfjb&paperDate=2026-01-25&paperNumber=01&articleid=971641. If you want to go down the CRS rabbit hole, see my China Leadership Monitor piece here: "The Cult of Xi and the Rise of the CMC Chairman Responsibility System" found at https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/clm55-jm-final.pdf.