On April 8, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) convened a “rectification” training session for the remaining senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Chairman Xi Jinping delivered the opening speech. On the dais beside him at the National Defense University in Beijing sat a single colleague: Zhang Shengmin. The CMC’s discipline inspection chief had become, alongside Xi, the only other member of China’s top military body, after two of its most powerful generals were placed under investigation in January.
Most outside readings have treated this scene as a purity ritual, another turn of the screw in Xi’s decade-long campaign to make sure the army is under the total control of party leadership. The content of his speech, which urged officers to maintain “the purity and glory of the people’s armed forces,” invited that reading. But the more interesting text that day was not the speech. It was the seating chart. In past sessions of this kind, the front row overflowed with full generals. This time, only two sat there, flanked by lieutenant generals.
On April 8, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) convened a “rectification” training session for the remaining senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Chairman Xi Jinping delivered the opening speech. On the dais beside him at the National Defense University in Beijing sat a single colleague: Zhang Shengmin. The CMC’s discipline inspection chief had become, alongside Xi, the only other member of China’s top military body, after two of its most powerful generals were placed under investigation in January.
Most outside readings have treated this scene as a purity ritual, another turn of the screw in Xi’s decade-long campaign to make sure the army is under the total control of party leadership. The content of his speech, which urged officers to maintain “the purity and glory of the people’s armed forces,” invited that reading. But the more interesting text that day was not the speech. It was the seating chart. In past sessions of this kind, the front row overflowed with full generals. This time, only two sat there, flanked by lieutenant generals.
Over the past 18 months, Xi has dismantled two of the most powerful networks in the Chinese military. Given the PLA’s extreme opacity, networks are analytical shorthand that observers reconstruct from career patterns and shared posting histories, rather than formal factions. But they describe a real feature of an army whose “mountaintop” mentality predates the People’s Republic. The first was the so-called Fujian faction, built around officers whom Xi had cultivated ties with during his time climbing the party ladder in the southeast between 1985 and 2007. It was anchored by He Weidong, who served as a CMC vice chairman, and Miao Hua, who as Political Work Department director had spent nearly a decade controlling the personnel files of virtually every flag officer in the force. Miao was suspended from his job in November 2024. He disappeared last spring. Both were expelled from the party and the military in October 2025, along with seven other generals linked to their circle.
The second network, the old ground-force establishment based around CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff chief Liu Zhenli, fell this January. Their formal investigation marked the high point of a purge cycle that had left the active-duty general bench nearly bare. Many inside the system considered Zhang’s combat record and esteemed background—he was the senior princeling in uniform, with multigenerational family ties to Xi—a shield against purges. As it turned out, however, belonging to either network was a dangerous place to be.
The conventional read is that Xi is installing loyalists, officers chosen for political reliability as the external environment grows more demanding. That answer is not wrong, but it is hollow. Miao and Zhang Youxia, after all, were selected on that criterion. Before they were purged, who would have judged them disloyal? In theory, Xi could subject every remaining officer to a fresh loyalty audit. But time is not on his side. He is bound by earlier commitments, including, most pointedly, the “strategic imperative” of building a “world-class” PLA ahead of its centenary in 2027. A senior command in ruins cannot meet those goals triumphantly. Xi has been forced rebuild it according to a simpler pattern.
Across CMC departments, core services, and theater commands, roughly 20 senior billets are now filled in an acting capacity (what the PLA calls “hosting work”) by lieutenant generals waiting on formal appointments. Given the shortage of experienced replacements and the impending deadline, most are expected to be confirmed in the same posts. Almost all share one critical feature: Their careers were shaped by networks that the now purged factions never controlled. In other words, it appears that Xi has been promoting the officers his last generals had kept down. But what has made these officers politically safe—years on the periphery—has also left them without the prestige, trust, and experience that joint warfare requires. The cohort that earns Xi’s confirmation may be the cohort least equipped to fight the war he is preparing them for.
Xi’s promotions are pulling from two primary networks. First, the discipline inspection track. Discipline inspection is a single branch in the broader political-work tree. That one branch has now pushed its way to the top of the tree, two of the four services, and the heights of the CMC. Zhang Shengmin, a newly minted vice chairman of the CMC, is a career political-work officer who built his career in the Second Artillery (now the Rocket Force) and later took over the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission, a post he has held since 2017. Xiong Zhaoyuan, now a deputy director at the Political Work Department and a principal organizer of the latest training session, served with Zhang in the Second Artillery a decade ago. The acting political commissars of the army and air force, Zhang Shuguang and Shi Honggan, respectively, are both discipline inspection secretaries who report directly to Zhang Shengmin.
The operational side tells a parallel story. A critical mass of the officers now running the CMC’s central nervous system are lieutenant generals with air force backgrounds, including Dong Li, the acting director of the Joint Operations Command Center; Liu Di at Training and Administration; and Chen Chi at Logistics Support. Lei Kai, the acting commander of the Rocket Force, is not a missileer at all. He led fighter formations over Tiananmen Square in the 2009 and 2015 parades. The two newly promoted three-star theater commanders, Yang Zhibin in the east and Han Shengyan in the center, are both air force generals, a break from the long tradition that ground forces should hold those seats.
These officers trace the legacy of Xu Qiliang, the air force general who served as a CMC vice chairman from 2012 to 2022 before his death in 2025. As executive deputy group leader of Xi’s military reform commission, Xu pulled joint operations and air power to the center of the PLA’s future. He was also the patron of a generation of air force officers promoted during those years. After he retired, that cohort lost its high-level sponsor. Miao’s Political Work Department was the institutional channel for senior officer promotions across the force. Zhang Youxia held his own recommendation pipeline to Xi on the command-line side. Neither man had to actively block the Xu-vintage aviators; he only had to not advocate. The aviators did not disappear. Their careers simply stopped moving—until now.
To illustrate the pattern, consider two officers, Lin Xiangyang and Yang Zhibin, who reached the rank of lieutenant general within roughly nine months of each other, in April 2020 and March 2021, respectively, at around the same age and career stage. A year and a half after his promotion, in September 2021, Lin ascended to the rank of general. Yang had to wait four years and nine months, rotating through three theater deputy postings, before reaching general in December 2025. The difference was Lin’s home network, the 31st Group Army and the Eastern Theater Command, anchored by Miao and He, respectively. Yang’s was the air force aviation cohort, cultivated by Xu and sidelined after his retirement; his promotion only came after Miao and He were out of the picture.
Taken together, the promotion pattern emerging from the aftermath of Xi’s military purges is hard to miss. The discipline inspection officers now occupying political-work slots and the air force generation now running joint operations and interservice portfolios share a common history: Both spent the Miao-Zhang Youxia years watching promotions flow to other hands. Xi has not built a new cohort from scratch. He has intentionally promoted the officers those newly dismantled networks had passed over.
This reading is narrower than the “loyalty test” frame, but it offers sharper predictions. It suggests that Xi’s talent pool was never as shallow as the volume of disappearances implied; it was just buried. As the PLA approaches its centenary, the expected wave of formal confirmations will likely favor officers who can document exclusion from the old networks, not merely allegiance to the new one.
Of course, there is a familiar counterargument. Purged networks always leave behind rivals who benefit from their fall; the aviators and the discipline inspectors were simply the largest available pools of noncompromised senior officers. That is always true. But specific appointments mean more than pure residuation. Air force officers now run five central billets. Discipline inspection secretaries are simultaneously acting commissars of two of the four services, crossing a branch line within the political-work system that is usually respected. A passive shuffle of untainted officers does not produce that pattern. The selection is discriminating and intentional, not merely residual.
What remains unknown is whether this cohort will cohere under operational stress. The aviators who developed under Xu spent their final active years waiting out networks that outranked them; the political-work officers now filling commissar billets spent those same years inside an apparatus built to watch other officers, rather than to fight alongside them. Neither background produces the kind of cross-service trust that joint warfare requires. That deficit doesn’t show up in peacetime parades. It surfaces in wartime command. Will a hardened ground force commander defer to a theater commander whose career was in the air force, a service long treated as peripheral in the army-dominated PLA? Will an operational commander speak candidly to a political commissar whose entire career was spent finding leverage on other officers? These are the moments when cross-service trust either holds or breaks. By promoting the officers his last generals blocked, Xi has bought himself a politically safe high command. Whether he has bought himself one that can fight together is a different question.
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