Chinese President Xi Jinping’s purge of the senior leadership of the People’s Liberation Army continues unabated. It reveals both the reach of the Chinese Communist Party’s disciplinary apparatus, and the persistence of disloyalty and corruption in the PLA.
On 21 September, Xinhua News Agency announced that the Politburo of the CCP Central Committee had approved the expulsion from the party of Central Military Commission vice chairman Zhang Youxia and former chief of the commission’s Joint Staff Department, Liu Zhenli. Both had already been expelled from military service, and their alleged criminal offences had been referred to military prosecutors.
The official statement presented their removal as evidence that the PLA was becoming ‘purer’ through the ‘revolutionary tempering’ of the anti-corruption struggle. Yet the allegations against Zhang and Liu suggest that considerably more is at stake than corruption. Their cases bring together three problems that have repeatedly complicated party–military relations in the post-Mao era: corruption and patronage; failures of command and party supervision; and political disloyalty.
The central issue is therefore not simply senior officers’ self-enrichment but whether informal networks of authority and obligation have persisted within the PLA despite Xi’s efforts to strengthen centralised party control.
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