COLUMN-China’s military purge raises questions of peace, war and US dialogue

By Peter Apps

LONDON, Feb 6 (Reuters) - As Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan met General Zhang Youxia in August 2024, the tired and strained look on the American’s face contrasted with the relaxed smile of the veteran Chinese officer, then at the height of his power as the top uniformed member of the People’s Liberation Army.

“Your request to meet with me shows the value you attach to military security and the relationship between our militaries," Zhang told the U.S. delegation led by Sullivan.

The Biden team had hoped that building dialogue with the PLA would reduce the risk of accidental war, something they feared might one day be sparked by an inadvertent clash by air or sea, or perhaps a misidentified cyber attack or missile.

That process, already stumbling in the 2020s, may now need to be comprehensively restarted – if that is even possible.

Last month, as the world’s media focused on Donald Trump and Greenland, China’s official media announced that General Zhang, a childhood friend of President Xi Jinping once described as like a “brother”, had been dismissed from office.

It was the latest of a string of removals that have now included almost every top Chinese commander. Exactly what is going on behind the scenes is impossible to know, but the implications for the rest of the world may well be enormous.

Alongside Xi, General Zhang – one of the few remaining combat veterans in the PLA after serving as a company commander during China's brief 1979 war with Vietnam – was one of the key decision-makers over whether Beijing might risk an invasion of Taiwan in the current decade. He was also a key interlocutor with the Kremlin on growing Russia-China relations.

SWEEPING PURGE

Now, not only is he gone, but so are dozens if not hundreds of other senior military figures cashiered over the past two years. They include, analysts say, a disproportionate number of those from Beijing’s critical and fast-expanding nuclear deterrence forces, and those in the capital Beijing and the Eastern Theatre Command responsible for any action on Taiwan.

The most recent purges have devastated the normally seven-person Central Military Commission, chaired by Xi himself with his boyhood friend as his senior deputy. The only two members left untouched now appear to be Xi and General Zhang Shengmin, the shadowy head of its discipline committee.

Zhang Shengmin is usually described as having come from among the PLA’s political officers, implying an almost complete purge of those with more mainstream military service.

According to U.S. officials, the Chinese president has told the PLA to be ready to win a battle for Taiwan by or in 2027 – although they have also increasingly stressed that this is not the same as a direct decision to invade Taiwan on that date.

What is clear, they say, is that at the start of the decade Xi took a series of military targets that had been set for 2035 and brought them forward to 2027.

With the PLA now within a year of that deadline, the Chinese president now seems very unhappy with his military high command.

Multiple official statements and news stories over the dismissal of Zhang and others have accused them of corruption, including one piece in the PLA Daily that accused “big rats” of eating into the military budget.

Another piece in that paper this week went so far as to describe China’s resulting military as just a “paper tiger”.

DISARRAY AND DECEPTION

If this disparaging reference genuinely reflects the views of China’s leadership – or even if it doesn’t, it would be a remarkable turnaround in language.

China has gone to great lengths to present itself as a rising military power, with its ever-escalating drills around Taiwan designed to send an unambiguous message to that island that “reunification” is inevitable, even if done by force.

Recent messaging around the removal of its military leaders appears to tear up that approach, at least for now.

This points to the least likely but most dangerous interpretation of recent events – that Beijing is going out of its way to look unprepared for military action as a deliberate deception manoeuvre, but that it actually views the mayhem of the new Trump administration as the best time to act.

Even before these recent moves, some China-watching analysts had expressed concern Beijing might become incentivised to move quicker than expected. They worried that U.S. military buildups and the deployment of high-tech unmanned weapons – as well as Taiwan’s own military rebuilding - might shift the strategic balance away from Beijing’s favour.

That should not be discounted – and even as the Pentagon prepares for potential military action on Iran and ongoing talk of further action in the Caribbean, it will be watching China’s military movements as closely as ever.

In Washington, though, there has been a growing feeling the balance of risk might be shifting to later in the decade – and that Beijing is keen to see the outcome of Taiwan’s 2028 election in the hope the more pro-mainland Kuomintang might regain office in Taipei, and could also be waiting to see who might prevail in the U.S. 2028 elections.

The most likely explanation, therefore, is that the schism between Xi and his top commanders is extremely real.

China is hardly the only country awkwardly discovering that spending vast quantities of money on arms in the 21st century so far has not always brought it what it wanted – but Xi may feel he has other reasons to be nervous about his senior soldiers.

Still, the fact the PLA’s own newspaper felt able to refer to China’s military capability as a “paper tiger” suggests its editors or their Communist Party masters believe the military rank-and-file might also share Xi’s feeling that Beijing’s armed forces have been let down by their seniors.

That may or may not mean that some of the wilder stories over wastage in Beijing’s new atomic missile fields – vast networks of silos housing intercontinental ballistic rockets – are truly accurate, including tales of fuel replaced with water and concrete crumbling within months of their construction.

According to the Pentagon, China is involved in a massive nuclear expansion programme to match U.S. and Russian arsenals. A Wall Street Journal report suggested Zhang’s suspected crime was discussing unspecified “nuclear secrets” with U.S. counterparts.

The fact that story is doing the rounds at all in China, though, suggests that contact with the U.S. touching on any element of Beijing’s military posture may now be seen as criminal – and a serious and perhaps fatal crime at that.

That could act as a wrecking ball to remaining if already often unsuccessful U.S. efforts to build closer military-to-military relations with Beijing.

CUTTING BACK RELATIONS?

From the beginning of the century, U.S. and other Western officials, academics and think-tanks have invested considerable effort in cultivating dialogue with both senior current and former members of the PLA. Access to senior serving PLA officials, however, has largely dried up lately.

Outside those who have met through the most traditional diplomatic channels – embassy military attaches, for example – it is now relatively common to find even a well-connected Western China-watcher has not had a personal interaction with a PLA general or equivalent for more than half a decade. That is a dramatic shift from the previous era.

That shift is not quite as binary as it can be presented -Chinese PLA officials remain part of a growing diplomatic circuit in the “Global South”, where they encounter similarly active Western counterparts. Direct U.S.-China military relations, though, have become much harder to pursue.

In 2022, Beijing cancelled them altogether following the Taiwan visit of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Getting national security adviser Sullivan in front of General Zhang two years later took patient diplomacy, eventually signed off by Xi himself after his own meeting with Sullivan on the same trip to Beijing was seen to have gone well.

The meeting with Zhang yielded an initial agreement for the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo, to engage directly with China’s individual theatre commanders.

That led to a video call and then a visit to Hawaii for PLA Southern Theatre Commander General Wu Yunan, who is responsible for the highly contested South China Sea region.

U.S. commanders were keen to meet with him to discuss clashes around disputed islands including with the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally.

But U.S. officials said they also wanted to open dialogue with Eastern Theatre chief Lin Xiangyang, the commander most responsible for operations and planning around Taiwan. Lin had made a highly public conference speech in spring 2025 pledging that the PLA was ready to move against Taiwan if ordered.

Both Wu and Lin appear to have since been purged.

Whatever China’s military is told to do next – as well as what it thinks about subjects including the future of Taiwan and rule of an ageing Xi – was already getting harder to know beyond the publications of the PLA itself.

However, top U.S. decision-makers will also be able to access whatever their spy agencies can intercept.

Even as Xi talks trade with the U.S., Canada and Europe, he may now have decided to cut the PLA out of communications with the West. At the age of 73, that may be designed to display Xi's strength. At worst, though, it might look like another superpower on the edge of chaos on a scale unseen since the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union.