After the fall of two top generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, in late January, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was left with only Chairman Xi Jinping and one vice chairman, Zhang Shengmin. Over the past two years, many senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been investigated. By an incomplete count, more than a dozen active-duty full generals have gone down.
Xi has moved against his generals with greater severity than against civilian officials. That vigor is especially evident in the systematic cleanup of the CMC, the PLA’s highest command body.
After the fall of two top generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, in late January, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was left with only Chairman Xi Jinping and one vice chairman, Zhang Shengmin. Over the past two years, many senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been investigated. By an incomplete count, more than a dozen active-duty full generals have gone down.
Xi has moved against his generals with greater severity than against civilian officials. That vigor is especially evident in the systematic cleanup of the CMC, the PLA’s highest command body.
In officialdom, it is rare to find someone without at least a suspicion of corruption; the real question is whether the leadership chooses to act. Xi’s predecessors did not refrain from anti-corruption because they lacked the will. The decisive difference was the power structure. Xi has built a system of personal authority second only to Mao Zedong—how he built it is not the subject here.
His opponents like to describe his rule as totalitarian. As an expression of moral outrage, that’s fine, but in stricter analytical terms, Xi’s system has not become the kind of totalitarianism associated with Mao or Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. This is not merely a difference in degree but a partial difference in kind.
Classic totalitarianism has three salient features: first, a grand project to remake society and human nature, typically expressed through mass mobilization; second, politics in command, with private life fully politicized; and third, rule by terror in which secret police serve as the primary instrument, enabling arbitrary arrest, punishment, or elimination of opponents without necessary or proper procedures. Communist totalitarianism also includes an economic element: the abolition of private property and comprehensive public ownership.
Xi’s system resembles this in parts, but overall it lacks the sustained mobilization of mass movements aimed at remaking society, and it lacks the Mao-era capacity—organizational and psychological—to convert political pressure into nationwide frenzy at will. A more accurate description, then, is that it is an intensified autocracy: a technological and organizational reinforcement of traditional authoritarian rule in the digital age.
It manifests as finer-grained social control, tighter discipline imposed on the bureaucracy, and more centralized orchestration of policy and propaganda. It certainly imposes political pressure and suppresses thought and speech. At most, however, it seeks to remake and purify the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself, not human nature.
This remaking manifests most fiercely in the PLA, where Xi has put in place a more personalized and finalistic arrangement of power to maintain security, one that comes close to totalitarianism inside the once relatively independent and closed off military system. That is the CMC chairman responsibility system, an idea introduced by Xi in 2014 that emphasizes the chairman’s total control over all military matters.
Xi has elevated this into the military’s highest political institution and highest political principle, turning it into the instrument of absolute control. Through ideology, organization, rules, procedures, and accountability, it penetrates every part of the PLA, further personalizing and concretizing the CCP’s absolute leadership over the military. The endpoint of loyalty is not an abstract party but the chairman; the endpoint of obedience is not collective decision-making but personal judgement.
Xi’s design is elegant, but implementing an absolute leadership system inside the military runs into an unavoidable structural contradiction: The chairmanship system, in form, requires all command and management to be unified under the chairman as an individual, yet in reality, that cannot be done by the chairman personally.
Xi lacks the time and bandwidth, and he certainly does not possess the expertise in highly specialized domains—operations, training, equipment, readiness, and reform—to carry out the day-to-day command and managerial functions himself. His role is closer to that of a supreme decision-maker and final arbiter. The daily operation of the military is delegated to trusted deputies, and CMC vice chairmen sit at the core of that proxy structure. In practice, then, he operates through the vice chairmen—a mixture of serving generals and political commissars with the title of general. In theory, Xi makes decisions and renders final judgments; vice chairmen handle execution and implementation.
This is where the problem lies. Xi wants vice chairmen to be mere handlers, carrying out his instructions, plans, and requirements—competent generals who do not encroach on power or form a center around themselves. But that’s not how people—or systems—work. The proxies end up asserting authority themselves, and their professional expertise gives them interpretative authority. By selectively implementing the chairman’s orders, or going through the motions while quietly resisting them, they obtain their own form of power. This doesn’t necessarily mean subversion or opposition to Xi; sometimes it may just be using professional judgment to steer the execution of an order in a practical fashion—but one that still departs from Xi’s intent. The generals, after all, know what the military can and can’t do far better than the chairman does.
Yet this creates another problem. As the proxies become more powerful, they develop personnel networks of their own. The appointment of senior officers belongs, of course, to the chairman. Yet vice chairmen typically possess recommendation power and a de facto veto, especially in the domains they oversee. Once a personnel network takes shape, a secondary power center forms around the vice chairman.
But that ends up creating a secondary center of power, and the chairman instinctively perceives that as a threat. Military power stops becoming a direct line from chairman to troops and acquires a circuit breaker in between. The facts the chairman sees may be filtered, the implementation of orders may be translated by professional gatekeepers, and cadres’ loyalty may be to their patron rather than to the chairman. An absolute leadership system cannot tolerate this.
That is why Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has continued to reach higher levels of the military. The trigger is often not how much someone stole but the chairman’s realization that the channel has been captured by proxies—that he cannot obtain truthful information and his orders are not fully carried out. Then the only choice is to strike, under the guise of “anti-corruption.” This was the problem for Zhang, Liu, and the others before them; the role they were placed in by the system controlled by Xi inevitably made them a problem for Xi.
This also explains why the military campaign has been sharper than its civilian counterpart. The more the PLA is shaped into a system of personal loyalty, the more, in practice, it relies on proxy figures such as the vice chairmen—and the more power they inadvertently develop.
The more the chairman centralizes, the more he depends on proxies; the more he depends on them, the more he fears them; the more he fears them, the more he purges them; and the more he purges them, the harder it becomes to find proxies who are capable, willing to take responsibility, yet absolutely safe. Military and political security may look tighter under ferocious purges, but it may also become more fragile as truthful information and real capabilities drain away.
