It was a bitterly cold, overcast winter day when China’s senior-most general left for a meeting with hundreds of high-ranking Communist Party officials, including their leader, Xi Jinping.
Gen. Zhang Youxia never made it.
Security personnel sent by Xi intercepted Zhang en route to the gathering at the Central Party School in Beijing, said people close to Chinese government decision-making. Securing the general in an undisclosed location, officers also raided Zhang’s home and detained his son, a military researcher, the people said.
Zhang’s arrest on Jan. 19 marked a stunning fall for a man whose political lineage and loyalty once made him the bedrock of the Chinese ruler’s military flank. But it also represented something more profound for China—the consolidation of absolute power by Xi, asserting again his primacy over the world’s second-most-powerful military.
Zhang’s downfall capped more than a decade of military purges that have sidelined dozens of high-ranking officers and cemented Xi’s control. A childhood friend that Xi called his “big brother,” Zhang rose to prominence following the initial waves of dismissals—a move seen as placing a trusted ally at the helm of the military. Analysts said Zhang’s ouster shows that, even with totalitarian control, Xi is having trouble finding a leadership circle he can fully trust.
“The fall of Zhang Youxia signals that Xi’s ‘one-man rule’ has reached a point where systemic trust—the belief that loyalty guarantees safety—has completely evaporated,” said Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California and editor of the quarterly journal, China Leadership Monitor. “At this stage, he isn’t ruling through a stable coalition anymore. Rather, he is relying on a cycle of endless political purges to keep his grip on power.”
Days before Zhang’s arrest, Xi had quietly appointed a new commander to lead the elite force responsible for the security of Beijing. He installed a trusted figure from Shanghai’s armed police, breaking from the tradition of appointing an army officer. This unusual move, the people close to decision-making say, is aimed at ensuring the capital’s defense is led by a figure personally beholden to Xi, rather than the military networks associated with the purged general.
After Zhang disappeared, the Chinese leadership kept its military brass in the dark about why their most senior commander didn’t attend the Jan. 20 “study session” with Xi, a can’t-miss event. Senior civilian party officials were briefed within 24 hours of his arrest, but the military high command didn’t learn until a few hours before the news was broadcast to the world on Jan. 24.
During a high-level military briefing that morning, Zhang was accused of leaking core technical data regarding China’s nuclear-weapons program to the U.S., The Wall Street Journal has previously reported. Other charges included forming “political cliques,” abusing his authority within the military commission, and accepting bribes to promote officials, the Journal reported.
The Journal hasn’t been able to independently verify these allegations. Party leaders have a history of tarring their enemies with allegations that may not be grounded in reality. A Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman warned against “unfounded speculation,” referring back to an official statement that the probe concerns violations of party discipline and state law.
Xi began his most recent round of purges in the summer of 2023 after he watched his strategic partner, Russian President Vladimir Putin, suffer a direct challenge to his authority—a failed coup staged by his once-trusted aide, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the now-dead operator of Wagner, the private army.
For the party, according to the people close to its decision-making, the Russian experience served as a cautionary tale. Moscow’s inability to secure a swift victory against both Ukraine and then Prigozhin, despite multibillion-dollar upgrades to its military, suggested to Chinese leaders that ambitious modernization doesn’t automatically produce a formidable fighting force.
With Xi already worried about corruption undermining his country’s fighting force, the people said, he appears to have concluded that military hardware alone is insufficient if it isn’t backed by absolute political loyalty.
As the son of a revolutionary elder, Xi began his career in a plum posting at the heart of the defense establishment. In 1979, the 26-year-old Xi was appointed as a personal secretary to Geng Biao, then the secretary-general of the Central Military Commission—the decision-making body for the People’s Liberation Army—and a close comrade of Xi’s father. That early access gave Xi a front-row seat to the raw mechanics of military power—and taught him that the commander who doesn’t fully control the generals is a leader standing on quicksand.
Upon rising to the party’s top job in late 2012, Xi wasted no time in launching a sweeping overhaul of the military, driven by a conviction that it had been riddled with corruption and structurally ill-equipped for modern, integrated warfare. He initiated an antigraft purge and dismantled the military’s top-heavy administrative fiefs in favor of centralized, joint-combat theater commands that report directly to the Central Military Commission, which he leads.
More than a decade later, he has gone a step further. Since mid-2023, Xi has removed five of the Central Military Commission’s seven members. Rather than repopulating the body, he has left most seats vacant. On the same day Zhang was shoved aside, another commission member, Gen. Liu Zhenli, was also placed under investigation.
Today, the commission is made up only of Xi, who is its chairman, and a general known less as a traditional warrior than as a political enforcer.
These purges, analysts say, effectively have transformed the Central Military Commission from a decision-making body into a personal secretariat, cementing Xi as the sole arbiter of military power.
Dennis Wilder, a former U.S. intelligence officer who has spent decades analyzing the Chinese military and Beijing’s corridors of power, describes the ouster of Zhang as the “most stunning development in Chinese politics” since Xi came to power.
Wilder, now a professor at Georgetown University, notes that the fallout is far from over, as Zhang and other senior officers are likely being “sweated” in detention centers to produce confessions and reveal their wider patronage networks, suggesting a much deeper wave of political cleansing to come. In Xi’s view, the people close to decision-making say, these networks represent a serious threat to his authority.
The Journal has reported that, in a sign of the depth of the current probe, Xi has commissioned a task force to conduct a deep-dive investigation into Zhang’s tenure as commander of the Shenyang Military Region, one of China’s most strategically sensitive and historically entrenched military hubs.
As the traditional cradle of Chinese heavy industry, the region provides the industrial backbone for advanced naval and aerospace production. It is a vital node for China’s strategic missile forces. Specifically, the region hosts a major Rocket Force base that manages a network of regional ballistic missiles.
Zhang’s tenure in Shenyang spanned five years from 2007 to 2012, a time when he built the kind of deep loyalties in the military ranks that Xi ultimately found untenable. The investigators have notably chosen to stay in local hotels in the city of Shenyang, rather than military bases, where Zhang would have a network of support.
In an apparent effort to steady morale following Zhang’s arrest, Xi used a video address on Feb. 11 to appeal directly to the boots on the ground. He said the rank and file had been hardened “in the fight against corruption” and praised them as “entirely trustworthy.”
With an institutional vacuum at its highest ranks, the Chinese military is now struggling with how the chain of command functions, analysts inside and outside China say. Xi is more at risk of being insulated from professional military advice, just as the armed forces are building up their capabilities and increasing pressure on Taiwan.
Jon Czin, a former senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, said Xi’s leadership style has changed. He said earlier purges targeted political rivals or distant peers, but Xi has now progressed to marginalizing partners and is “really going after his friends” like Zhang.
Zhang and Xi are both “princelings” whose fathers fought side-by-side in the 1940s civil war that forged modern China.
When Xi, 72 years old, assumed the presidency, he effectively made Zhang, 75, the architect of his military vision. By personally elevating Zhang to the rank of No. 1 general in 2022 even after he had passed the customary retirement age, Xi signaled that Zhang was the indispensable hand behind the military’s modernization.
As a battle-hardened veteran and a trusted confidant, Zhang played an instrumental role in helping Xi centralize power at the top. For years, he had been the primary guardian of Xi’s “China Dream” of national rejuvenation, serving as the bridge between the party’s revolutionary past and its high-tech military future.
Czin, currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said Xi is stripping the high command “down to its studs,” demonstrating a total loss of patience with the military institution itself. This move indicates that even lifelong revolutionary ties—like the “princeling” connection Xi shared with Zhang—provide no protection.
As the investigations continue, the purge underscores a new, darker phase of Xi’s tenure. Czin of Brookings describes this as the “ultimate demonstration of Xi’s coldbloodedness,” proving he is willing to discard “lifelong-revolutionary ties to ensure the military lives up to his unforgiving standards.”
The specific reasons for Zhang’s undoing remain shrouded in mystery.
Official statements from the Ministry of National Defense and state media have avoided specifics, saying Zhang is under investigation for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law.”
However, a flagship military editorial accused Zhang of having “seriously trampled on and undermined the system of ultimate responsibility resting with the chairman.” This rare phrasing suggests the arrest was in response to a perceived direct challenge to Xi’s absolute command rather than routine graft.
The nuclear-secrets allegations add a strategic twist touching on China’s battle-readiness. Evidence of vulnerability surfaced in recent years through a series of reports by American researchers that detailed China’s rapid nuclear expansion.
Wilder, the former intelligence official, noted that the public exposure of roughly 300 new nuclear-missile silos in western regions like Gansu and Xinjiang likely unsettled Beijing. This tension, he said, was compounded by subsequent U.S. intelligence reports alleging that widespread corruption had rendered some of these missiles nonfunctional—including claims of defective silo lids. Such reports likely made the Chinese leadership feel vulnerable and “paranoid,” Wilder said.
For Xi, the fact that Western intelligence could identify such humiliating technical flaws suggested a breach of trust, Wilder said, leading him to suspect that “somebody is telling somebody something” from deep within the defense-industrial complex.
Even if unproven, the alleged espionage charge serves a political function, reframing a power struggle as a matter of patriotism and foreclosing any narrative of Zhang as a “loyal dissenter,” wrote Seong-Hyon Lee of the George H.W. Bush Foundation in a recent article published by the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
Such charges also justify a closed-door trial, avoiding public scrutiny.
The 2014 downfall of Zhou Yongkang, the former domestic security czar, offers a possible template. As the most significant “tiger” caught in Xi’s early anticorruption campaign, Zhou was sentenced to life in prison following a secret trial that found him guilty of bribery, abuse of power, and leaking “party and state secrets.”
The historical parallels to the era of Mao Zedong are unmistakable, Chinese historians say. They point to the 1971 fall of Lin Biao, who was dubbed the “invincible general” for his crucial role in winning the Chinese civil war.
By 1970, Lin had become what many party insiders then called a “second center” of power. Mao grew paranoid that the military’s devotion to Lin was eclipsing its loyalty to him. That tension reached a breaking point in September 1971, when Lin allegedly attempted a botched coup before dying in a mysterious plane crash in the Mongolian desert while fleeing to the Soviet Union.
The downfall of both Lin and Zhang reflects a recurring pattern in Chinese communist history in which the person closest to the leader becomes the primary target of his suspicion.
Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com