Famed baseball player Yogi Berra is often credited with the quote, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” One could add a “communist corollary”: It’s difficult not only to predict what authoritarian regimes will do, but to explain what they have already done. Unlike democracies, where information is often open, accessible, and verifiable, totalitarian governments conceal truth because their propaganda cannot survive the scrutiny of sunlight.
Consider the latest round of political and military purges in the People’s Republic of China. Late last month, state organs announced investigations into and the removal of two high-level military officials in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA): Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and Liu Zhenli, chief of the CMC’s Joint Staff Department. These moves, the latest in a long line of leadership shake-ups inside China, marked some of the most consequential expulsions in the country’s modern history.
In recent days, China watchers have been divided over two questions: Why were Zhang and Liu dismissed, and who ordered their dismissals? Beneath these questions are deeper disagreements about President Xi Jinping’s political standing within China. For the U.S., much rests on the answers. If Xi is large and in charge, then leaders in Washington have little choice but to deal with his domestic dominance. If he is losing support, however, then opportunities arise to exploit Beijing’s weaknesses.
A purge and a build-up.
Unlike the U.S. military, which is civilian-controlled as a constitutional matter, the PLA has always served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That’s more than an esoteric distinction. Sailors, soldiers, airmen, Marines, and Guardians do not answer to the Republican or Democratic parties, regardless of election swings. They answer to the president and his or her Senate-confirmed appointees. The PLA, however, is the CCP’s armed wing. It serves a political party, not the state. The CMC formalizes this arrangement and is among the most elite and powerful institutions in China.
Aside from Xi Jinping, Zhang was the senior-most official on the CMC. His father also served alongside Xi’s father during China’s civil war, and both Xi and Zhang grew up as “princeling” party elites, making the charges against Zhang all the more shocking. The Ministry of National Defense announced an investigation into Zhang and Liu for “serious disciplinary and legal violations.” Analysis from the Jamestown Foundation suggests that both men openly defied Xi’s commands, as the charges include “seriously undermining” the party’s control of the military.
Over the past four years, Xi has worked to preserve that control, specifically by removing nearly all of the generals serving on the military commission. In a piece for the New York Times, China expert John Garnaut recently noted a similar trend underway in the party’s Central Committee: “As many as 34 of the 44 generals … have been ousted or were conspicuously missing from official appearances without explanation—a deeper purge than anything Mao ever conducted.”
This purification campaign coincides with the PLA’s unprecedented modernization and expansion. By at least one estimate, China’s military spending increased by 60 percent between 2015 and 2024. These investments have yielded quantitative advantages for China over the U.S. in ships and missiles, among other metrics. In 2023, the Australian government sounded the alarm: “China’s military build-up is now the largest and most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War.” In 2025, the Pentagon characterized the PLA’s expansion as “historic.”
The convergence of these two trends, military purges and military growth, should caution policymakers against taking comfort in Beijing’s infighting. Xi’s designs on Taiwan are clear, and the PLA’s expansion may indicate a singular strategic focus. They underscore the urgency of understanding what is happening inside China.
Absolute control.
Miles Yu, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently identified a core weakness inherent in Communist systems in a piece for the Washington Post: “Those closest to power are simultaneously the most indispensable and the most dangerous.” Power tends to centralize in a single leader who, in turn, must delegate that power to deputies who rightly fear crossing him. “The result,” Yu argued, “is predictable. The supreme leader becomes obsessed with hidden dissent, double loyalty, and especially foreign collusion.” Yu then walks through Mao Zedong’s numerous purges, from Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao to He Long and Liu Shaoqi.
Xi seems to suffer from that same paranoia. It could explain why military purges in the last year have swept up Xi loyalists like CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong and Adm. Miao Hua, as well as—most recently—Zhang Youxia. The cardinal sin of any apparatchik isn’t incompetence or corruption, but becoming too visible to the leader. American presidents would do well to exploit this potential weakness of China’s hierarchical system.
Jonathan A. Czin and John Culver of the Brookings Institution, however, have a slightly different view of Zhang’s dismissal. For Foreign Affairs magazine, they outlined Xi’s “long and well-documented history of hardhearted rationality” and downplayed the possibility that he perceived Zhang as a threat. “It is more likely,” they wrote, “that Zhang simply outlived his usefulness to Xi,” having already consolidated Xi’s power within the PLA. It could be that Xi sensed the need for a younger cohort to replace the old guard.
Similarly, former CIA analyst Christopher Johnson, also writing in Foreign Affairs, argued that Xi has demonstrated “unquestioned authority” over the military. Whereas Chinese leaders after Mao could leverage the PLA “only through careful bargaining,” Xi has dismantled that model. In 2016, Xi claimed operational command over China’s armed forces, a step beyond administrative control. The following year, Xi solidified his grip on the CMC by reducing its ranks from 11 to seven. What followed, of course, were purges targeting first officers, then officials in civilian security and intelligence services, and most recently, rocket force personnel and senior CMC officials.
Johnson also cautioned that these actions indicate Xi’s seriousness about meeting PLA operational requirements regarding Taiwan: “Outsiders run a serious risk by doubting [Xi’s] determination to achieve ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’” This analysis leaves few good options for American strategists, aside from accepting reality and dealing with the devil they have in Beijing.
It is also possible that Zhang Youxia and Xi had a substantive falling out. K. Tristan Tang made this case in a report for the Jamestown Foundation, wherein he asserts that Zhang “most likely fell from power due to disagreements with Xi Jinping over PLA development, particularly the joint operations training timeline, and may have pursued orders that ran counter to Xi’s directives.” For evidence, Tang points to a PLA Daily editorial alleging that Zhang had “seriously betrayed the trust and heavy responsibility entrusted by the Party Central and the CMC,” “seriously undermined the authority and image of the CMC leadership,” and “caused extremely severe harm to the Party, the state, and the military.”
These charges, according to Tang, suggest that Xi felt politically challenged and publicly disrespected by Zhang’s disobedience. Understanding the specific act of disobedience is key. Tang argues that Zhang and Liu “likely failed to meet Xi Jinping’s requirements for force building related to a Taiwan invasion,” possibly running eight years behind Xi’s schedule on securing joint operational capability. Tang cites a November 2025 People’s Daily article in which Zhang notably telegraphed his intent to focus on joint operations training well after 2027, the year Xi has identified as a benchmark for readiness. Xi’s purge, then, was an act to align the PLA’s timeline with his own.
If that’s true, American policymakers should expect to see increased belligerence toward Taiwan, and should begin testing policies of deterrence and compellence to shift the status quo in Washington’s and Taipei’s favor.
Power struggle.
But is Xi truly “large and in charge,” as the conventional wisdom assumes? In the Financial Times, Dennis Wilder of Georgetown University warned that “this assessment is dangerously wrong” because “every civilian leader since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 has had an uneasy relationship with the PLA.” In the wake of Zhang’s and Liu’s purge, Xi has not yet named a new military high command in the CMC, nor has he named new lieutenant generals. Meanwhile, the Politburo has not yet granted retroactive authorization of Zhang’s arrest and military leaders have yet to make open declarations of loyalty to Xi.
Human rights activist Dimon Liu recently noted these trends and questioned Xi’s domestic dominance in an interview with The Free Press: “It is a naked and more fierce than usual power struggle among the Chinese Communist Party elites. It is far from over — I would not count the winner until the last man is left standing.” She went on to reference analysis from Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese political dissident and former princeling who grew up with Xi and Zhang. According to Liu, Wei questions whether Xi himself is in danger.
Behind this provocative interpretation is an understanding of the four corners that constitute political control in China’s modern political system. Former Clinton administration official Bob Suettinger has identified them as propaganda organs, the military, party administration, and intelligence and internal security agencies. While Xi controls propaganda, Zhang up until recently held greater sway over PLA ground forces. A power struggle between Xi, Zhang, and other players could explain why the purges have targeted Xi loyalists like He Weidong and Miao Hua, given the possibility that those dismissals were not ordered by the general secretary himself.
Hints of CCP infighting have surfaced in recent years. Consider also Li Keqiang, China’s former premier. His final speech before his untimely death included a thinly veiled critique of Xi in 2023: “Heaven is looking at what humans are doing. The firmament has eyes.” Implicit in Li’s words was an assertion that Xi had broken the party’s implicit deal with the Chinese people after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: unchallenged power in exchange for increasing prosperity. Xi has long rebuffed systemic economic reforms, preferring to rely on state-directed stimulus and party-directed subsidies. Political control trumps economic dynamism for Xi, and that has left him open to not only popular discontent but also elite frustration.
An opening.
Successive American presidents have either dismissed the possibility of political instability in China or chosen to leave it unexploited. The most infamous example was the Tiananmen Square massacre, which developed in the wake of a power struggle within the party. Rather than standing with the Chinese people or condemning the PLA’s barbaric response to peaceful protests, Washington stood back and allowed the CCP to save face globally and resolve tension among factions internally. As I detailed in the opening chapter of Countering China’s Great Game, this calculation has pervaded much of America’s policy toward China.
Policymakers today should consider testing the proposition that Xi is unrivaled within Beijing. At worst, calculated competitive strategies will reveal that reports of high-level strife are wildly exaggerated, and President Donald Trump can return to dealing with Xi as he has done consistently by pursuing high-level diplomacy and trade negotiations. At best, these gambits could reveal cracks in the party’s facade and present opportunities for America to exacerbate divisions between the CCP and the Chinese people.
Ideally, Trump would delay his April trip to China. If Xi faces threats from rivals, then a visit from the U.S. president would risk bolstering Xi’s domestic image and boosting his leverage within the party. Delaying the visit, coupled with calculated critiques of Xi’s economic policies and draconian purges, could strengthen the hand of Xi’s opponents and destabilize the party. After all, an unstable Beijing rebounds to America’s benefit.
If Trump elects to go to Beijing, he still retains options to test Xi’s position. For instance, Trump could demand the immediate release of political prisoners, particularly Jimmy Lai, Pastor Ezra Jin, and Gulshan Abbas.
The president could also consider ways to compel Beijing to turn down the temperature in the Taiwan Strait and back off its aggressive military exercises. As I have previously argued, Trump should reduce Chinese student visas to the U.S. by 100 for each exercise the PLA conducts in and around Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace. Relatedly, Trump should rebuff Xi’s pressure and move forward with planned arms sales to Taipei.
The administration could also link the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific force posture with China’s own nuclear buildup. U.S. officials recently revealed that China, along with Russia, has secretly tested nuclear weapons. Trump should clarify to Xi that if he refuses to engage in arms control negotiations with Washington, then Washington will not hesitate to station forward-deployed medium-range ballistic missiles on China’s doorstep.
These policies are good and needed in their own right. Pushing them now, at a moment of apparent discord in the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, could reveal previously unappreciated weaknesses in Beijing. After all, a China beset with internal problems may struggle to foment foreign mischief.