Since 2022, more than 100 senior People’s Liberation Army officers have been removed, disappeared, or placed under investigation, and last week two former defense ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, were handed suspended death sentences that will commute to life imprisonment without parole. The Central Military Commission, which is supposed to have seven members, is down to two: Xi himself and a discipline specialist. Xi’s hand-picked vice chairman, the PLA’s top professional soldier, is now under investigation. It’s tempting to read this as pure power consolidation, a Stalin-style coup-proofing where the dictator clears out anyone who could plausibly threaten him. There’s some of that. But it doesn’t fit on its own. The PLA was, by all accounts, a deeply broken institution: officer commissions bought and sold, Rocket Force silos with blast doors that wouldn’t open, missiles found filled with water instead of fuel. Xi seems to genuinely care that the party’s military can fight. So why now, and why this hard? Two readings, probably both true. Yes, he’s removing potential rivals and reasserting Communist Party control over a force that had drifted into a kind of fiefdom. But he’s also clearing deadwood ahead of what he plainly considers the main event of the next decade: Taiwan. The PLA hasn’t fought a real war since 1979 against Vietnam, and got humiliated then. If you’re planning to do amphibious combined-arms operations across the strait, a patronage racket won’t get you there. We compare this to Stalin’s late-1930s purges, which gutted Soviet readiness right before Barbarossa, talk through what it means that the man Xi appointed to actually run the army is the one being disappeared, and ask the uncomfortable question: does a leaner, less corrupt, more politically loyal PLA make a Taiwan move more likely or less? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com
