When Xi Jinping presided over the lavish commissioning of China’s newest aircraft carrier this month, three officers expected to be crucial to the naval chain of command were strangely absent.
State television footage showed no sign of navy commander Admiral Hu Zhongming or Admiral Wu Yanan, commander of the southern theatre that includes the island of Hainan where the commissioning took place. The regional command’s political commissar Admiral Wang Wenquan was also missing.
The absences came amid a new wave of removals of People’s Liberation Army officers by Xi that shows the president’s purge is now embroiling large numbers of figures with vital command roles, fuelling speculation over the impact on how the military trains and whether it is ready to fight.
“They are trying to keep up appearances, but it is definitely having an effect on the PLA’s frontline operations,” said a US official briefed on the matter, adding that experts who did not perceive such an impact were probably suffering from an “an intelligence gap”.
The absence in Hainan of the three admirals came just weeks after Beijing announced the firing of 10 other senior PLA officers, including He Weidong, formerly the military’s third in command, who was quietly purged in April.
Admirals Hu and Wu were among 27 senior PLA officers who were missing from a crucial gathering of the Communist party’s central committee last month, absences that accounted for 64 per cent of its members with a military background. Most of those missing are thought to be under investigation or have already been confirmed as having lost their jobs or party membership.
The heads of all but one of the PLA’s five regional commands are currently unaccounted for, are under investigation or have been fired. The navy and the ground force have followed the rocket force in having their commanders targeted. The heads of several specialised departments under the Central Military Commission, the top command organ led by Xi, have disappeared from public view. And scores of political commissars have been ousted or are under some form of party investigation.
Since the ousting of He, the military number three, analysts have observed marked changes in its manoeuvres around Taiwan — the region where Beijing is believed to be most likely to take military action and where it has been training its forces hardest.
Since May, the Chinese military has been sending many fewer fighter jets directly across the Taiwan Strait’s median line than in the same period last year. Since July, overall monthly numbers of PLA aircraft flying close to Taiwan airspace have also dropped off compared to 2024.
However, analysts caution against concluding that the purges have impaired the force’s combat readiness and see a variety of other factors that could be driving the changes.
Experts with ties to Taiwan’s military believe He’s downfall has led to a change in the PLA’s strategy.
Tristan Tang, an associate fellow at the Research Project on China’s Defense Affairs in Taipei said He had been the driving force behind so-called grey zone warfare towards Taiwan.
“His background was originally in a PLA army reconnaissance unit, and they focus on intimidating and deterring Taiwan but also on probing enemy capabilities and finding out about enemy rules of engagement,” Tang said. “He would have advocated for operations towards Taiwan to prioritise this kind of activity.”
General Zhang Youxia, the Central Military Commission’s first vice-chair and second-in-command after Xi, was more focused on solid training to advance towards Xi’s long-term goal of making the force strong enough to match the US, Tang added.
“Zhang and He held different views on the CMC, and Zhang does not support the force engaging in all kinds of flashy activities,” he said. “It is likely that He’s departure led to a return to a different kind of training regimen.”
People familiar with the PLA’s manoeuvres said another factor was its increased ability to operate near Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.
“The PLA concluded late last year that they have mastered the skills necessary to control the first island chain, so they started moving on to focus training more on countering US forces in the Pacific,” said a foreign intelligence official.
In late 2024, the PLA held drills involving what Taipei called record numbers of naval ships and aircraft both around Taiwan and Japan and further out in the Pacific. This summer, two Chinese aircraft carriers operated outside the first island chain simultaneously for the first time and Beijing sent one carrier beyond the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam in the central Pacific for the first time.
Other analysts believe Beijing has adjusted its behaviour around Taiwan for broader political aims.
“The changes may have something to do with the frontline commanders being removed from their posts,” said James Char, an assistant professor at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies who has been tracking Xi’s PLA purges for a decade.
“But there may also be a regional context or a connection with domestic politics within Taiwan itself,” Char said.
He said Beijing might be avoiding controversial PLA movements so as not to miss the opportunity presented by the election by Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang of a new chair who has made China-friendly remarks. Beijing’s desire for a deal with US President Donald Trump might also be behind the reduced activity around Taiwan.
However, observers caution that the broadening of Xi’s purges could have big implications on the force for years to come and might be a concern for Xi when considering warfare in the Taiwan Strait.
“We are only skimming the surface here,” said Char, pointing to the purges of top PLA leaders that have become public. “There may be hundreds of others under the offices under the CMC that are affected.”
Xi’s campaign was previously focused on corruption around weapons research and procurement — which resulted in taking down many top officials linked to the CMC’s equipment development department, the entire leadership of the missile forces and two consecutive defence ministers. It is now developing into a wider attempt to overhaul the armed forces’ personnel management.
Since the ousting late last year of Miao Hua, the CMC member in charge of political work, Xi has unleashed a sweeping crackdown on political commissars, the PLA officers who are in charge of securing the force’s loyalty to the party while also managing and promoting personnel.
A new set of regulations on rectifying the conduct of political cadres that the military newspaper PLA Daily announced in July demands that the cadres respond to grassroots demands and be accountable to the rank and file. Analysts believe this opens the door for wide-ranging denunciations of commissars by their underlings.
That could lead to further waves of purges and trigger a rapid turnover that would promote large numbers of much younger officers with fewer patronage ties across the force.
Analysts argue the reform effort attempts to address the structural weakness that stems from the party’s system of political control over the PLA, which hinders the decentralisation of command that western military experts believe is key for making a force agile in wartime.
Some observers have become concerned about the longer-term impact of the possible promotion of large numbers of new commanders on the mindset of the PLA officer corps.
“They might be a lot less risk-averse, more nationalistic and more aggressive,” said a Taiwanese senior official. “So to be honest, the outcome of these purges is still completely unclear.”
Data visualisation by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong
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