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During the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, a 26-year-old company commander’s unit was pinned down by a fortified hilltop. After frontal assaults failed, the junior officer made an extraordinary request: an entire battalion, four times the size of his own unit, for a jungle flanking maneuver. The regimental commander agreed. The surprise assault broke the Vietnamese defense. This company commander’s pedigree was as formidable as his tactics: His father was a founding general who had just retired as head of the Chinese military’s General Logistics Department.
Five years later, that same officer commanded the regiment tasked with the main assault at the Battle of Laoshan, the largest engagement of the Sino-Vietnamese border war. His attack plan, the military’s first complete infantry-artillery coordination plan since the Cultural Revolution, required massed artillery support far exceeding what any single regimental commander could normally secure. During a massive counterattack, his regiment held the line against six enemy regiments. His competence was real. So was the informal network of guanxi — the entrenched personal connections and reciprocal obligations — that put him in a position to demonstrate it.
The officer was Zhang Youxia. In January 2026, nearly half a century after his triumph in Vietnam, he became the most senior general to fall in General Secretary Xi Jinping’s unprecedented purge.
Analysts have debated the specific triggers behind individual dismissals, offering explanations ranging from corruption and intelligence leaks to power consolidation and strategic disagreements over Taiwan. Yet focusing on these disparate motives obscures a deeper convergence: The overarching logic of Xi’s campaign is to make the military unconditionally responsive to his will. The primary obstacle to that goal is the emergence of any force capable of operating beyond his control. That force takes the form of informal networks. Both the earlier structural reforms to dismantle the traditional general departments and military regions, and the current wave of purges, have targeted them.
The more consequential question is what comes after. Joel Wuthnow has offered a systematic analysis: While the purges disrupt short-term readiness, they will clear the way for a new generation of officers. The danger, in his view, is that the “professional competence of the military’s new elite” will “give Xi confidence that he has the right people in place to lead a war.” These new commanders will enhance warfighting capability but lack the political capital to push back against Xi’s war optimism.
This assessment is carefully reasoned, but its medium-term prediction is likely wrong. It overlooks the role that informal networks play in a military that lacks the modern institutional foundations to function effectively without them. After the most sweeping purge since the 1970s, the surviving high command has every incentive to avoid accumulating the personal networks that effective command requires. The result will be atomization, not professionalization. The scenario in which a newly professionalized military gives Xi the confidence that he has the right force in place to win a war will not materialize.
Every military cultivates informal relationships to identify talent, resolve bureaucratic friction, and build the trust required for complex coordination. West Point classmates look out for each other. Senior officers mentor protégés. But in Western armed forces, these networks operate within and are constrained by robust formal institutions: transparent promotion boards, independent military judiciaries, standardized operational doctrines, and rigorous budgeting frameworks. When informal networks disappear, the formal system carries the load. No American junior commander in the modern era has ever needed a general or flag officer’s bloodline to secure more forces for his battle plan.
What distinguishes the Chinese military is the absence of these foundational structures. The People’s Liberation Army operates strictly as the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party, without the institutional independence of a state military. It possesses an elaborate apparatus of political control: a capillary political commissar system, discipline inspection commissions, and internal audit bodies, all engineered to ensure loyalty.
While the military has no shortage of written regulations, the lack of modern institutional foundations — combined with the absolute supremacy of politics — means the formal system cannot reliably deliver effective professional management. To bypass this gridlock, the burden falls on the individual officer. In China, relying on informal networks is how an officer actually navigates the system: It is the mechanism through which one secures a promotion, obtains political shelter during an investigation, and even negotiates for battlefield command or prioritized ammunition. These guanxi coalesce into an umbrella — the essential patronage infrastructure that provides the security and resources necessary to function within a totalizing party-state.
Extensive research documents how personal networks compensate for bureaucratic failure across Chinese military life. Within the personnel system, formal regulations interact with informal ties, driving senior leaders to elevate competent officers primarily from within their own guanxi networks. This reliance on patronage extends far beyond career advancement, dictating weapons procurement and cross-departmental coordination. The party’s totalizing political machinery consumes a disproportionate share of the force’s time to ensure ideological compliance. Consequently, officers frequently rely on informal networks to short-circuit the bureaucracy and execute the actual mechanics of generating combat power.
These networks are not conspiracies. They are the natural residue of a career: who your former commander was, whom you promoted, whom you trained alongside, whom you came to trust over decades of shared service. An officer who serves competently, mentors subordinates, and cultivates trust across departments has simply done his job. While pervasive graft often accompanies these networks, within the Chinese party-state, corruption is a lesser concern for the political center than the threat of autonomous power. The true danger is that the resulting web of relationships is always liable to become indistinguishable, in Xi’s eyes, from a political threat. “Forming cliques,” the charge leveled against virtually every purged general, is the label Xi applies to anyone whose accumulated relationships make him uncomfortable.
In 1975, Deng Xiaoping diagnosed a fatal institutional disease within the military: “mountaintopism,” the entrenched “mountain-stronghold” mentality (shantou zhuyi). He warned that the army was plagued by factionalism and an inadequate sense of organizational discipline. This fragmentation was baked into the military’s origins as a patchwork of decentralized guerrilla forces. The rhetoric of eradicating mountaintopism was a demand, at bottom, for absolute submission to the political center. Fifty years later, Xi is waging a great purge driven by a similar anxiety.
Xi views informal networks with a dual logic of calculated utilization and perpetual suspicion. The initial purge of General Secretary Jiang Zemin-era holdovers succeeded precisely because it was underwritten by General Secretary Hu Jintao’s legacy military ties and princeling allies like Gen. Liu Yuan. To push through structural reforms that broke up the mountain-strongholds embedded in the ground force-dominated system, he relied on the air force network led by Gen. Xu Qiliang, the key executor of the entire program. With the old order shattered, Xi staffed the newly minted commands with loyalists drawn from his southeastern provincial career — a trusted cohort rooted in the 31st Group Army that became the “Fujian clique.” Meanwhile, Zhang’s network served as the indispensable anchor for maintaining equilibrium within a military still heavy with traditional infantry influence, representing both the old army establishment and the regime’s princeling blood covenant.
What Xi cannot abide is the moment an informal network swells beyond a pliable tool of rule into a structural constraint on his own exercise of power. Zhang illustrates this trajectory. During his tenure as commander of the Shenyang Military Region in the late 2000s, Zhang pioneered a military housing program that leveraged military land allocations to broker massive construction deals between local governments and commercial developers, securing desperately needed housing for thousands of officers. This early ability to bypass formal constraints cemented intense personal loyalties among subordinates while forging deep ties with civilian elites and private wealth. Upon ascending to head the General Armaments Department — later reorganized as the Equipment Development Department, the military’s supreme authority for weapons planning, procurement, and defense-industrial oversight — Zhang scaled this logic to the national level, leveraging his network to fast-track next-generation weapons systems and pull private tech enterprises into the defense supply chain under the “military-civil fusion” banner. The result was a patronage empire that simultaneously delivered real combat power and generated systemic corruption on an industrial scale. When this systemic corruption brought down Defense Minister Li Shangfu, it exposed critical vulnerabilities across the defense-industrial base and directly compromised Xi’s strategic timetable.
Zhang survived the initial fallout but emerged with his patronage base badly shaken. What followed were signs of a counterattack: Zhang mobilized his remaining influence against the rival Fujian clique led by Political Work Department Director Miao Hua. Miao had leveraged his monopoly over the nomination pipeline to transform the chairman’s mechanism for loyalty control into a deeply interconnected faction whose reach far exceeded Xi’s intended design. Xi likely permitted Zhang’s campaign against Miao to run its course. The collateral damage was staggering: Gen. He Weidong, the military’s second-ranking officer and chief architect of Taiwan invasion planning, was purged alongside Miao due to shared factional entanglement, underscoring the absolute supremacy of political security over military utility. Yet by successfully engineering the downfall of his rivals, Zhang sealed his own fate. A general capable of weaponizing his network to annihilate a rival ceases to be a tool of the center, becoming instead an independent center of gravity that requires immediate eradication.
The cycle has restarted, but the survival logic has shifted. Having dismantled the dominant power blocs, Xi turned to what remains of the air force network cultivated by the late Xu. Yang Zhibin and Han Shengyan, both career air force officers, were promoted to general, making them the only active-duty generals besides Zhang Shengmin and Dong Jun. But the lesson of this purge will not be lost on them. Xi’s tolerance threshold has dropped precipitously. If he destroyed Zhang — a figure once considered “too big to fail” — no rational top commander would risk accumulating even a fraction of that influence. The most likely outcome is not another round of network-building followed by another purge. It is voluntary self-atomization: generals who sever the informal ties and patronage networks that might one day be reinterpreted as “forming cliques.”
Xi envisions an ideal military where the high command is strictly atomized: individually competent, readily replaceable, and personally loyal to no one but the supreme leader. But this vision collides with the reality that navigating the party-state requires exactly the kind of patronage umbrella that the purges have destroyed. Informal networks served as the essential workaround to this systemic gridlock. They provided the patronage cover under which Zhang spearheaded leapfrog weapons development, Miao overhauled the military’s personnel system, and He masterminded the “Joint Sword” encirclement campaigns. For the officers executing these directives, a powerful patron provided the political shield to take initiative and allocate resources, free from the fear of operational failure and attendant retribution.
The eradication of these networks has plunged the Chinese military into a pervasive climate of survivalism. In an environment defined by intense surveillance and retroactive accountability, the retreat from factionalism has metastasized into a wholesale retreat from responsibility. As the purges progress, the loss of these networks produces immediate symptoms of mechanical operation and bureaucratic stagnation. More than half of the military’s top 176 leadership positions have been affected by the purges, leaving critical posts like the Southern Theater Command sitting vacant for months. This command vacuum has demonstrably degraded readiness: Joint exercises with Russia plummeted from 14 instances in 2024 to just six in 2025, and exercises around Taiwan in 2025 took between 12 and 19 days to transition from political directive to deployment — a dramatic lag compared to the three to four days required for identical maneuvers in 2024.
This institutional paralysis mirrors a broader crisis afflicting the entire party-state. While the military’s extreme opacity masks the full extent of its internal dysfunction, the civilian party-state provides an instructive parallel. Facing identical punitive political pressures, local cadres have universally adopted “lying flat” as a survival strategy. Such administrative paralysis has become so severe that in February 2026, the Central Committee’s flagship journal Qiushi pointedly published a curated compilation of Xi’s directives demanding that cadres “take charge and act.” Recent empirical research corroborates this dynamic, demonstrating that when a single administrative failure can trigger career-ending repercussions, officials rationally choose inaction over any form of initiative.
Beyond operational stagnation, atomization has removed the military’s internal safety valves and heightened the risk of an unintended kinetic clash. The purge systematically replaced an entrenched old guard, who protected the status quo to preserve their patronage networks, with an echelon of terrified successors. This dynamic grants Xi greater latitude to order troops into combat. While these new commanders possess stronger technical credentials, they lack the political capital to act as a strategic braking mechanism. Stripped of the weight to stall or manage crises privately, this atomized officer corps no longer buffers political pressure or transmits honest assessments. Xi is left to make decisions in an information environment divorced from reality.
The commander in chief has achieved his goal of political sterilization, but at the cost of the military’s institutional spine: He has forged a hollow force too frightened to fight, yet too frightened to stand down.
For China’s opponents, the hollowing out of the Chinese high command may appear to reduce the near-term threat. Policymakers should not expect a professionally rebuilt Chinese military to emerge from this crucible. Professionalization requires sustained institutional trust: officers willing to build cross-service relationships, develop subordinates, speak candidly about problems, and take initiative under ambiguous conditions. The purge climate has made every one of these behaviors a career-ending risk. Without the informal networks that once functioned as the military’s shadow infrastructure, real combat power is unlikely to improve substantially in the medium term. This represents an objective constraint on Xi’s ability to wage war, regardless of his intentions.
But a paralyzed machine is not a safe one. By eradicating the informal networks that paradoxically served as the military’s primary risk management mechanism, Xi has dismantled his own safety valves. With these circuit breakers removed and the high command populated by terrified loyalists, the threshold for strategic miscalculation has never been lower.
Christopher Nye is a pseudonym for a non-resident fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, where he specializes in Chinese Communist Party elite politics and the institutional dynamics of the Chinese military.
War on the Rocks readers can find our criteria for permitting authors to use pseudonyms on our submissions page.
Image: Chief Petty Officer Elliott Fabrizio via Wikimedia Commons
