Xi Can Purge His Generals, But He Cannot Purge Doubt

The most revealing word in China’s latest military purge is not “death.” It is “former.”

On May 7, 2026, a Chinese military court gave suspended death sentences to two former defense ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, after bribery proceedings reported by state media, according to the Associated Press¹. Suspended death sentences in China are often commuted to life imprisonment, so the courtroom drama is less important than the institutional map behind the names. Wei served as defense minister from 2018 to 2023, Li succeeded him and lasted only months before disappearing from public view, and Li had spent much of his career in the missile and procurement branches of the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, AP reported¹. That is the part I cannot get past. The scandal is not orbiting the edges of China’s armed forces. It is sitting in the ministries, missile units, and acquisition system that Xi Jinping would need if he ever ordered a blockade, missile campaign, or invasion against Taiwan.

I think the purge is best read as a sign of weakness inside China’s war machine, not because the PLA is falling apart, and not because Xi has lost control. He plainly has enough control to remove, prosecute, and terrorize senior officers. The weakness is more specific: Xi’s weapons buildup is real, but the institution that must turn those weapons into coordinated combat power looks less trustworthy, less continuous, and more politically brittle than the parade footage suggests.

Start with the chain of command. China’s Central Military Commission, or CMC, is the top body that oversees the armed forces, chaired by Xi himself. AP reported after the May 7 sentences that the CMC, which in earlier years had 11 members, now has only one member besides Xi, and that current Defense Minister Dong Jun still lacks the CMC seat usually associated with the job according to AP¹. That does not mean no one is running the PLA. It does mean the normal senior command architecture has been thinned to an extraordinary degree. A modern military can survive turnover. It has a harder time when the turnover hollows out the very group meant to advise the supreme commander, reconcile service rivalries, and manage crises.

The purge also reaches far beyond two disgraced ministers. In October 2025, China expelled He Weidong, then vice chair of the CMC, and eight other senior officials from the Communist Party and military over suspected serious misconduct linked to corruption, with AP identifying He as the most senior target in that wave and as a former head of the Eastern Theater Command, the command with primary responsibility for Taiwan operations according to AP². China’s own government statement said the nine officials had “seriously violated Party discipline” and were suspected of major duty-related crimes involving exceptionally large sums of money according to Xinhua via China’s State Council site³. Put plainly: the purge has touched the CMC, defense ministers, political-work officials, theater commanders, Rocket Force leaders, and procurement figures. That is not a bad apple problem. It is a system problem.

The best open-source attempt to quantify the damage comes from CSIS’s China Power Project, which built a database of senior PLA purges. Its February 2026 analysis identified 101 confirmed or potential purges of senior PLA officers since 2022, including six CMC members, and said the removals had “decimated” the PLA’s high command according to CSIS⁵. The same project’s database says that, among 52 key PLA leadership positions examined, only 11 were filled as of February 20, 2026 according to the CSIS dataset⁶. I would not treat every “potentially purged” name as proven. China’s system is opaque, and absence from public events is not a conviction. But when confirmed removals and unexplained disappearances cluster across the organs responsible for command, promotions, and force building, the burden shifts. The safer assumption is not business as usual.

The Rocket Force matters most. The PLA Rocket Force controls China’s land-based nuclear and conventional missiles, the tools Beijing would rely on to deter U.S. intervention, strike Taiwanese air bases and command nodes, and shape the first hours of any war. The Pentagon’s 2024 China Military Power Report said that from July to December 2023 at least 15 high-ranking military officers and defense-industry executives were removed, that several investigated leaders oversaw equipment-development projects tied to China’s ground-based nuclear and conventional missiles, and that the removals included senior Rocket Force leaders and Li Shangfu, who had led the CMC Equipment Development Department from 2017 to 2022, where he would have signed off on PLA weapons acquisitions according to the Defense Department report⁴.

That same Pentagon report went further. It said the wholesale dismissal of senior Rocket Force leadership may be connected to fraud cases involving underground ballistic-missile silos, that at least five Chinese defense-industry leaders, including the head of China’s largest missile manufacturer, had been detained, and that a rare PLA procurement investigation reached back to 2017 according to the Defense Department report⁴. Most tellingly, the report assessed that Beijing’s decision to appoint officers from outside the Rocket Force to lead it “probably signals Xi’s distrust” in the service’s senior leaders according to the Defense Department report⁴. If Xi distrusts the leaders of the missile force, outside analysts should not blithely assume that missile numbers equal missile reliability.

The counterargument is serious. Purges can strengthen authoritarian militaries by destroying patronage networks, scaring corrupt officers, and tightening obedience to the center. Xi’s military reforms after 2015 were designed to move the PLA away from old military-region fiefdoms and toward joint theater commands, with the CMC overseeing overall management, theaters focused on operations, and services focused on force building, as PLA specialists at National Defense University described in their analysis of China’s “Goldwater-Nichols” style reforms published by NDU Press⁷. Under that logic, cleaning out corrupt procurement chiefs and disloyal political-work officials is not evidence of collapse. It is preventive maintenance.

I buy part of that. Leaving a corrupt Rocket Force clique in place would be worse than removing it. A compromised procurement network can produce fake readiness, defective gear, distorted promotions, and commanders who tell Xi what he wants to hear. The PLA has also kept operating. In December 2025, China’s Eastern Theater Command said it had completed “Justice Mission 2025” around Taiwan and claimed the drills tested integrated joint operations capabilities according to AP⁸. That matters. A paralyzed military does not run large coercive exercises in the waters around Taiwan.

But drills are not war, and Taiwan is not a staff exercise. The Pentagon describes a large-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan as one of the PLA’s most complicated operations, requiring air and maritime superiority, rapid buildup and sustainment of supplies ashore, and uninterrupted support, while also facing attrition, urban warfare, resistance, and international response according to the Defense Department report⁴. That kind of campaign is exactly where hidden rot matters. A missile that underperforms, a logistics unit whose readiness was inflated, a newly promoted commander afraid to report bad news, a joint staff missing experienced officers: each flaw is manageable alone. Together, under fire, they compound.

This is why I part ways with the “purge means strength” reading. It explains Xi’s motive better than it explains the PLA’s condition. Yes, Xi is trying to build a more obedient force. But if you need to remove consecutive defense ministers, gut the top military commission, replace Rocket Force leaders from outside the branch, and investigate procurement going back years, the conclusion cannot simply be that the machine is being tuned. It is that the machine had been producing readings Xi himself no longer trusted.

Reuters, citing the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 2026 Military Balance, put the balance well: China’s purges are leaving serious deficiencies in command structure and likely hampering readiness, even as the effects may be temporary and modernization continues “apace” according to Reuters⁹. That is my view. The PLA remains dangerous. China’s ships, missiles, aircraft, cyber forces, and coast guard pressure are not imaginary. But usable combat power is not an inventory spreadsheet. It is hardware plus doctrine plus training plus logistics plus command trust. The purge tells us at least two of those variables are under strain.

The forward indicator I would watch is not another sentencing. It is whether Xi can refill the senior command system with experienced operational officers by the 2027 party congress cycle, while reducing visible churn in the Rocket Force and procurement bureaucracy. If the CMC is still skeletal, if Rocket Force leaders keep disappearing, or if Taiwan drills remain theatrical rather than more complex and sustained, I would discount China’s near-term Taiwan warfighting capacity even as I worry more about coercion short of invasion. Xi may get a more loyal PLA out of this purge eventually. For the next two years, I think he has exposed a force less ready than its arsenal makes it look.