China’s Xi targets top general in growing purge

What happened

China’s Ministry of Defense announced Saturday that the country’s top general, Zhang Youxia, and another member of the Central Military Commission, Gen. Liu Zhenli, were being investigated over “grave violations of discipline and the law.” The Defense Ministry did not disclose the allegations against either general, but Zhang was accused of “leaking information about the country’s nuclear-weapons program to the U.S. and accepting bribes for official acts,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Who said what

“Few if any Chinese officials placed publicly under investigation are later declared innocent,” said The New York Times, and Zhang’s “downfall” is the “most stunning escalation yet” in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s yearlong “purge of the People’s Liberation Army elite” to “root out what he has described as corruption and disloyalty.” Zhang “has long been seen as Xi’s closest military ally,” Reuters said, and he is “one of the few senior Chinese officers with combat experience,” from a 1979 border conflict with Vietnam.

“This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents the total annihilation of the high command,” Christopher Johnson, a former CIA analyst who now heads the China Strategies Group consulting firm, told the Times. Zhang, like Xi, is “one of China’s ‘princelings,’ as the descendants of revolutionary elders and high-ranking party officials are known,” the Journal said.

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What next?

Xi “seems to have calculated that in the longer term, his shake-up of the military will make it less corrupt” and “more loyal” and effective, the Times said. But rebuilding “these chains of command may take him five years or longer,” said Su Tzu-yun at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research.