In January 2026, the world’s largest standing army lost the top of its command in a single announcement. Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, the two officers who ran the People’s Liberation Army under Xi Jinping, went under investigation on the same day. The seven-seat Central Military Commission dropped to two. One of the two is Xi. The other is the general who runs discipline.
Beijing called it corruption. The wording of the charge says otherwise. Zhang stood accused of causing “severe damage to the military’s political awareness” and of trampling the Chairman Responsibility System — language the Party reserves for a general who defied the boss, not one who merely stole.
Our new assessment stress-tests the leading Western paper on the subject and lands a harder verdict. The purge is real, the largest since Mao, and still running. What drives it is loyalty and combat readiness ahead of the 2027 Taiwan deadline, with graft as the warrant that makes the whole affair presentable. We assess the coup rumors out of the diaspora press as low-confidence; they fail every source check the trade applies. And the force that emerges fights slower this year and next, even as the shipyards keep launching and the warhead count keeps climbing.