When a brief note from the official Xinhua news agency announced just over a week ago the fall from grace of Zhang Youxia, China’s highest-ranking general, one thing was clear: no one, beyond President Xi Jinping’s inner circle (or perhaps not even them), knew why. Zhang was placed under investigation, along with Liu Zhenli, another top military commander, for alleged “serious violations of discipline and the law,” the statement said, offering no further clues.

The facts under investigation have not been made public; in China, the matter is not discussed on television talk shows, and social media — separated from the rest of the world by the great firewall of the internet — has fallen silent: the usual.

Beyond China, however, a parallel machine was immediately activated to decipher what had happened, given the few existing clues. Some jokingly call this exercise, common among those who follow China’s opaque politics, “reading tea leaves”: a kind of divinatory art, carried out by an army of sinologists, academics, and intelligence analysts, similar to the Kremlinologists who once scrutinized the Soviet Union, but dedicated in this case to decoding the movements of the Chinese Communist Party and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Why has a close associate of Xi Jinping suddenly been stripped of his position? What does it say about the power struggle in the Asian superpower? And about the modernization of its armed forces? What are the implications for a potential conflict over Taiwan?

The blow to the top of the military establishment, announced as a new “anti-corruption” case, has heightened the sense of bewilderment at what many analysts interpret as a purge unprecedented since Mao Zedong’s outbursts against his military leadership in the 1970s.

Zhang is the first vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC, China’s top military body), making him the country’s second-in-command, answering only to Xi Jinping, while Liu is head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His departure, coupled with previous purges in recent months, leaves the CMC with only two of its seven members: its chairman — Xi himself — and General Zhang Shengmin, the very person in charge of overseeing disciplinary inspections. This is a “revealing” fact, noted Jon Czin, a former CIA advisor and prominent member of that community of “tea-leaf readers,” on the China Talk podcast.

“It’s a kind of Shakespearean moment for the Chinese Communist Party and politics,” said Czin, an analyst at Brookings, a Washington-based institution. In his view, a new phase has begun in the purges that Xi Jinping initiated after coming to power in 2012: first, he went after his “enemies”; then, after his “partners.” “Now, in my opinion, he’s really going after his friends.”

To date, all but one of the six generals appointed by Xi to the CMC in 2022 have been dismissed or placed under investigation. The cascade of cases has intensified since 2023, and has also claimed two defense ministers.

Red princes

Of all of them, Zhang was often described as Xi Jinping’s closest ally. Their parents came from the same city and were comrades-in-arms during Mao’s revolutionary war. The sons grew up as “red princes” within elite communist circles in Beijing. They are only three years apart in age: Xi is 72; Zhang, 75.

“It seems clear that Xi used to consider him a trusted colleague,” notes Neil Thomas of the Asia Society Policy Institute in an article on Substack. There is no record of them working together early in their careers, he adds, but Xi oversaw Zhang’s rise: his appointment to the CMC in 2012, his promotion to vice chairman of the CMC and member of the Politburo in 2017, and his promotion to first vice chairman of the CMC in 2022, bypassing retirement age rules.

Zhang and Liu, the other person under investigation, were also decorated war heroes and the only CMC members with combat experience: both participated in the PLA campaigns against Vietnam in the late 1970s.

Zhang played a key role in planning and executing Xi Jinping’s military modernization of China, which aimed to move the PLA away from the Soviet-style, army-centric model and toward a U.S.-inspired design optimized for joint operations by reorganizing the command structure.

According to K. Tristan Tang of National Taiwan University, the crux of the matter lies in the disagreements between the two sides regarding the military’s operational capacity and the roadmap for Taiwan, he writes in an article for the Jamestown Foundation. “Zhang and Liu fell from power because their results in force building and war preparation failed to meet expectations and may have jeopardized Xi Jinping’s requirement that the PLA be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.” U.S. intelligence typically cites this date as the time by which Xi has demanded troops be ready.

Tang bases his argument on a detailed comparative analysis of editorials in the *PLA Daily *— the official propaganda organ, published the day after the announcement of this latest purge — and one by the number three in the military leadership, He Weidong, last year. He argues that the clash had been brewing for some time, starting with a video: when Xi Jinping walked out of the closing session of the Two Sessions in March 2015, the most important political gathering of the year, Zhang Youxia stood with his back turned, a “highly unusual and politically risky” act.

“Will this postpone any intended direct move on Taiwan?” asks renowned French sinologist François Godement in an analysis for the Institut Montaigne in Paris. “In the short term, certainly. The CCP’s indictments indicate that there remains much rot and ideological dissonance to weed out in the PLA — neither this nor the ensuing climate of terror among the officer corps looks favorable for a major offensive.”

Given the lack of transparency, everything is mere conjecture, Godement assumes. There’s only one thing to do: “One must read tea leaves” to decipher the political storm.

Based on the editorial in the PLA Daily, he interprets the purge as “going beyond” corruption, shifting into the political arena. He highlights a phrase from the text about those purged: They “seriously trampled upon and undermined the chairman responsibility system of the Central Military Commission, severely encouraged and exacerbated political AND (emphasis by Godemont) corruption problems that weaken the Party’s absolute leadership over the military.”

He doesn’t give much credence to the biggest journalistic bombshell about the purge: The Wall Street Journal published last week that Zhang is accused of leaking secrets about the Chinese nuclear program to the United States, information supported by anonymous sources “familiar” with the matter. For several analysts, this alleged leak primarily explains what Beijing wants the world to know.

Amid the speculative noise, one of the most revealing analyses comes from Drew Thompson, a former advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense specializing in China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and currently a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Relations in Singapore. In an article published in his digital newsletter, ChinaDrew, he argues that the general’s downfall “hits different.” Not because it breaks with the logic of Xi Jinping’s purges, but because it affects a figure who, in his opinion, did not fit the usual mold of the Chinese military machine.

Zhang, Thompson writes, was “an anomaly”: a military man with real combat experience and an intellectual curiosity uncommon in an increasingly homogeneous military leadership. The author recalls meeting him during an official visit by a Chinese delegation to the United States in 2012, and highlights his genuine interest and his ability to listen, ask uncomfortable questions, and debate with foreign interlocutors.

This singularity is key to Thompson’s political interpretation. The analyst admits that he had been hearing rumors since 2023 that Zhang might be in trouble, but confesses that he assumed (or hoped) that his track record and personal relationship with Xi would protect him. The fact that this hasn’t been the case, in his view, reinforces the conclusion that neither closeness to the leader nor military experience is enough anymore in the face of the logic of absolute political control.

The result, he warns, is an impoverished decision-making ecosystem within the PLA, leading to a military structure that is increasingly disciplined politically but potentially more fragile strategically. “I think he was the one active duty PLA officer who could give Xi the best, most objective advice about PLA military capabilities including the PLA’s shortcomings,” he reflects. “I think he could assess U.S. and Taiwan military capabilities objectively and explain to Xi Jinping what the military risks and costs of an operation to take Taiwan would be” with “honesty and objectivity,” as opposed to “a sycophant with no combat experience [who] has to tell Xi what Xi wants to hear.”

Thompson links his reflection on the climate of opacity to the disappearance, in October 2023, of Minnie Chan, a journalist specializing in military affairs for the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, whose whereabouts remain unknown. Chan, who had an extensive network of sources in mainland China, had reported for years on internal movements within the PLA leadership. At the time of her alleged detention — never confirmed by the authorities — she was gathering information on rumors of new investigations. Thompson provides a screenshot of a message exchange he had with Chan before she vanished. He asserts that all of the reporter’s replies were deleted after her disappearance, except for a concise “yes” in answer to the question: “Do you think Zhang Youxia and Zhang Shenmin are in trouble and being investigated?”

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