At the press of a button, the lids of the missile silos in western China should open to launch nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States.

But according to US intelligence released in 2024, the materials used to construct them were too heavy. Not only that, some of the missiles were filled with water rather than fuel.

The scandal – or some form of it – appears to have driven Xi Jinping, China’s president, to remove the entire leadership of Rocket Forces, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) division responsible for Beijing’s nuclear deterrent, in the months before the leak was published.

The purge was part of a colossal effort to stamp out corruption in China’s military ranks. Since Mr Xi took power 14 years ago, he has dismissed hundreds of officers and filed criminal charges against some of the most powerful figures in the armed forces.

Last week, that campaign expanded to oust Gen Zhang Youxia, the highest-ranking uniformed commander in the PLA and a childhood acquaintance of the president.

Xi Jinping ousted Gen Zhang Youxia (right of Mr Xi), the highest-ranking uniformed commander in the PLA - Xinhua / Alamy

While the eradication of endemic graft clearly motivates Mr Xi, analysts told The Telegraph his hatchet job on the PLA is also driven by his desire to reshape the world’s second-largest army into a modern fighting force – one that is ready to invade Taiwan by 2027 and overtake the US as the world’s top military by 2049.

Corruption, in this view, forms both a serious threat to the PLA and a tool through which the president has been able to direct the military towards these goals – and ensure it remains entirely loyal to his own rule.

“In its scope and scale, it’s breathtaking,” Jonathan Czin, who served as a China analyst in the CIA for 17 years, told The Telegraph.

Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society think tank, said the president had built a “much larger political discipline apparatus around an initial anti-corruption campaign, which also targets disloyalty, incompetence and other failures to suitably implement Xi’s policies”.

The case of Gen Zhang provides the clearest hint that the purges reach beyond simple housekeeping.

Announcing the investigation, the Chinese newspaper PLA Daily declared that he had “seriously trampled upon the system of chairman responsibility”, a reference to Mr Xi’s years-long campaign to enforce total allegiance to his wishes as chairman of the Central Military Committee (CMC), the body that directs PLA strategy and operations.

What exactly he did remains shrouded in the fog of Chinese high politics. He has been accused of leaking Chinese nuclear weapons secrets to the US, but rumours suggest Gen Zhang may have opposed the president’s timeline for an invasion of Taiwan.

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The general’s recent speeches had laid out his focus on a training programme that would, by its nature, have pushed back a complex crossing of the Taiwan Strait, noted K Tristan Tang, an analyst.

He had also praised “collective leadership” in the PLA and stressed loyalty to the Communist Party – small but important blows against the principle of loyalty to one man alone.

At the moment, corruption appears to be the only objective the CMC is equipped to tackle. Mr Xi’s purges have reduced the body to just two members; himself and Zhang Shenmin, the anti-corruption watchdog.

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3001 Xi's Central Military Commission purge

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That has generated speculation that Mr Xi’s scythe has cut the PLA to the bone, stripping away the expertise that would be needed to handle even the most basic of combat tasks, let alone an invasion requiring the full might of the navy, air force, cyber and space divisions in total concert.

Be careful with such interpretations, warned Mr Czin, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institute think tank.

“I think [the purges] show not that Xi’s is distracted from operational issues, but that he’s laser-focused on them,” he said.

China is holding drills in waters around Taiwan - Lin Jian/Xinhua

In truth, Mr Xi may well prefer to reunify Taiwan through a political process as the costs of an invasion would be staggering.

Taiwan’s politics appear to be leaning his way, with elections due in 2028 while a pro-Beijing party is performing well in the polls.

But he is “serious about wanting to have options,” said Mr Czin. “He wants the military to be up to snuff and prepared, and he’s willing to be so unforgiving of the PLA because he’s so focused on the underlying objectives.”

Christopher K Johnson, another ex-CIA China analyst, echoed Mr Czin, saying that the idea put forward by some that the PLA blood-letting is solely intended to shore up Mr Xi’s position is wide of the mark.

“I think it’s more a manifestation of his impatience with his generals, that they are not getting it done in a timely manner,” he said.

“I’m not saying he’s in a hurry, but he’s getting older and might be facing some whispers it’s time to think about stepping down.

“What better way to show, ‘don’t f— with me’, than to take down the entire high command?”

Mr Xi’s twin campaign of corruption purges and vast military spending has transformed the PLA into a force unrecognisable from the one he inherited.

Under Deng Xiaoping, the military had been encouraged to run commercial enterprises, while government funds were diverted to transforming the economy. As a result, the PLA operated a host of dodgy businesses, from dance troupes to factories and high-end hotels – with top brass continuing to profit despite a 1998 ban on outside fundraising.

In strategic terms, the force was designed to ward off invasion from the United States or Soviet Russia, a legacy of the Cold War that left Beijing’s military planners with an oversized ground army.

Mr Xi’s corruption campaign began as part of an effort to assert his authority for radical change, said Mr Czin. In 2014, CMC vice-chairmen Xu Caihou and Guo Boxio were charged with taking bribes in exchange for offering promotion, a widespread practice that, for generations, had undermined the PLA – and reportedly still does.

“The guys he went after were ‘made men’,” Mr Czin said. “It was a high stakes gamble. By uprooting these people, it gave Xi the political latitude to undertake this massive reform that his predecessors tried to impose on the PLA.”

In 2015, the president cut the size of the army by 300,000 troops. Command structures were reorganised to prevent the formation of graft-prone cliques.

At the same time, the taps were opened on a spending programme that has by now delivered China the world’s largest navy, second-largest combat air force and a missile arsenal that is rapidly catching up with – and, in some areas, outmatching – that of the United States.

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0810 China under Xi - largest navy

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The official military budget is $250bn (£200bn), but analysts believe the true figure is higher as much remains off the books. The secrecy has allowed graft to continue, but the much-publicised corruption campaign has kept it below the threshold to seriously undermine Beijing’s military modernisation.

“The corruption is real, it’s been pervasive,” said Mr Czin. “But the military modernisation is incredibly impressive. It’s a big enough and well-resourced enough effort that there’s enough space for both of these things to coexist side by side.”

By now, the PLA can “walk and chew gum”, he added. In November, Mr Xi fired nine generals, including seven who previously served in the Eastern Theatre, the branch responsible for Taiwan. The next month, he ordered the largest drills to date around the island.

To adopt the metaphorical style of Chinese state media for a moment, the road may be bumpy – but the destination is unchanged.

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