2025 recorded an unprecedented purge of China’s top military and political leadership, that continued up to the penultimate day of the year, December 30, taking the tally up to “65 tigers” – high-level officials – the largest number in any year since the commencement of the anti-corruption campaign in 2012 and, on some accounts, since the beginning of China’s era of reforms in 1978.
Central to the purge has been the most extensive and consequential changes in the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army, with a raft of top officers removed, disappeared from public view, investigated and expelled from the military and from the Chinese Communist Party. In a single announcement on October 17, nine top generals were expelled for “serious violations,” including the abuse of power for personal gain and a “total collapse of beliefs.” Key military leaders who have been removed through 2025 include He Weidong, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), a Politburo member, and China’s second-highest ranking general who commanded strategy and operations around Taiwan. Weidong was a Xi loyalist who disappeared from public view in March 2025, and was formally expelled in October. With him went Miao Hua, Director of the CMC’s Political Work Department and a former navy admiral, responsible for ideological indoctrination. Among the most significant expulsions were Wang Houbin, the former commander of the strategically critical Rocket Force; Lin Xiangyang, the commander of the Eastern Theater Command; Zhang Lin, head of the CMC’s logistics support; and Wang Chunning, commander of the People’s Armed Police.
Western propagandists have seized on this as evidence of crisis, paranoia and imminent collapse, arguing that the sheer scale of dismissals will disrupt military readiness, command stability, organisational integrity, morale, response capabilities and the planned pace of modernisation. A laundry list of speculative motives has been imagined, including conspiracy theories regarding Xi’s fears of a coup in reaction to the ‘failures’ of his economic policies, prompting a ‘decapitation strategy’ to suppress dissent, as well as other motives arising out of Xi’s authoritarianism and attendant chronic insecurities.
Much of this is just wishful thinking. The purge of 2025 was not an abrupt and radical departure from the past that will reverberate long into the future. It is a continuum. Indeed, as many as 58 ‘tigers’ were shown the door in 2024, marking the then highest annual total since the anti-corruption campaign began in 2012 – with little noticeable impact on institutional continuity. Indeed, 2023-2024 saw the removals of two defence ministers (Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe) and multiple Rocket Force leaders, and continuing rhetoric about tougher anti-corruption measures in 2026 suggested that more senior officials are likely to be targeted.
Western commentary has repeatedly projected the imminence of Chinese collapse in the wake of every transient challenge – be it economic slowdowns, demographic shifts, political purges, pandemics, or localised unrest – reflecting less an empirical assessment than a persistent projection of unfounded hopes. These forecasts have extrapolated short-term disruptions into systemic failure, assuming that the absence of ‘liberal institutions’ necessarily implies fragility. In doing so, they overlook the Chinese state’s capacity for adaptive governance and social absorption of shocks, as well as the CPC’s long-honed mechanisms of crisis management. The trope of impending collapse thus functions more as a recurring narrative device within the Western strategic imagination than as a serious analytical conclusion.
Where outsiders see crisis, insiders see consolidation in the face of intensifying external pressure, a hostile international environment and aggressive US strategies of containment. In such a context, any internal disunity, factionalism, corruption or ideological drift – particularly in the PLA – is seen as strategic vulnerability. Corruption, in particular, is not just a moral, or ethical failing, it is a strategic challenge.
It is useful to recall, here, that Mao’s conception of the ‘political army’ fuses combat and ideology. An army that lacks political clarity, he argued, cannot fight effectively. Contemporary CPC and PLA doctrine continues this tradition. Significantly, Xi has repeatedly emphasized that the PLA must be able to fight and win “informatized and intelligentized” wars. But this goal cannot be achieved through technology alone. It requires moral discipline, ideological alignment, and trust in the chain of command. An officer whose primary loyalty lies with personal networks rather than the Party is, in strategic terms, a liability. A divided elite is vulnerable to pressure, infiltration and collapse. The instability of the global environment demands ‘rectification’. Western policymakers are misreading consolidation as collapse.
