Recently China’s Defense Ministry announced it were investigating two generals, General Zhang Youxia and General Liu Zhenli, both serving on the powerful Central Military Commission. As others in the news have noted, this recent announcement has thrust the commission into a tumultuous situation, with this and other recent ousters leaving only one of the six members intact. This most recent purge is one of the biggest in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
Chaotic purges in the top ranks are nothing new to communist regimes; Stalin’s Great Terror from 1937-1938 comes to mind. But they certainly are not without heavy consequences for the functioning of the military. These purges also stand in sharp contrast to the way the U.S. military does personnel changes. No military is free of politics, and the U.S. military’s chain of command ends with the commander in chief, who ultimately has the final say over who fills what positions. But even our more significant personnel changes in U.S. military history, including the shakeups that occurred in 2025 under Secretary Hegseth and the many promotions and demotions of generals made by Lincoln during the Civil War, are minimal compared to the level seen in authoritarian states.
This reflects a broader theme in authoritarian versus democratic militaries: when secrecy pervades, paranoia at the top must inevitably follow, leading to the purging of anyone who could be perceived as a threat. Democracies are certainly not immune from infighting at the highest levels of the military, but there’s no comparison between the threat of being purged as a political traitor versus taking an early retirement with a generous pension.
Yet China’s rash changes will carry larger effects for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its future plans for Taiwan. The fact is the PLA is untested and Xi has just removed his top military leaders, who depart with their decades of experience and leave a vacuum in their wake. General Zhang in particular is one of the few PLA officers with firsthand combat experience, serving as a front-line junior officer during the 1979 war between China and Vietnam. Much has been made of China’s large People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and their breathtaking speed at producing ships, and the United States would do well to take it seriously and drastically increase ship production to wartime levels. The Trump administration deserves accolades for the way it has zeroed in on this growing problem. But China’s ships are untested, with their recent military engagements being minimal at best. It is one thing to carry out a drill surrounding Taiwan; it is different when Taiwan is utilizing its newly purchased National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS). How will the PLAN’s new vessels handle heavy fire? Will the PLA’s missiles hit their targets, or will their systems fail? And further, how will China’s peacetime military leaders react under combat conditions?
For better or worse, the United States military has been heavily tested since WWII. The United States created the international order after WWII, built up and maintained its military amidst the tensions of the Cold War, and entered wars in the Middle East post-9/11 with mixed results. In the last two years alone the U.S. Navy and Air Force executed and tested new weapons in Yemen, Iran, and in Venezuela. There is room for debate if the United States military involvements around the world are worth the effort, but there is no doubt that these actions gave the military knowledge about how personnel, weapons, systems, and ships perform in action.
Nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined the concept of “friction” in military operations, describing in his seminal work On War how any army encounters innumerable, unexpected, mostly minor obstacles that make seemingly simple operations difficult in real war. In short, friction is the “difference between war on paper and what war actually is.” Even in its low-level conflicts the U.S. military has encountered constant friction for the last eight decades since WWII, in doing so gaining firsthand combat experience and also streamlining the theoretical into the practical. An untested military like China’s cannot know how it will perform in a real conflict. Of course experience is not the reason why the U.S. engaged in conflicts of the last few decades, but it is an important byproduct that prepares the US military for the conflicts of the future. We should be wary of China’s recent advances and of the aggressive foreign policy that their powerful military enables, but should also recognize their precarious position with a military leadership devoid of experience.
