By TRH World Desk
China has formally stripped its two most senior generals of their military posts, leaving Xi Jinping’s supreme command body with just two known members. One of the men ousted wasn’t just a top general — he was the son of Xi’s father’s wartime comrade, and one of the last men in the Chinese military who had actually been to war.
New Delhi, August 29, 2026 — China has officially removed Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, its two most senior military officers, from the Central Military Commission (CMC) — the body that commands the People’s Liberation Army and answers directly to President Xi Jinping.
The decision, confirmed at a meeting of the National People’s Congress’ Standing Committee on Friday, formalizes what state media first signalled in January: both men are under investigation for what Chinese authorities describe as “serious violations of discipline and the law,” a phrase widely understood in China to mean corruption.
Who Was Removed, and What They Held
The South China Morning Post reported that as the CMC’s senior vice-chairman, Zhang was the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the Chinese military, while Liu served as chief of the CMC’s Joint Staff Department — effectively the PLA’s top operational planning role.
Both men had been under formal investigation since January, when Chinese authorities first disclosed the inquiries.
The scale of what’s been lost is significant on its own terms. The removal leaves the seven-member CMC with only two publicly known members remaining: Xi Jinping himself, and anti-corruption chief Zhang Shengmin. Three other CMC members have already lost their positions since 2024 without being replaced — meaning Friday’s move isn’t an isolated event, but the latest step in a leadership body that has been steadily hollowed out over roughly two years.
Why Zhang Wasn’t Just Another General
What makes Zhang Youxia’s fall different from the two dozen other senior military figures purged since 2022 is the depth of his personal connection to Xi. The South China Morning Post’s own earlier profile of Zhang described him as widely regarded as one of the men Xi trusted most, noting that both men are Shaanxi natives and so-called “second-generation reds” — children of Communist revolutionaries — whose fathers were comrades dating back to the 1940s.
Zhang’s father, Zhang Zongxun, is considered a founding general of the People’s Republic; he served in the same revolutionary cohort in China’s northwest as Xi’s own father, Xi Zhongxun.
That family history had, for years, been cited as a key reason Zhang remained one of Xi’s most durable allies even as the president cycled through and purged other senior officers around him — some analysts have gone so far as to describe the two men as having grown up together, though others have publicly disputed how close that childhood relationship actually was.
Zhang also carried a distinction almost no one left in China’s senior military leadership can claim: real combat experience. He fought in China’s border conflicts, including the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War and the 1984 Battle of Laoshan — making him one of only a handful of PLA generals to have actually seen war, in a military that hasn’t fought a major conflict in decades even as it modernizes and takes an increasingly assertive posture in the East and South China Seas and around Taiwan.
The Official Explanation — and Its Limits
Chinese authorities have offered only a narrow public explanation for the removals. A commentary in the PLA Daily, published around the time investigations were first disclosed in January, accused Zhang and Liu of having betrayed the trust of the Communist Party and undermined the party’s absolute control of the military, as well as the reputation of the armed forces — language consistent with Beijing’s standard framing for corruption-related purges.
Authorities have not disclosed the two men’s current whereabouts or provided specific details of the accusations against them.
That opacity is itself part of the story. Malay Mail’s explainer on Zhang’s earlier fall from grace noted that his position as a Politburo member and CMC vice-chairman, combined with his closeness to Xi, meant the initial announcement of his investigation “shocked defence observers” — a reaction that reflects just how unusual it is for a figure this senior, and this personally connected to the president, to be publicly implicated at all.
Part of a Much Larger Pattern
Friday’s formal removal caps what has become the most sweeping anti-corruption campaign inside China’s military in the modern era.
Chinese authorities have officially purged 36 generals and lieutenant generals since 2022, with a further 65 officers listed as missing or potentially purged — a scale that dwarfs previous rounds of military discipline enforcement under Xi, including the 2023 purge that reached the elite Rocket Force.
Zhang’s removal specifically marks only the second time a sitting CMC general has been ousted since the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 — a historical marker that underscores just how rare and consequential this particular fall is, even against the backdrop of an already unprecedented broader crackdown.
What It Means Going Forward
With the CMC now reduced to just two publicly confirmed members, questions are mounting over how China’s military command structure functions day to day, and who Xi will elevate to fill the vacuum — a decision that will likely signal much about the balance he intends to strike between loyalty, competence, and combat experience in the PLA’s next generation of leadership. The removal of Zhang in particular — a man whose family ties to Xi were long treated as a form of political insurance — sends its own signal: in Xi’s China, historical loyalty and personal history are apparently no longer guarantees against the same anti-corruption machinery that has already reshaped much of the rest of the military’s senior ranks.
For a country simultaneously modernizing its armed forces and asserting itself more forcefully in disputed waters and around Taiwan, the loss of experienced, war-tested leadership at the very top of the command structure — even amid legitimate corruption concerns — is a development regional security analysts are likely to be watching closely in the weeks ahead.
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