Sun Lee
On January 24, 2026, China’s Ministry of National Defence released a four-line statement confirming that General Zhang Youxia, Xi Jinping’s second-in-command, childhood acquaintance, and the man Xi himself elevated to the highest operational military post in 2022, had been placed under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law.” With him fell Liu Zhenli, the PLA’s chief of staff and the military’s pre-eminent operational commander. The Central Military Commission (CMC), once a seven-member body, now consists of two people: Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin, a political commissar best known for having overseen the investigations into the other five. Whether or not Xi intended this as a statement of strength, it reads unmistakably as one of fear.
This is the mature form of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, the most extensive in the CCP’s history and the most institutionally destructive. Since 2012, over six million party members have been investigated and punished. In 2024 alone, the number of party members investigated jumped 40%, from 626,000 in 2023 to 877,000. By the first quarter of 2025, the CCDI had initiated 220,000 investigations into officials for potential bribery, and from January to November 2025, it opened 251,516 cases, a 30.87% increase over the same period in 2024. In January 2026, Xi told delegates to the Fifth Plenum of the CCDI that the party must “press ahead with the anti-corruption fight with a clearer understanding and stronger resolve.”
A Campaign Without a Cure
The foundational problem with Xi’s anti-corruption drive is one the party has never been willing to confront: that corruption in a one-party state is not a deviation from the system but a product of it. This structural blindness is embedded in the campaign’s own design. The CCDI, the body tasked with prosecuting corruption, is a party organ, reporting upward to the Politburo Standing Committee and, in practice, to Xi himself. It has no judicial authority. Detention under its liuzhi mechanism (the successor to shuanggui) permits months of confinement without charge, without legal counsel, and without oversight. Confession rates in such proceedings are close to universal. The CCDI’s own Secretary since 2017 has been a Politburo Standing Committee member, making its notional independence from political direction effectively theoretical.
The removal of Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai, Sun Zhengcai, and Ling Jihua, all enormous figures of institutional capital, all potential obstacles to Xi’s consolidation, did not happen because they were uniquely corrupt in a system saturated with corruption. It happened because they were uniquely inconvenient. That selectivity becomes more obvious in the campaign’s own data: in 2024, CCDI records show 73 provincial-ministerial officials investigated, yet public case listings accounted for only 58 named cases; in 2023, the CCDI reported 87 centrally managed officials investigated, but public disclosures listed only 45 named cases.
The moral authority the campaign depends upon is further eroded by what a March 2025 declassified report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence documented: Xi’s siblings, nieces, and nephews held assets worth over one billion dollars in business investments and real estate, while Wen Jiabao’s family controlled assets of at least 2.7 billion dollars. Neither figure has produced any domestic accountability. The campaign’s jurisdiction, it turns out, is precisely coterminous with its author’s political interests. Xi himself has declared that the situation “remains complex” and that “there can be no stopping, slacking or compromising on anti-corruption”, a formulation that would seem to acknowledge, without quite admitting, that thirteen years of unprecedented enforcement have not resolved the underlying condition.
Permanence as Weakness
Normal political logic would suggest that a genuine reform programme eventually produces institutional results, a measurable decline in corrupt conduct, a stabilisation of enforcement, a gradual transition from emergency campaign governance to routine rule of law. Instead, the opposite has occurred. In July 2024, the Third Plenum communiqué called on the party to “redouble” the anti-corruption drive; in January 2025, Xi told CCDI delegates the party must persevere in the “tough, protracted fight against corruption.”
Nowhere is the cost of this perpetual campaign more acutely visible than in the military. Since July 2023, at least 43 officers have been purged from the PLA leadership, including two consecutive defence ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, and four CMC members. Of the 81 generals promoted by Xi in the PLA since October 2022, at least 14 have been purged and 23 have effectively vanished from public life. The January 2026 purge of Zhang Youxia is the peak of this wave. According to PLA Daily, Zhang and Liu Zhenli had “seriously betrayed the trust and expectations” of the party by “severely trampling on and undermining” Chairman Xi, language that makes clear this is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a corruption case but rather a case of loyalty.
Many analysts have concluded that the core driver of Zhang’s removal was a fundamental divergence with Xi over PLA joint operations training timelines and the 2027 deadline for Taiwan-contingency readiness. Zhang’s purge removed the last senior commanders with genuine combat experience from the CMC at precisely the moment when Xi has most publicly committed to military credibility. The campaign against disloyalty has left the military commanded, at its highest level, by a discipline inspector.
The systemic effect on the broader bureaucracy is equally damaging and has become one Xi himself has been forced to acknowledge. In 2024, Xi recognised the crackdown had led to “bureaucratic inertia” among officials who, fearing punishment, are unwilling to act or make decisions. The South China Morning Post reported that officials are “becoming more risk averse, overworked and lacking any incentive to use their initiative” so acute a problem that in 2021, Xi was already asking publicly whether his officials would do any work if he did not personally hand out instructions.
The anti-corruption campaign, whatever its genuine reformist content in the years immediately after 2012, has become the primary instrument of elite insecurity. What it cannot produce, and what no campaign operating without independent courts, a free press, or competitive accountability ever could, is legitimacy. In purging Zhang Youxia, his childhood friend, his most trusted appointee and the man he kept on beyond mandatory retirement age, Xi did not demonstrate omnipotence. He demonstrated that, thirteen years and six million investigations in, there is still no one he can trust. That is not the signature of a system being cleaned but signs of a system that is slowly eroding itself.
Sun Lee is a pseudonym for a writer who covers Asia and geopolitical affairs.
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