On May 7, a Chinese military court handed down suspended death sentences to two former defense ministers — Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu — with an unusual clause: permanent denial of parole and commutation. The ruling made both men the most senior officials below Politburo rank ever sentenced to irreversible life imprisonment in the People’s Republic. But the verdicts were not the final chapter of Xi Jinping’s military purge. They were the opening move in its next, more dangerous phase.
The sentences arrived in the middle of an ongoing campaign that has already swept through the highest levels of the People’s Liberation Army. The CSIS Database of Chinese Military Purges contains detailed information on over 100 PLA senior officers who have been purged or potentially purged since 2022. Of the 47 PLA leaders who were generals in 2022 or promoted to three-star positions after 2022, 41 of them — or 87 percent — were purged or potentially purged as of February 2026. The CMC, China’s supreme military decision-making body, has been reduced to just two functioning members: Xi himself and anti-corruption czar Zhang Shengmin, a political commissar with no operational command experience.
The Escalating Language
What makes the Wei and Li verdicts significant isn’t the corruption charges — bribery convictions at this level are routine. It’s the political language that accompanied them. The PLA Daily’s front-page commentary accused both men of “harboring disloyalty to the party” and warned that “the army holds the gun, and there must be no one in it who is disloyal.”
That language marked a deliberate escalation from the men’s original June 2024 expulsion notices, which framed their offenses primarily as corruption. The May 8 editorial put political disloyalty first. And it did so using rhetoric that echoes Mao Zedong’s axiom that armed forces must answer to the party — a principle Xi has reengineered since 2017 through the CMC Chairman Responsibility System, which routes every major military decision through the CMC chair. That chair is Xi.
The pattern becomes clearer when you track the formal language attached to each round of purges. When nine senior officers were expelled in October 2025 — including CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong and Political Work Department director Miao Hua — the PLA Daily accused them of having “seriously damaged the principle of the party’s command of the gun and the Chairman Responsibility System.” That was the first time a Politburo member had been publicly charged with attacking the institutional foundation of Xi’s military authority, not merely with graft.
The sharpest language came in January 2026, when Zhang Youxia — the PLA’s highest-ranking general and a Politburo member long considered one of Xi’s closest allies — was arrested alongside joint staff chief Liu Zhenli. The accompanying PLA Daily commentary accused them of having “seriously trampled and damaged the Chairman Responsibility System” and “seriously aggravated political and corruption problems that affect the party’s absolute command of the army.” With the removal of Zhang and Liu — the last senior commanders with real combat experience who rose through the ranks mostly based on merit — the professional core of the PLA has been left gutted.
Floor-Setting, Not Case-Closing
The Wei and Li sentences become legible only in this context. By imposing the harshest penalties ever applied at their rank, Xi has established a new sentencing floor — one that makes anything lighter for officers facing graver political indictments logically untenable. With the purge of 56 deputy theater commanders, the pool of those who can take over one of the five theater commands has been culled by more than 33%.
The real test case is He Weidong. Unlike Zhang Youxia, who turned 75 last year — the age at which Chinese law bars death sentences except in cases involving exceptionally cruel killings — He can legally receive the same suspended death sentence Wei and Li just got. No Politburo member has been given such a sentence outside the politically charged Gang of Four trial in 1981. If Xi applies it to He, he will have established a new ceiling for Politburo rank itself, one that extends to civilian officials under investigation as well.
Zhang’s case presents a different problem. His political indictment is the heaviest of any officer purged, yet the maximum sentence available to him — conventional life imprisonment — would be lighter than what his former subordinates received. That contradiction is difficult to explain to party members and the public, and it may be precisely why Xi has been slow to move: more than three months after Zhang’s arrest, he still retains all his positions, which highlights significant internal disagreements on how to handle this case at the highest levels.
The Readiness Question
The operational cost of the purge is becoming measurable. Joint exercises with Russia plummeted from 14 instances in 2024 to just six in 2025, and exercises around Taiwan in 2025 took between 12 and 19 days to transition from political directive to deployment — a dramatic lag compared to the three to four days required for identical maneuvers in 2024. Among 52 key PLA leadership positions examined, only 11 — about 21 percent — are filled as of February 2026.
CSIS analyst Thomas Christensen warned that the purge creates a dangerous feedback loop: if top generals were arrested partly for expressing realistic doubts about the ability to meet Xi’s 2027 readiness goals, future officers will have a strong incentive to only pass good news up the chain — dangerous for crisis management because it could make Xi unrealistically confident in his military’s capabilities.
A analysis published this month put it most starkly: Xi envisions an ideal military where the high command is strictly atomized — individually competent, readily replaceable, and personally loyal to no one but the supreme leader. But that vision collides with the reality that navigating the party-state requires exactly the kind of patronage networks that the purges have destroyed. The eradication of those networks has plunged the Chinese military into a climate of survivalism, where officers “lie flat” rather than risk initiative.
History suggests the deterrent value of harsh sentences at this level is limited. The execution of National People’s Congress vice chairman Cheng Kejie in 2000 did not prevent the explosion of elite corruption under Hu Jintao. The 2021 execution of Huarong chairman Lai Xiaomin did not slow the flow of new financial intermediaries for politically connected wealth. Xi has now raised the punishment floor again. Whether it constrains behavior — or simply raises the stakes for those who feel they have nothing left to lose — is the question that will define the next chapter of his rule.
Original analysis inspired by Christopher Nye from Foreign Policy. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
