“Astonishing.” “Unprecedented.” “One of many greatest purges of China’s army management within the historical past of the Individuals’s Republic.” That’s how Western analysts specializing in Chinese language elite politics are describing Xi Jinping’s newest determination to take away his prime common and longtime buddy from his command publish and place him below investigation.
Certainly, even towards the backdrop of Xi’s withering anti-corruption marketing campaign concentrating on the senior brass of the Individuals’s Liberation Military, the newest announcement that Gen. Zhang Youxia was being probed for “suspected severe violations of self-discipline and legislation” was a bombshell.
Zhang had been serving as vice chairman of the Central Army Fee, the organ of the Chinese language Communist Occasion that controls the armed forces. He was second within the chain of command, behind solely Xi himself, who chairs the fee. He was additionally considered one of few senior Chinese language generals with battlefield expertise, having served as a frontline commander throughout China’s border conflicts with Vietnam throughout the late Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.
