Chinese President Xi Jinping’s purges among the People’s Liberation Army ranks, purportedly over corruption charges, run much deeper than previously thought, a new American study has revealed.
Among those purged over the last four years include a PLA General, who had commanded the Chinese forces against Taiwan, another officer in charge of training and previously praised for modernising the combat drills of the PLA, and a chief military aide to Xi himself, the study has concluded.
These senior PLA leaders were among the dozens of those who were rising in the ranks, but have been detained, dismissed, or just disappeared from public view without any explanation in the last four years.
Their downfall has been documented in the study released on Tuesday (February 24, 2026) by the American think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ‘China Power’ project and reported extensively on American media platforms.
The staggering extent of Xi’s campaign to shake up the PLA had only last month led to the removal of a senior military general Zhang Youxia, the study mentioned.
The purges have resulted in the PLA being stripped of experienced military commanders, raising serious doubts over the armed forces readiness to go to war, including against Taiwan, an independent territory claimed entirely by Beijing as its own.
“In the near term, given the significant vacancies, it would be incredibly difficult for China to launch large military campaigns against Taiwan,” CSIS China Power Project director Bonny Lin, who was part of the team compiling the data, wrote in his assessment of the study results.
The study’s data estimated that nearly 100 senior military officers of the PLA in the ranks of general and lieutenant general were dismissed or sidelined since 2022.
This data included 11 officers purged even after they had retired from service, indicating the depth of Xi’s targeting of the PLA top brass.
The purged officers were about half of the PLA’s top military leadership, including commanders, chiefs, and deputy chiefs of key central military departments in all Chinese military theatres and regions, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and Chinese military expert Taylor Fravel.
The study concluded that replacing the purged top leadership of the PLA wouldn’t be that easy, as Xi’s action had reduced the pool of right candidates with skills, experience, and ironclad loyalty to the Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party’s undisputed leader.
Professor Fravel, who analysed the CSIS China Power Project data, and was quoted by the American media outlets, noted that for a top officer to be promoted to the next command, he or she should have done at least five years of tenure in his current rank.
“Xi has purged all of these people and, obviously, it’s framed as their lack of loyalty to Xi and to the party,” he said in a New York Times interview.
“But he also needs expertise to have the military he wants — loyalty as well as expertise — and how will he find those people? That’s going to be harder now,” Professor Fravel said.
In 2022, the purges began with a single officer disappearing from public view, and it grew to 14 officers either dismissed or disappeared in 2023.
By 2024, another 11 officers faced a similar fate, but in 2025 the purge was massive with 62 officers being removed, a maximum of them in the later part of that year.
In 2026, in just two months, 11 officers went absent from military meetings that they were expected to attend, indicating a serious trouble within the PLA, the data showed.
Interestingly, some of the officers purged owed their rise to Xi, and others were star-ranked officers seen as the future leaders of the PLA, the study noted.
The purges included Lt Gen. Wang Peng, whose reputation for modernising the PLA training preceded his removal, Lt Gen. Zhong Shaojun, who served as Xi’s chief aide, and General Lin Xiangyang, who commanded the forces facing Taiwan, the study revealed.
While there were officers, who could fill in the shoes of these purged senior PLA leaders, the wave of dismissals, removals, and disappearances could have a cascading effect through the ranks, it was estimated.
Last year, Xi had attempted to plug the gaps in the PLA leadership caused by his purges by promoting new commanders for the Eastern Theatre Command overseeing Taiwan operations, and the Central Theatre Command that guarded Beijing.
However, there is no indication of when Xi would fill the vacancies in the Central Military Commission, the apex decision-making body on military that is directly controlled by him.