China’s war zone commanders canceled holiday plans and stayed on base
In the days following the announced purge, an unusual scene played out across China’s military. Sources with knowledge of conditions inside the armed forces told overseas Chinese media that generals at every level were gripped by anxiety during the Lunar New Year holiday, terrified of becoming the next target.
A source identified as Mr. Xu disclosed that during the holiday period, “officers at every rank were on edge, keeping a low profile, avoiding travel, and skipping visits to relatives or hometowns. Some even sent their wives out to do the shopping for them.” In past years, senior military officers routinely returned to their home provinces or arranged personal activities during the break.
This year was different. “A large number of division-level and higher officers stayed on base and celebrated the holiday with their troops,” Xu said. “At war zone installations, regimental and battalion commanders organized in-house holiday events: making dumplings, hanging spring couplets, putting on small performances. I’ve heard the festive atmosphere was much worse this year, and the funding from above was also cut.”
Xu added that this kind of “collective holiday” inside military compounds has historically been rare, occurring only when tensions within the armed forces are running high. “From the grassroots level up to the war zones, everyone is being cautious,” he said. “You could say they’re all deliberately making themselves as small as possible.”
A Chinese military scholar writing under the pseudonym Chen Guoming offered further analysis. Within the CCP’s military system, whenever senior positions are subject to reshuffling or investigation, lower-level units instinctively become more “conservative” and avoid doing anything that might draw scrutiny. Chen noted: “The command shakeups right before the holiday had a huge impact on the rank and file. Right now, nobody can say for certain who actually holds command authority in the Eastern Theater Command, which covers the Taiwan Strait, or the Central Theater Command, which is responsible for the defense of Beijing.”
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A separate source, a Mr. Liu who lives in a military family compound for armored units in Beijing, told overseas Chinese media: “I’ve heard that the top military commission leaders all stayed in Beijing and never left.” Liu added that during the Lunar New Year, Xi Jinping, CCP general secretary and China’s top leader, and Zhang Shengmin, the sole remaining vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission (the Party’s top military command body), had no publicly disclosed travel itineraries.
This claim could not be independently verified. However, according to a report from Xinhua, the CCP’s state news agency, Xi visited a commercial district near Longfu Temple in Beijing on Feb. 10, 2026, to inspect holiday market conditions and conducted a video review of military readiness and duty assignments across the armed forces. For roughly ten days afterward, no new public appearances were reported.
Xi addressed troops by video instead of visiting them, signaling deep distrust
On Feb. 10, the eve of the Lunar New Year, Xi delivered a speech from the Bayi Building, the headquarters of China’s Central Military Commission in Beijing, addressing the entire armed forces via video link and offering holiday greetings. His choice of words attracted immediate attention from analysts.
Xi declared that the past year had been “extremely unusual and extraordinary.” He praised military personnel, “especially grassroots officers and soldiers,” for “firmly obeying the Party’s commands and following the Party’s lead,” calling them “completely reliable and trustworthy.”
On the surface, these words expressed confidence in the rank and file. The visual told a different story. Footage broadcast by China’s state television network showed a cavernous, nearly empty hall with only three tables. Xi sat at the center table. The only two people flanking him were Zhang Shengmin, the remaining military commission vice chairman, and Dong Jun, China’s defense minister. No other senior military officials were present.
Shen Mingshi, a researcher at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, pointed to the stark contrast between Xi’s words and his actions. “You would normally only see this kind of video-link greeting during a pandemic,” Shen said. “At a minimum, even if he couldn’t leave Beijing, he could have visited troops stationed in or near the capital. The fact that he didn’t do even that shows he still harbors serious concerns about the military’s loyalty, that he doesn’t feel safe. When he said the troops are ‘reliable and trustworthy,’ we know from experience that in China’s military, whatever they feel compelled to say is exactly what they lack. The fact that he had to insist the military is trustworthy tells you he doesn’t trust it.”
Analysts warn Beijing’s political situation is unstable, and Xi fears a mutiny
Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based political commentator, went further. “The fact that Xi broke with precedent and addressed the troops from the Bayi Building over video shows that Beijing’s political situation is unstable right now, and he felt he absolutely had to stay in the capital. Given that he still hasn’t consolidated control over the military, if he had traveled to inspect garrison forces in other provinces, there was a real risk of extreme incidents, a mutiny, a revolt. Xi himself has no confidence that such things won’t happen.”
Katsuji Nakazawa, a senior correspondent and columnist for Nikkei Asia, wrote in a recent analysis that Xi’s remarks amounted to a morale injection for the rank and file. Nakazawa drew a parallel between Xi’s direct appeal to grassroots soldiers and the tactics used by Mao Zedong, the CCP’s founding leader, during the Cultural Revolution. To reclaim absolute power within the Party, Mao bypassed the CCP’s senior leadership and the intelligentsia entirely, instead mobilizing the Red Guards and ordinary citizens to pledge their loyalty directly to him. Xi, Nakazawa argued, is now making the same move: reaching over the heads of his generals to demand personal allegiance from common soldiers.
When Xi told all military personnel to “obey the Party’s commands,” the meaning was transparent: obey him personally. This framing laid bare Xi’s extreme distrust of the senior officer corps. His serial purges of high-ranking military leaders over the past two years already demonstrated that distrust. Although Xi has served as chairman of the Central Military Commission for more than a decade, he remains suspicious of virtually every senior commander in the armed forces, including the heads of the commission’s subordinate departments and the commanding officers and political commissars of all five war zones.
The military purge of Xi’s own deputy left him isolated and unable to trust anyone
Nakazawa observed in his column that during the Lunar New Year, Xi could hardly have been in a celebratory mood. The purge of Zhang Youxia, the former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission who had been Xi’s most trusted military ally, and Liu Zhenli, the former chief of the joint staff department, meant that Xi had struck down even his own inner circle within the armed forces. He has found himself, in Nakazawa’s phrase, “utterly alone,” unable to trust anyone, trapped in deepening isolation.
The scale of the damage becomes clear when you look at the numbers. The Central Military Commission formally has seven members. After the announced purges on Jan. 24, 2026, only two remain: Xi himself and vice chairman Zhang Shengmin. The other five seats are vacant, stripped of their occupants by successive rounds of investigation and removal.
One telling indicator of the rift between Xi and the military establishment appeared in the institutional response to the purge announcement. On Jan. 24, the Liberation Army Daily, the CCP military’s official newspaper, published an editorial using harsh language to accuse Zhang Youxia of “gravely trampling on and undermining the system of accountability to the chairman of the Central Military Commission.”
Under normal CCP protocol, when the Party leadership announces the downfall of a senior official, major Party, government, and military bodies quickly issue public statements pledging support for the decision. This time, those statements never came. The silence from CCP institutions was conspicuous and, by the standards of CCP political theater, extraordinary.
The contrast with past purges is stark. In every previous case, from the fall of former defense minister Wei Fenghe to the investigation of former defense minister Li Shangfu in 2023, the apparatus reliably fell into line. The failure of that apparatus to perform this time suggests that Xi’s arrest of Zhang Youxia has opened a deep fracture between the top leader and the military’s senior ranks, creating a climate of mutual suspicion and distrust. The generals are afraid. And so, it appears, is Xi.
By Li Deyan
