On April 8, 2026, China’s official Xinhua News Agency released a set-piece article titled “Forging a Stronger Army of Heroes: Chairman Xi Jinping Leads the Entire Military in Deepening Political Rectification Through the Spirit of Self-Revolution.” The piece was timed to open a new political rectification campaign inside the People’s Liberation Army, and it follows the pattern the CCP has always used before a crackdown, flooding the propaganda channels in the days before the targets start falling. Resentment inside the PLA officer corps is already running high, and the Xinhua piece, read closely, suggests Xi Jinping is turning the heat up from a position of weakness.
The second sentence of the Xinhua article reads: “On the foundation of Mao Zedong’s original answer, ‘let the people supervise the government,’ the Chinese Communists of the new era have given a second answer: the Party’s self-revolution.”
The slot now filled by “the Chinese Communists of the new era” had routinely been occupied, in earlier versions of this formula, by Xi Jinping’s own name. Placing Xi’s name there was one of the Party’s favorite rhetorical devices for putting him on the same historical plane as Mao, the CCP’s founding chairman. Replacing it with an anonymous collective noun is a meaningful demotion. It also runs directly counter to what Xi is trying to accomplish with his new campaign, since a “political rectification” modeled on Mao’s 1942 Yan’an Rectification Movement is supposed to amplify a leader’s personality cult, not quietly deflate it.
The timing of the Xinhua piece leaves no doubt about its purpose. It ran the same day the first session of a new “training class for senior officers of the entire military” opened, and the same day the commander of the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command, General Yang Zhibin, published a signed article in Study Times, the newspaper of the Central Party School. The three pieces together form the opening salvo of a political purge aimed at the top of the Chinese military command.
Party elders appear to be pushing back on Xi’s campaign
Xi Jinping has most likely run into serious criticism from the Party’s old guard, the retired elders who still wield informal influence over the top leadership, and the editors who produced the Xinhua piece quietly made room for that pressure. Large numbers of senior officers have been taken down in recent months, but Xi’s confidence appears to have been visibly weakened by the same campaign he launched.
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A second sign of that weakening appears later in the article, in a line about the “profound and complex changes in the world, the country, the Party, and the military.” The phrasing is a deliberate fog. What the author will not say out loud is that the trends in the world, the country, and the PLA are all moving in directions unfavorable to the Party. Otherwise the piece would not be reaching, in the very next breath, for one of the Party’s oldest survival slogans, “escaping the historical cycle of order and chaos,” an internal euphemism for the existential fear that the CCP itself may one day collapse.
The rest of the article is straightforward cover fire for the purge that is about to begin.
What ‘building the army through politics’ really means in CCP jargon
The Xinhua piece returns repeatedly to the phrase “building the army through politics,” and Yang Zhibin’s Study Times article, published the same day, echoes the theme by calling for a crackdown on what it labels “false combat readiness” that has strayed from the demands of “actual combat.”
The language the Party uses here is jargon whose meaning has nothing to do with the English words on the page. When CCP official media talks about “false combat readiness” or “false combat effectiveness,” it is not saying that the troops cannot fight. It is saying that the troops are not sufficiently indoctrinated. The criterion is whether “politics is in command,” a phrase that Cultural Revolution-era defense minister Lin Biao used repeatedly in the 1960s to mean the same thing. In this framework, a unit with excellent weapons, excellent tactics, and excellent morale still suffers from “false combat effectiveness” if its political loyalty to the Party leader is in doubt. Xi’s talk of “building the army through politics” and Yang’s attack on “false combat readiness” are two versions of the same message.
That is also why the Party keeps returning to the 1929 Gutian Conference as a reference point, since the Gutian resolution explicitly attacked what it called the “purely military viewpoint,” the dangerous idea that “if the military is good, politics will naturally be good; if the military is bad, politics will not be good either.”
Xi Jinping fears his own officer corps more than he fears Washington
Xi Jinping is less frightened of losing a shooting war with the United States, Japan, or Taiwan than he is of the people inside his own officer corps harboring second thoughts about him. He worries that the supporters and sympathizers of the purged Central Military Commission vice chairman Zhang Youxia, or of the purged army chief Liu Zhenli, may one day stage a repeat of the 1976 Huairen Hall coup, the Politburo-backed move that ended the Cultural Revolution by arresting Mao’s widow and her closest allies within weeks of his death. From its founding, the CCP has always feared its own cadres more than its external enemies.
That fear is why the Xinhua article uses the word “political” more than seventy times across its headline and body. Xi is trying to build ideological insurance against the possibility that someone inside the military will do to him what recent events have done to Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro or to Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. He is hunting for the internal enemies he believes must be embedded somewhere in the ranks, the so-called “American collaborators.”
Xi Jinping does not trust the people holding the guns
Stripped of Party-speak, one sentence in the Xinhua article amounts to an admission that Xi Jinping does not trust the people currently holding the guns inside the Chinese military: “Ensure that the gun barrel is always held in the hands of those who are loyal and reliable to the Party.”
That same sentence has been appearing in CCP propaganda over and over again in recent years, and its repetition is itself a leak. The more often the regime insists that the Party firmly holds the gun, the clearer it becomes that Xi does not, in fact, hold the gun firmly at all. His mass arrests of senior officers have taken on a compulsive quality, functioning less as a rational purge than as a psychological release valve that he reaches for whenever the pressure builds.
The trap Xi has built for himself is that the pressure he keeps applying is itself the fuel. Resentment inside the PLA accumulates a little more each day, and the longer it builds, the more likely it becomes that it will one day detonate all at once.
