On May 27, China’s state news agency Xinhua reported that the Central Military Commission (CMC), the Party-controlled body that commands China’s armed forces, had issued a document titled “Several Measures on Strengthening the Education, Management, and Supervision of Senior Military Cadres.” The document, released in summary form only, covers 26 provisions across seven areas. Its stated aims include carrying out “ideological rectification,” deepening “political training,” and establishing what it calls “iron rules” for strict education, strict management, and strict supervision of senior officers.
Among its stated priorities are: tightening control over commanding officers, “strengthening Party committee collective leadership,” “upholding Party management of cadres and personnel selection,” and “strengthening the supervision and management of principal leaders.”
The following day, May 28, the PLA Daily, China’s official military newspaper, ran a front-page editorial under the headline “Establish ironclad rules for strictly strengthening the education, management, and supervision of senior cadres.”
PLA Daily dropped Xi’s loyalty slogans in a striking reversal
Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based Chinese political commentator who closely tracks CCP factional dynamics, drew a direct comparison between this May 28 PLA Daily editorial and one published just seven weeks earlier, on April 9. On April 8, Xi had personally attended and addressed a “Senior Military Cadre Training Class” held in Beijing, in what Tang characterized as Xi’s attempt to use his formal position as CMC chairman to reassert personal control over the armed forces through legitimate channels. The April 9 PLA Daily editorial that followed was saturated with the political vocabulary of Xi’s personal authority: the word “loyalty” appeared 32 times; “core” appeared five times; the editorial explicitly invoked the “2-4-4-2” ideological formula, a shorthand for four sets of Party slogans Xi has made obligatory; and it called on officers to uphold the “CMC chairman responsibility system” and “support the core.”
The May 28 editorial contained none of this. The phrases “loyalty,” “core,” “CMC chairman responsibility system,” and “2-4-4-2” are entirely absent. The Xinhua dispatch accompanying the directive mentions “deeply implementing Xi Jinping’s thought on strengthening the military” once, a standard ritual phrase, but otherwise strips out every marker of personal fealty that Xi’s apparatus typically demands.
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The missing phrases point to a factional struggle over who controls the military
In CCP political culture, “rectification campaigns” ( zhengfeng) are not routine administrative exercises. Historically, they have been launched when the top leadership has failed to consolidate control, when internal factional lines are contested, and when one side needs to compel loyalty from subordinates who have not yet chosen sides. A leader who has already secured unchallenged authority does not need a rectification campaign; rectification is the tool of a leader still fighting to get there. The new directive fits that pattern. The emphasis on “Party committee collective leadership” is particularly telling. During periods when Xi has been at his most dominant, official military communications have referred instead to the “CMC chairman responsibility system,” a formulation that concentrates authority in Xi personally. The phrase “collective leadership” has been functionally suppressed in Xi-era military discourse precisely because it dilutes individual command authority. Its reappearance in a CMC-issued document is a deliberate reassertion by forces that want to prevent Xi from recentralizing personal control.
The 26 provisions appear aimed at locking in, through formal regulatory language, the rules governing how senior military officers, likely at the rank of major general and above, can be promoted, transferred, assigned duties, and removed, so that no single leader can make those decisions unilaterally.
CCP elders operating through a shadow council are blocking Xi’s path back to military control
Tang’s argument is that the directive did not originate with Xi. Its real author, he contends, is a body known as the “Central Decision-Making Awareness Coordination Mechanism”, an informal but authoritative council of senior CCP elders operating outside the formal Party structure. Tang treats this body as the operative successor to Deng Xiaoping’s Central Advisory Commission, the vehicle through which Deng, after formally stepping down from his positions, retained ultimate veto power over Party affairs and used it to remove two general secretaries, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.
According to Tang, the Coordination Mechanism was established on July 1, 2025, with an explicit mandate to “deliberate on major affairs, discuss major matters, and oversee major decisions,” while also pledging to “coordinate without substituting, and arrive at positions without overstepping.” Tang reads that formulation as a division of authority: Xi manages the Party’s day-to-day operations, but all decisions of strategic significance require the elder council’s approval.
The Mechanism’s leverage over military affairs is, at this moment, unusually direct. The CMC normally operates as a seven-member body. Following the 2023–2024 wave of military purges, which swept out figures including Zhang Youxia, the former CMC vice chair, and Liu Zhenli, the former chief of staff of the military’s Joint Staff Department, only two members remain: Xi himself, and Zhang Shengmin, a CMC member overseeing discipline. With the body this depleted, the elder council effectively holds a casting vote on all major military decisions, because there is no quorum of Xi loyalists to override it.
Current military commanders, Tang argues, are acutely aware that Xi wants to reassert personal control and that doing so would likely mean purging officers who owed their positions to Zhang Youxia’s patronage network. Facing that threat, they have calculated it is safer to align with the elder council than with Xi. The new directive is the institutional expression of that alignment: an attempt to formalize, in binding regulation, a system of collective decision-making that Xi cannot unilaterally dismantle.
Xi is blocked through official channels, but extralegal moves remain possible
Tang’s conclusion is direct. Xi’s April 8 appearance at the Senior Military Cadre Training Class was an attempt to reassert personal military authority through his formal institutional role. The response, a CMC directive that strips that role of its key prerogatives and buries the loyalty vocabulary Xi depends on, amounts to a formal rebuff delivered through the official machinery of the state he nominally leads. Xi’s path to reclaiming direct military command through institutional procedures is now closed.
Tang adds one qualification. Xi is not Hua Guofeng, the transitional leader who succeeded Mao Zedong and was eased out of power through institutional maneuvering without mounting serious resistance. Xi has shown a willingness to use surprise and force when institutions work against him, as the sudden removals of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli demonstrated. Tang does not rule out that Xi could move against the elder council or individual military commanders through similarly extralegal means.
