The Chinese Communist Party announced through state media on Monday that two of the country’s highest military officials, Gen. Zhang Youxia and Gen. Liu Zhenli, have been expelled for corruption and “being disloyal and dishonest to the Party.”
Zhang was the vice chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC) of the Chinese Communist Party, which made him second only to dictator Xi Jinping in the Chinese military hierarchy. He is the highest-ranking active-duty Chinese general ever to be purged from the Party.
Liu was chief of staff for the CMC’s Joint Staff Department, giving him major responsibilities for strategy, logistics, and training of military personnel.
The CMC is supposed to have seven members, including Xi, but with the downfall of Zhang, only one other member remains: the Party’s chief anti-corruption officer, Zhang Shengmin.
Both Zhang and Liu have been under investigation since January, and were stripped of all practical authority in August. Their formal expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party is expected to be finalized at a plenary session of the Party in late October.
The next full Party Congress, at which Xi is expected to claim a fourth term as leader, will occur in late 2027. Observers have speculated Xi plans to unveil a reorganized and more combat-ready military at the Party Congress, a goal that has been embarrassingly delayed by the massive scope of the anti-corruption purge required to beat China’s military leadership into shape.
When the investigations of the two generals were first announced, they were “suspected of serious violations of discipline and the law,” a common Chinese Communist euphemism for corruption.
The charges announced on state media Monday were more specific and unusually severe, including “seriously violating political discipline and political rules,” failing to “supervise their relatives and close staff members,” accepting an “enormous amount of money” in bribes, “forming cliques and factions,” and most severely being “disloyal and dishonest to the Party.”
The Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party said the two generals had large-scale “political problems entangled with economic problems, with corruption, illicit enrichment and dereliction of duty occurring at the same time.”
The announcement said Zhang and Liu had “crossed the red lines and bottom lines of conduct” and warned “there can be no place for corrupt elements to hide within the armed forces,” hinting that their punishments would be exceptionally severe to make examples of them.
Two other purged military officials, former defense ministers Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, have been sentenced to death for comparable offenses, although their sentences were effectively commuted to “deprivation of political rights for life and confiscation of all personal property.”
According to the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Xi’s latest anti-corruption purge has officially claimed 36 generals and lieutenant generals since 2022 – and 65 other high-ranking officers have mysteriously vanished.
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