Why Xi’s Search for Loyalty is Strangling the PLA’s Effectiveness
Abstract
The most recent wave of purges that have roiled the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) demonstrate the seriousness with which Xi takes his push to reform the country’s military leadership with the aim of improving command and eliminating the corruption that has long plagued the PLA. While these efforts may yield benefits in the long-term, they will likely result in the degradation of military effectiveness due to the reform’s emphasis on loyalty over the professional autonomy needed for effective command on a modern battlefield.
Purging the Ranks
The recent purges are part of a sweeping campaign that has targeted over a hundred senior officers, resulting in the effective removal of half the senior leadership of the PLA, including the heads of various theater commands, the leadership of the Rocket Force, and the defense minister. Two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission (CMC) have also been removed over the space of a few months, leaving a single political officer, not operational commander, alongside Xi on the CMC.
Corruption has indeed been a long-running source of dysfunction within the PLA, one that has hobbled its military effectiveness and acted as a drain on PLA professionalism. Shortly after his ascent to power, Xi diagnosed the PLA as suffering from ”deep-rooted contradictions,” leading him to institute wide-ranging reforms meant to eliminate corruption and streamline command and control (C2) with the aim of turning the PLA into a force that could “win information-age wars.”
Central to the reforms that Xi has implemented is the reemphasis of the ‘Chairman Responsibility System,’ an arrangement that routes all major military decisions through Xi personally. In most modern militaries, civilian leaders set the wider strategic objectives, leaving officers to pursue commander’s intent when making operational and tactical decisions. The Chairman Responsibility System collapses this distinction, concentrating strategic, operational, and even tactical authority in a single individual. While this ensures that the ‘Party commands the gun’, it creates a rigid hierarchy increasingly at odds with the fluid, decentralized demands of 21st-century warfare.
Paradoxically, the very technologies meant to enable modern warfare may also provide additional avenues for commanders to micromanage events in the field and reinforce this rigidity. Advanced C2 systems give central authorities unprecedented visibility into tactical situations, which in a hyper-centralized military culture does not empower subordinates but instead incentivizes micromanagement from above. Lower-level officers, aware that Beijing can see what they see, are discouraged from acting independently and instead pass decisions up the chain to avoid political risk. PLA analysts have noted the vulnerability of China’s centralized command system to communication disruptions, but their solution appears to be to improve situational awareness for officers up the chain of command rather than loosen centralized control to allow for increased delegation. As such, the technology designed to accelerate decision-making becomes a tool for tightening control.
Red and Expert?
While these reforms ensure political reliability, they come at the cost of the operational initiative required for modern combat, produce an environment where officers may feel unable to give their professional opinions on an operation, and create a military culture of paranoia where “no one can be trusted.” As Zi Yang noted, these purges risk “substituting the collective wisdom of elite officers for the wits of one man.”
The removal of General Zhang Youxia, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and General Liu Zhenli, Chief of the Joint Staff Department, under charges of “serious violations of discipline” illustrates this dynamic. While the charges are nominally related to corruption, the accompanying official rhetoric accused him of ‘severely damaging the military’s political awareness’ and ‘trampling on the ‘Chairman Responsibility System,’ suggesting that his removal has as much to do with enforcing political obedience as with rooting out graft. This view appears to be supported by Japan’s former defense minister, Satoshi Morimoto, who stated that Zhang had opposed Xi’s consideration of an invasion of Taiwan in 2024.
Not all observers view this internal turmoil as a permanent debilitation. Others have highlighted how the purges might be a result of impatience with the pace of reform and could lead to a more reliable and ideologically aligned officer corps better suited to high-intensity conflict. Even the Pentagon has echoed this perspective, noting that while the recent purges of leadership may degrade the PLA’s effectiveness in the short term, they have “the potential to improve PLA readiness in the long term.”
Yet this optimistic view underestimates the inherent friction in building an officer corps that is both politically loyal and operationally competent, or both ‘red and expert’, when restaffing the depleted ranks of the PLA leadership. The qualities that ensure political survival, such as caution, obedience, and ideological conformity, often directly undermine the initiative, horizontal cooperation, and willingness to deliver uncomfortable truths required for modern command. As such, the pool of candidates who satisfy both criteria is inherently limited, while the purges have further shrunk the pool of candidates at a time when the PLA faces an already problematic shortage of senior officers.
This emphasis on political awareness and loyalty will almost certainly undermine PLA combat effectiveness, as research has regularly shown that politicized militaries with restricted horizontal communication and loyalty-based promotions consistently underperform as fighting forces. While the PLA was never designed to act as a traditional state army, as its ‘historic missions’ have always included the defense of the Communist Party, the politicization and personalization of command under Xi has been pushed to a degree unseen since the Mao era. At that time, political control likely resulted in improved loyalty, discipline, and morale in the PLA during the Korean War, improvements that may be derived from the current purges. But the demands of that conflict bear little resemblance to the sensor-driven, information-intensive operations that the PLA must now be prepared to fight. Under the circumstances, a short-to-medium term degradation of military effectiveness is almost assured while its future payoffs remain hypothetical.
The Kill-Web’s Weakest Link
The consequences of this organizational and political rigidity become concrete when examined against the technical demands of the PLA’s own weapons systems. Many modern weapons systems today have ranges that far exceed the organic sensing capabilities on their launching platforms. As such, these systems will rely on two-way data-link to receive offboard cuing from external sensors to guide them to their target. This type of interaction requires the rapid processing of data, coordination between different units, and the ability to rapidly react to changes on the ground.
The importance of speed when coordinating various systems, sensors, and shooters can be found in China’s long-range anti-ship missiles. The use of such systems requires a sequential kill-chain to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess damage, a sequence that must be carried out with minimal delay or interruption. The longer the kill-chain takes to be completed, the further the target moves from its last known position. If the kill-chain takes 15 minutes, a salvo of 7 to 33 missiles might yield an 80% hit probability. But if organizational friction or processing delays extend that loop to two hours, the Target Location Error expands so drastically that over 100 missiles would be required to saturate the uncertainty area. While advances in sensing and processing have shortened these timelines, the underlying mathematics remain unchanged, and crucially, the organizational delays introduced by a hyper-centralized command structure represent precisely the kind of friction that extends processing times and reduces the effectiveness of modern weapons systems. The PLA’s own assessments regard its current pace of intel transmission and dissemination as slow, “especially in a joint environment.” Automation and computer-assisted processing lag behind those of other advanced economies, and different units take different approaches to cross-unit intelligence sharing, increasing friction and compounding delays.
Recognizing the importance of speed to the effective implementation of the kill-chain, Beijing moved to establish a resilient “web” of diverse and interconnected sensors to provide regular and accurate updates on target location. While this approach aims to close the loop more rapidly, the current centralization and politicization of the PLA’s command structure is the antithesis of a decentralized kill-web. China’s organizational culture continues to dissuade independent decision-making, encouraging officers to pass responsibility up the chain of command to avoid “political errors“. This problem is compounded by persistent stove-piping, which is the tendency for intelligence to flow vertically rather than horizontally between units, resulting in a kill-web that in practice operates more like a series of parallel chains, each dependent on the center.
If an adversary were to employ cyber, electronic, and kinetic attacks to disrupt the kill-web, decentralization and adaptation become vital for the targeted force. A hyper-centralized force, however, enters a state of command paralysis where units wait for authorization that never arrives, redundant sensors go unused because no one has the authority to re-task them, and local commanders defer to a center that may itself be degraded or overwhelmed. If the PLA’s information flow is restricted to vertical silos, the kill-web collapses back into a series of disconnected nodes, each individually vulnerable to attack.
Digitization and the use of AI agents might appear to offer a solution to slow decision-making. Yet embedded in the PLA’s organizational culture, these tools may simply accelerate information flow without solving the underlying problem that junior officers may not feel empowered to act on the collected information. In the friction-filled environment of the modern battlefield, a ‘Digital CMC’ will likely find itself flooded with data but starved for the delegated authority to act on it.
The Fragility Beneath the Hardware
Xi’s campaign to reform the PLA and eliminate corruption is likely to produce significant side effects through the hyper-centralization and personalization of command, which may prove equally damaging as corruption. Early indications suggest these effects may already be materializing, with analysts noting a degradation in the quality of military exercises carried out around Taiwan in 2025. The severity of these purges will also have psychological effects on the remaining officers, who are now more likely to withhold professional judgment and to prioritize analyzing political trends over professional development, resulting in unrealistic assessments of military capability. The danger mirrors Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, where unrealistic political expectations went unchallenged by a cowed military leadership. If a new cadre of loyalists, fearful of Zhang’s fate, refuses to inform Xi of the immense difficulties of a cross-strait invasion, China risks the same kind of catastrophic strategic miscalculation.
Fundamentally, Xi’s purges have systematically undermined the capacity for rapid, delegated decision-making. In a battlefield that demands precisely this capability, the PLA’s rigid internal communications and vertical command dependencies constitute its weakest and most invisible link. The policy implications of these observations are clear. Deterrence must focus not only on material denial but on exploiting the PLA’s decision-making bottlenecks. Strategies that increase operational tempo, disrupt command nodes, or force decisions down to levels where the PLA’s officers are least empowered to act would compound these structural vulnerabilities. Operations designed to saturate multiple sectors simultaneously under a degraded communication environment, for example, would likely paralyze distributed PLA units without centralized coordination.
From the Iraqi army in 1991 to Russia’s army in 2022, forces that appeared formidable on paper have consistently underperformed when their institutional foundations were compromised, demonstrating that the human and organizational dimensions of military power matter as much as the technical. Yet Xi, in his pursuit of absolute control, appears to be compounding the PLA’s weaknesses, resulting in a military that cannot fail him politically, but may fail him operationally when it matters most.
I would like to thank David Heiner at the Small Wars Journal for his constructive and helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
