What is being described online as the “Zhang Youxia incident” is less a single event than the latest rupture in a long, tightening arc of power under Xi Jinping an arc defined by suspicion, erasure, and the relentless subordination of institutions to one man’s will.
In late January 2026, v
Zhang was not a marginal figure. He was one of the most senior uniformed officers in the People’s Liberation Army, a rare combat veteran of the 1979 China-Vietnam war, and for years considered a core pillar of Xi’s control over the military. His survival through earlier purges had made him appear untouchable. That illusion collapsed overnight.
The shock lies not only in Zhang’s removal but in what it confirms. Since consolidating power after 2012, Xi has pursued an ever-narrowing definition of loyalty, one that no longer tolerates independent stature, institutional memory, or even long-standing personal ties. The PLA, once governed by collective leadership and factional balance, has been subjected to repeated waves of cleansing. The justification is always corruption; the result is always the same greater personal dependence on Xi at the apex.
This pattern did not begin with Zhang. In 2023 and 2024, the leadership of the PLA Rocket Force China’s most sensitive strategic arm vanished from public view. Commanders, political commissars, and procurement chiefs were removed or replaced in silence. No trials were televised, no evidence disclosed. In 2025, senior figures linked to logistics and equipment development followed. Each disappearance was treated as isolated. Taken together, they describe a system in which fear has replaced trust as the organising principle.
By early 2026, the Central Military Commission itself had been hollowed out. From a body designed to project collective command, it was reduced in practice to Xi and a shrinking circle of provisional survivors. Zhang Youxia’s investigation left the CMC with an unprecedented concentration of authority in Xi’s hands. This was not institutional reform; it was institutional abandonment.
Why now? Analysts point to a convergence of pressures. The economy continues to slow, local government debt remains unresolved, and foreign policy has boxed China into simultaneous confrontations from Taiwan to the South China Sea to technology controls. In such conditions, authoritarian systems do not decentralise; they contract. Control becomes an obsession because uncertainty is everywhere else.
Xi’s fixation on “absolute loyalty” within the military reflects a deeper anxiety: the knowledge that modern power no longer rests on ideology or growth alone, but on uninterrupted command of force and information. The repeated emphasis on the “Chairman Responsibility System” in official statements following Zhang’s removal was not rhetorical flourish. It was a warning to the PLA and to the Party that allegiance is personal, not constitutional.
The echoes of earlier eras are impossible to miss. The comparison some commentators make with the 1971 Lin Biao crisis is exaggerated in scale but accurate in instinct. Then, as now, the leadership responded to perceived military uncertainty not by transparency, but by silence and purification. The lesson drawn from history inside Zhongnanhai is not that purges destabilise the system, but that they must be carried out faster and deeper.
What emerges from the Zhang Youxia case is not evidence of a coup attempt, nor proof of organised resistance within the PLA. It is something quieter and more corrosive: a confirmation that no rank, history, or service record offers protection once a leader becomes larger than the institutions he commands. Disappearances are no longer exceptional events; they are tools of governance.
In this sense, the “incident” is less about Zhang Youxia than about Xi Jinping himself. It marks another stage in the transformation of China’s political system from collective authoritarianism into personal rule where stability is maintained not through rules, but through the continual demonstration that anyone can be erased.
