Chinese President Xi Jinping’s yearslong purge of the top ranks of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) culminated on Jan. 24 with the removal of his longtime top general, Zhang Youxia. Reports suggest Zhang is now being investigated for corruption and disloyalty. But his falling out with Xi may have also had to do with disagreements over military strategy. Given China’s vast military goals, any such disagreement has high stakes for the rest of the world.
What is the substance of Xi’s split with Zhang? What has Xi’s military modernization campaign achieved? And what kind of military thinker is the Chinese leader?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: In understanding what happened this past week, should we be taking these allegations and rumors of Zhang’s corruption and treason at face value? It seems like that would be a bit naive given the broader kind of purges taking place. If not, what is the substance of his split with Xi exactly?
Adam Tooze: I think it’s important to understand some of the organizational sociology at work. He Weidong, who was purged [in October 2025]was accused of abandoning his original mission, losing party discipline, suffering a collapse of belief and a betrayal of loyalty, which sort of suggests he’s a complete degenerate. By contrast, Zhang is accused of seriously undermining the image and authority of the PLA. So, what you could take all of this to mean is there’s actually a kind of substantial nub to all of this. One has got to assume that any longtime Chinese senior official has skeletons in his closet. That’s not the question. The question is, does anyone choose to get them out and turn them into a charge against him? And what would motivate Xi to do that in relation to Zhang and the other senior figure [Liu Zhenli] who was purged?
Some suggest it’s really all about the effort to prepare the PLA to meet the objective of being ready for a military confrontation over Taiwan in 2027. And it then goes to fundamental issues of troop training, the direction of the build-out. Everyone agrees that the PLA is going to be expanded, but you can do that to maximize immediate impact in terms of breadth and scale, which apparently is more the Xi line. And the professional soldiers apparently were preferring a more technically focused, more limited expansion of what they took to be actual fighting power, rather than intimidatory front, which was the priority of Xi. And between 2025 and 2026, increasing gaps were opening up between Xi and his senior military. And since 2026 is the last year ahead of 2027 in which you can do a training cycle—all of this is about how the bits of the Chinese military operate together—and we’re just up for the announcement of a new five-year plan, which will contain investment and spending priorities, this was the moment to move.
So, though there has been a rolling purge, part of this is a kind of generational reshuffle in the PLA. It’s accompanied by a flurry of various types of denunciation, but if you get into the details of those denunciations, they seem to indicate something more of substance, of military doctrine and developmental priorities. And the timing doesn’t seem accidental either because there is this ticking clock toward 2027.
CA: What has Xi’s military modernization campaign amounted to? What has Xi actually done when it comes to reforming the Chinese military?
AT: The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] regime is, of course, built on the barrel of the gun, right? It is built out of victory in civil war against the Japanese and then a full-on pitch battle civil war against the Chinese Nationalist regime through to ’49. But that left China with that kind of army, an army that grew out of guerrilla campaigning and then became, as it were, the antagonists of the United States in the Korean War, which was fought at huge cost in terms of casualties by the Chinese because they were up against a vastly superior enemy technologically. And really ever since, the PLA has been trying to figure out what it is in military terms. And certainly the PLA that came out of the ’70s and ’80s, which struggled to assert itself against the Vietnamese army—hardened, of course, by its long confrontation with the French and the Americans—was not a force that really knew where it was going in military terms.
But the PLA has been getting serious over the last generation. The off-the-books, unofficial spending estimates would get you to around $400 billion in terms of spending. So that would put China just squarely behind the United States among global military spenders. China is not emphasizing military spending as strongly as the United States, but nevertheless, with an economy as big as China’s and growing as fast as China’s, if you just spend 2 percent of a massively increasing pie, you end up with a huge military.
And they have, since the early 2010s, been really doubling down on modernization. I mean, the Russians tried to do the same thing. The Americans have gone through iterations of modernization, the Europeans as well, but the Chinese are in this game. And as you would expect from the Chinese, they are delivering hardware results, right? They now have not quite perhaps cutting-edge but pretty close to cutting-edge fighters. They are building out a nuclear force that will in the next decades produce a tripolar nuclear competition. They are doing the right thing, which is cutting down the grunt infantry element in their force, because that’s really a waste of money and manpower and everyone in the modern age needs smaller, more lethal armies, not massive armies. Unless you end up in a ghastly war like Ukraine-Russia, and no one in their right mind wants that obviously. And they’re building out the navy rapidly enough now to mean that there aren’t many war games of a Taiwan conflict that will look good for the Americans at this point. I mean, you can do it, you end up with different scenarios, but none of them look terribly good.
And for the first time really in the history of the PLA, in 2020, they issued an emphatic joint operations doctrine that basically said to everyone in the PLA, you’ve got to stop just doing artillery or infantry or naval operations—you have to think of yourselves as a combined joint force. That then entails a whole bunch of other things, like breaking the military units down from division and army and core level down to brigade level, which is much more analogous to how Western militaries function. And everything suggests that the Chinese really are thinking through systematically, at every level, all of the elements of what it would take to make this a viable fighting force. You’d be crazy to ignore this. I don’t think you have to be a military hawk on the American side to take very seriously what they’re doing. The ambition is clearly there to build and to turn the PLA into a 21st-century fighting force, rather than the kind of midcentury 1940s, ’50s powerhouse that it was. Do they show all of the signs of trying to build a highly competent 21st-century military? Emphatically.
CA: For all these changes, China also hasn’t fought a major war in a very long time. How does that affect its ability to do so? In what ways does combat experience matter?
AT: Yeah, one of the things that fascinates me about militarism per se and military history in general is it has this weird existential property, which is that everyone who’s in the business agrees that you can’t learn it except by doing it. You can think about it, you can prepare, anyone in their right mind would, everyone drills, trains, and so on, but there aren’t any coherent accounts of military activity that don’t fundamentally stress that you cannot know it until you do it. And the only good way of really learning how to fight is to fight.
And of course it’s terrifying from a geopolitical point of view. And it comes with inherent trade-offs. The first is simply that in truly high-intensity combat, too many of your people get killed. And so one of the problems—and the Soviets experienced this, Germans as well in World War II—is that you have to churn through an entire army. And the Ukrainians and the Russians are experiencing this right now. So you learn, and yet the people who’ve learned best actually die. The second thing is that you go down a dependent path of learning, right? Because no two conflicts are the same. And so the problem is that as you learn to optimize a particular type of conflict, you may be losing sight of the other sorts of things you should have been thinking about.
So the American military had a huge crisis in the 2010s, precisely over China, because they realized that for 15 years, for better or worse, they’d been trying to learn counterinsurgency operations. And all of a sudden, “Oh my God, we’ve got to do peer competition with the Chinese. We haven’t been thinking about this.” Presumably, the PLA is a super smart organization full of highly wired Chinese technocrats who’ve been thinking very hard about all of these problems. They’ve certainly read their Clausewitz. They know these problems of war. And what they will have been doing is just learning as much as they possibly can from Russia in the Ukraine-Russia war.
And when you speak about drones, where do we think the Russians get their drones from? I mean, again, we can’t have it both ways. We insist that Russians get all their drones from China. That’s part of our shtick against China. So, if that’s the case, there’s someone in China who’s learning an awful lot about drone warfare right now. And one of the principles of PLA and Xi Jinping thinking is a civil-military joined-upness. So we would be crazy to assume that the Chinese and the PLA don’t just have a giant data tube going into their military brain. I mean, the Ukrainians are using Chinese kit as well, right? It’s not like anyone else makes drones at a large enough scale or pioneered the technology of doing so. Both the Ukrainians and the Russians have learned from the Chinese how to mass manufacture them. I think it would be nothing short of bonkers for anyone in Western Europe and the United States to imagine that we could go toe-to-toe with the Chinese in a drone conflict.
CA: What kind of military thinker is Xi? What does Xi think the military is even for?
AT: Xi’s mission in the last 12, 13 years has clearly been to take China’s growth and the development of Chinese society to the “next level.” So, after the reform and opening up in the ’80s and ’90s and the just hyper-rapid boom of the 2000s and early 2010s, it’s a message of modernization and stabilization. And the military is an indispensable part of this. And they’re also, of course, not just sociologically, but they’re also the tool of power of a large state. And it’s quite clear in the early 2010s that in Xi’s thinking, when he’s thinking about new models of great-power relations, China’s graduated. China has graduated from being a revolutionary power and a developing economy to being a great power. And a great power has a great army. And it’s kind of just, join up the dots. It would be dangerous and disequilibrated for a great power like China not to have a great army. It must have a great military. And then what sort of military should it be? Well, it should be modernized, and it needs to be under the control of the party. There’s no other PLA—it’s always under their control.
And if you think about China, right, they could be training up against Russia, they could training in the far west, or they could be training on the eastern seaboard. And where they’ve concentrated their training, they’ve increased their marines to 40,000 or 50,000 Chinese marines now. One of the units within the Chinese army that’s actually grown is the marine component, the amphibious component. The specific target is to be in a different place from where you were 20 years ago or the mid-’90s confrontation over Taiwan. You want to be in a fundamentally different place if you were to choose to go for a confrontation. So I think those are the key elements. But what is striking in his thinking is that it is holistic—it clearly does add up to a coherent vision of modernized state power.
