The Death Sentence

Last week, a Chinese military court sentenced two former defense ministers to death. Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu received two-year reprieves that will be commuted to life in prison without parole. Both men once stood at the top of the People’s Liberation Army. Wei ran the Rocket Force before serving as defense minister from 2018 to 2023. Li succeeded him and ran military procurement before that. Both were Xi Jinping’s picks. The verdicts raise a more serious question than corruption: whether China’s military can fight.

On April 8, Chinese state television aired the opening ceremony of a senior officer training program at the National Defense University in Beijing. The Nikkei’s Beijing correspondent, Katsuji Nakazawa, noted what the cameras showed: Xi and General Zhang Shengmin sat alone at the head table. Many of the PLA’s highest-ranking generals and admirals were absent. Of the seven men who sat on the Central Military Commission when Xi began his third term in October 2022, only those two remain. The other five have been purged, expelled, or placed under investigation. The body that runs the world’s largest standing army is now a chairman and his anti-corruption officer.

The man missing from that table tells the story. General Zhang Youxia was Xi’s childhood friend, the son of a comrade-in-arms of Xi’s father, and the highest-ranking general in China. Xi pulled him out of retirement in 2022 to fix the army. In January, Xi placed him under investigation. Brookings China expert Jonathan Czin called it a Shakespearean moment in Chinese politics. Foreign Affairs called it the biggest political earthquake in the PLA top brass since Tiananmen. If Xi cannot trust the friend whose father served beside his own, no general beneath him is safe.

Armies can survive corruption, but distrust can have a lethal impact.

He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The CSIS China Power Project counts more than one hundred confirmed and suspected purges of senior officers since 2022. Sixty-two of those came in 2025 alone, more than the previous three years combined. The Rocket Force, which controls China’s nuclear missiles, has lost two consecutive commanders. Junior officers are being promoted into jobs that used to require decades more experience.

These losses are showing up in what the army actually does. China’s response time to provocations from Taiwan stretched from three or four days in 2024 to nearly three weeks in 2025. The April 2025 exercise around Taiwan was downgraded from a full military exercise to a hastily organized drill, a quieter classification under PLA doctrine. Nakazawa’s verdict in the Nikkei was direct. In its current state, the PLA would have an extremely difficult time preparing to invade Taiwan. While mounting a blockade is conceivable, putting boots on the ground is not.

Xi appears to know it. Two days after the April 8 ceremony, he rolled out the red carpet for Cheng Li-wun, the new chairwoman of Taiwan’s Kuomintang opposition party. He shook her hand for fourteen seconds in front of the cameras and chatted with the press pool. A Chinese leader confident in his military does not stage peaceful-unification theater with a politician who has run her party for less than six months. The handshake telegraphed to the whole world Xi’s north star: peaceful unification, because the alternative is no longer available to him.

China wants the world to see a disciplined superpower. The world is seeing a chairman who no longer trusts his own generals, and generals who have learned the safest move is to tell him what he wants to hear. A leader who cannot hear bad news is a leader who can stumble into a war he is not ready to fight. An obedient army is not a ready one. Xi Jinping is about to find out the difference.

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