When General Zhang Youxia met with US officials in Beijing in 2024, he exuded the confidence of a man who was seen as the most trusted deputy in the military of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
General Zhang did not appear worried that he had to look over his shoulder to make sure he was pleasing the leader, said Jake Sullivan, who was the US national security adviser attending the meeting, which lasted at least an hour. “He spoke in an unvarnished way that was typical of a military guy, but also reflective of someone who didn’t feel like he had to be cautious.”
That image of General Zhang’s invulnerability, and closeness to Xi, shattered over the weekend, when China’s defence ministry announced that he was under investigation for unspecified breaches of laws and political discipline.
General Zhang’s downfall is of a different magnitude from the dozens of other generals who have been toppled in Xi’s unrelenting campaign against perceived corruption and disloyalty over the past three years. His fate has astonished even longtime experts who thought that they had taken full measure of Xi, China’s most powerful and imperious leader in generations.
“It’s fair to say this is a seismic event,” Sullivan said. For Xi to “take out somebody who he had such a long history with is striking and raises a lot of questions”, he said.
At 75, General Zhang was old enough that Xi could in theory have ushered him into retirement. Instead, Xi made a public pariah of him. An editorial about General Zhang in the Liberation Army Daily on Sunday hinted that he was being accused of corruption, and, perhaps more important, of disloyalty to Xi.
General Zhang and another commander who fell with him, General Liu Zhenli, had “trampled on” the authority of the military chairman — that is, Xi — and had “severely undermined the party’s absolute leadership over the military”, the editorial said. Their actions had “rendered massive damage” on the military’s political soundness and combat readiness, it said.
“It reads more to suggest that they really were challenging Xi Jinping, that it was really a personal betrayal,” said Shanshan Mei, a political scientist at RAND, a research organisation, who studies China’s military. “Corruption is mentioned, but to me this gist of what they are accused of is very political, betraying Xi.”
What prompted Xi to finally turn against General Zhang is now a topic of fevered speculation in Beijing and beyond. Some experts believe that Xi may have come to see General Zhang as too powerful after the general’s own rivals were toppled in previous purges. Others believe Xi concluded that systemic corruption was so deep that he needed drastic surgery to clear the way for a new generation of commanders.
Other allegations have emerged. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing anonymous sources, that General Zhang has been accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the US.
The timing of the investigation has drawn attention to General Zhang’s recent high-level engagements. Sullivan said their discussions of nuclear issues in 2024 — in the presence of about 20 other Chinese military officers — were strictly general. He said that he brought up nuclear weapons in the context of China’s overall military buildup, but said that General Zhang said nothing sensitive or even substantive on the topic.
“That was not one of the main topics of the discussion,” Sullivan said.
‘Princelings’
Xi and General Zhang are both “princelings”, the sons of revolutionaries who served under Mao Zedong. General Zhang’s father was a general who served alongside Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, in northwest China. There is no evidence that General Zhang and Xi were close as children, but their shared background might have helped to cement their bond at some point, said Joseph Torigian, the author of a biography of the older Xi.
New York Times News Service