Fall of top Chinese general Zhang stirs US uncertainty about China’s military

WASHINGTON/BEIJING - With the downfall of China's top general, the United States has lost an important contact on Beijing's top military body and now faces a People's Liberation Army that increasingly lacks steady, experienced commanders, said former US officials and analysts. 

China's defence ministry said on Jan 24 that Zhang Youxia, second-in-command under President Xi Jinping as vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), is under investigation. It is the latest and highest-profile purge of the country's top military leadership amid Mr Xi's crackdown on corruption in the armed forces.

For Washington, Zhang's surprising demise removes a respected and well-known figure within China's military at a time when successive US administrations have worked to build senior-level contacts to avoid mishaps between the world's two most powerful militaries. 

Several former senior US officials told Reuters that Zhang's dismissal came as a shock.

Mr Xi allowed Zhang to communicate with the US during the Biden administration after a 17-month-long period during which China had cut off nearly all military-to-military communications following a visit to Taiwan by then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. 

Such a senior-level connection - in China's political system, Zhang outranks the defence minister - was seen as an important relationship and a channel that remained viable for further talks.

One of just a few leading officers with combat experience from China's invasion of Vietnam in the late-1970s, Zhang was seen in the US as a competent adviser to Mr Xi, who sits atop the Central Military Commission, now staffed by only one general, a career political commissar Zhang Shengmin. 

“Who does Xi Jinping convene in a crisis if there's only one person on his commission?” said Mr Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore who engaged with Zhang as a former US defence official. 

Mr Thompson said he believed Zhang was the one active-duty PLA officer who could give Mr Xi objective advice about China's military capabilities and shortcomings, as well as the human cost of conflict. 

“There's a risk that Xi Jinping is given bad advice by sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear,” he said. “That creates a risk of miscalculation.”

A senior US administration official said the White House had nothing to share regarding “reports of palace intrigue” in China, adding that the Trump administration is “building a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain”.

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment. The Chinese Embassy in Washington also did not respond. 

Need for insight

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has held talks multiple times with China's Defense Minister Dong Jun - who does not sit on the CMC - since September, part of US efforts to improve communications with China over its military modernisation, nuclear weapons build-up, and more aggressive posture toward US allies and actions in the Indo-Pacific.

But American officials have long prized contact with vice chairs of the CMC over the country's Defense Ministry, which lacks command authority over China's armed forces.

Among senior Chinese generals, Zhang was a known quantity to US officials, having joined a week-long military delegation to the US in May 2012 when he was a lower-level general. 

Mr David Stilwell, a former US Air Force General who served as the State Department's top diplomat for East Asia in the first Trump administration, recalls that Zhang was the only Chinese officer who wanted to fly in one of the US military's Osprey aircraft on that trip.

“He is very different from his fellow PLA brothers. He could have fit in very well in the US military,” Stilwell said, noting that he was keen to talk to US soldiers and try out US weapons, and struck the Americans as a professional rather than political soldier. 

Still, Mr Stilwell said senior-level engagement with CMC generals was typically perfunctory. Without Zhang to advise Mr Xi, his main concern was that the PLA was more likely to believe a self-constructed narrative that they were ready for a “Taiwan adventure”. 

“I think what you lose with Zhang Youxia gone is a voice of reason,” Mr Stilwell said. 

US interactions with senior CMC generals have been an infrequent feature of bilateral diplomacy over the past two decades. 

Biden administration national security advisor Jake Sullivan was the last known senior US official to meet Zhang when the two held talks in August 2024 in Beijing.

Mr Eric Hundman, a Chinese military expert at Washington-based security consultancy BluePath Labs, said military-to-military exchanges under Mr Xi, even at the CMC level, tended to be scripted.

“The PLA knows its capabilities fairly well and is not interested in moving on Taiwan before they think they're ready. My question mark has always been how much Xi Jinping listens to them on that point,” Mr Hundman said.

“To the degree that he's getting worse advice, that would worry me,” he said. REUTERS