by Amichai Stein
Empty seats define President Xi’s rule, as China’s political elite faces a relentless purge.
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In the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the choreography is usually flawless. The red flags are perfectly aligned, and the applause is synchronous.
The goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and President Xi Jinping, who has ruled the country since 2012, is to project an image of unbreakable unity and inevitable rise.
However, in recent years the carefully curated image of stability has been shattered by a reality that looks more like a high-stakes thriller than a bureaucratic procession. The dominant feature of Beijing’s political landscape is no longer the applause but the empty seats.
From the unceremonious removal of a former president from his chair in front of TV cameras to the vanishing of foreign and defense ministers and the purging of top generals, China is undergoing a political earthquake that has left Western intelligence agencies and geopolitical analysts scrambling for answers. Is this a sign of a paranoid dictator losing his grip, or a supremely confident leader fine-tuning his machine for a conflict that will reshape the world order?
The tremors began publicly in October 2022, during the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. In a scene that shocked the world, former Chinese leader Hu Jintao was physically led out of the hall while seated next to Xi Jinping.
“An unceremonious departure for a former Chinese leader,” Zi Yang, a senior research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, tells the Magazine. “Hu was basically asked to leave. It seems like Hu had no idea what was going on. To see a former leader carried out like that was, of course, quite shocking to many observers.” It was a visual declaration: The old guard was gone. This was Xi’s party now.
But what followed was even more bizarre. One morning in July 2023, Qin Gang, the foreign minister, simply evaporated – he did not arrive at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit. “Health reasons” was the official explanation given by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
A rising star in the CCP and former ambassador to the United States, Qin “had been a favorite of Xi Jinping. It’s said that Xi Jinping actually liked to drink on his airplane with Qin Gang, that they were very good friends,” explains Prof. Dennis Wilder of Georgetown University, a former senior director for East Asia at the National Security Council.
'Regarding your question, I have no information to provide'
When asked about Qin’s whereabouts, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Mao Ning, offered a response that has become a hallmark of the current era: “Regarding your question, I have no information to provide.” Weeks later, Qin was stripped of his title. Rumors swirled.
“What seems to have happened in this case is that Qin Gang began an illicit relationship with a Chinese news reporter,” Wilder suggests, noting reports that the affair may have resulted in a child.
Qin was not alone. Liu Jianchao, the man responsible for the party’s international liaison work, also vanished from the public eye that same year. The pattern was clear: Proximity to the leader offered no protection.
If the diplomatic purges were mysterious, the upheaval in the People’s Liberation Army was alarming. The very men tasked with modernizing China’s military and preparing it for a possible invasion of Taiwan are being removed at a staggering rate.
“Nowhere in Chinese military history – except perhaps under chairman Mao – have we seen anything as unprecedented as this purge,” notes Wilder.
The purge has reached the very apex of the military hierarchy. Gen. Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and effectively the second-most powerful man in the military, came under scrutiny and was removed from his post last month.
“Resolutely investigating and dealing with Zhang Youxia is a major achievement in the party and military’s struggle against corruption,” stated Jiang Bin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, using the party’s preferred euphemism for political removal.
“They didn’t really use the word ‘purge’; they used the phrase ‘under investigation.’ But that’s basically the first step of being purged. Usually, nobody is found innocent through these investigations,” says Zi Yang.
The chaos has been particularly acute in the Defense Ministry. Li Shangfu, who became the defense minister with the shortest tenure in Chinese history, was ousted amid corruption allegations. His successor, navy veteran Dong Jun, has reportedly faced similar scrutiny.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Assaf Orion, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and director of the Diane & Guilford Glazer Israel-China Policy Center, views this as a systemic cleansing of the officer corps.
“We are talking here about a cleaning out – or elimination – of the entire group... the Chinese military top brass, who were all appointments from Xi Jinping’s era,” Orion explains.
According to Orion, the official line always circles back to “corruption, disciplinary violations, and violations of party laws,” but the subtext is power dynamics. The accused are often charged with creating “cliques or influence networks” that can be viewed as a threat to Xi’s rule.
The Wall Street Journal has reported even more damaging allegations, suggesting that some generals, including Zhang Youxia, were suspected of leaking secrets related to China’s nuclear program to the United States.
While Wilder believes these leaks might be a “cover for what’s really happening” – a raw political struggle – the implication is stark: Xi feels he cannot trust the men who control his nuclear arsenal.
“There seems to be quite a lot of infighting among the elites,” says Zi Yang. “And Xi seems like he does not trust anyone at that level.”
WHY IS Xi Jinping dismantling the very leadership structure he spent a decade building? The conventional wisdom suggests a leader gripped by paranoia, seeing shadows of treason in every corner.
However, Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and renowned China scholar, offers a counterintuitive perspective. In an interview, Johnson argued that these moves might stem not from fear but from hubris.
“I think he is fundamentally unsure about the people he’s surrounded himself with,” Johnson says. “He is probably doing this out of not so much paranoia but perhaps extreme self-confidence.”
According to Johnson, Xi feels he has such absolute control that he can afford to treat the military leadership as interchangeable parts.
“He feels that he can get exactly the people he wants running the military. It might be like fine-tuning the leadership,” Johnson explains.
While it is easy to “construct a scenario where he’s paranoid, schizophrenic,” Johnson contends that Xi is acting out of a belief that he has “complete control.”
This view contrasts with the assessment of other analysts who see the purges as a sign of fragility. “When some of these generals start building up their own factions by promoting their own underlings, perhaps that alarms Xi,” Zi Yang says. “Xi is very afraid of his subordinates getting too powerful.”
Orion
highlights the scale of the campaign: “In total, during his years in
office, about 200,000 people were purged. This shows that even those
closest to him cannot be trusted, and therefore, he purges them.” For
the international community – and particularly for US allies like
Israel, which closely monitor global stability – the burning question is
how this affects a potential invasion of Taiwan.
In Taiwan, senior officials say that 2027 is a year to watch. This aligns with US intelligence assessments that Xi has ordered the military to be ready for action by that date. But does a purged military fight better?
A purged command structure is a compliant one. However, Orion warns of the operational costs: “When a military is undergoing a turnover of senior officers, this is not the height of stability needed to launch an operation with such high risks.”
Essentially, Xi may be buying political loyalty at the cost of military competence.
Johnson, however, pushes back against the idea that the purges signal an imminent war. He remains skeptical about the “invasion next year” theories derived from reading political tea leaves.
“I still assume that the leadership in Beijing is rational,” Johnson argues. “And if I assume that they’re rational, then it would not make sense to invade right away because time is on Beijing’s side militarily.”
Johnson points out that while the United States is distracted by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, China is methodically building aircraft carriers and expanding its arsenal. He also notes that the domestic political situation in Taiwan – where the pro-independence leadership is unpopular – may eventually break in Beijing’s favor without a single shot being fired.
“It makes sense to wait and see how that plays out, meanwhile building up the military and not pushing a hasty invasion,” Johnson concludes. “I don’t think the purges are directly related to some sort of impending military adventure.”
WHETHER DRIVEN by paranoia or confidence, Xi Jinping has fundamentally altered the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party. By abolishing term limits and refusing to groom a successor, he has centralized power to a degree not seen since Mao Zedong.
“I think it’s all about President Xi’s desire to remain leader for life in China,” says Wilder. “He has given no indication of who a successor might be because he doesn’t want one. A successor would mean he becomes a lame duck.”
This isolation creates a paradox. The system appears stable because there are no rivals. “He doesn’t have any clear heir apparent, and he doesn’t have any real rivals inside the system,” Johnson observes.
But this superficial stability masks a deep, existential risk for the regime.
“If one day he dies – as all people do – or becomes incapacitated, there will be no clear person to succeed him,” Johnson warns. “And I think this is the problem facing China in the next five years or so.”
For now, the empty seats in the Great Hall of the People serve as a silent warning to the Chinese elite. The applause may still be loud, but everyone knows that in Xi Jinping’s China, the distance between the inner circle and a prison cell has never been shorter.
In the opaque world of Beijing politics, the only certainty is that the next purge is only a matter of time.
Amichai Stein
Source: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-886386
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