‘Today, Xi [Jinping] is purging an entire generation of officers. This is not a factional struggle but an assertion of complete control,’ one analyst said.
A new database of the Chinese communist regime’s military purges provides detailed information on the more than 100 senior military leaders purged since 2022.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping’s escalating military purges came under the international spotlight this year after two top military officials were accused of corruption. The move drew intense speculation about shifting power dynamics within the regime, as the two officials, who were among Beijing’s senior military leaders with combat experience, allegedly clashed with Xi over Taiwan, and as the regime’s follow-up actions have been highly irregular.
The database was published on Feb. 24 by the China Power Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It names 101 senior People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leaders who have been purged or potentially purged since 2022; some were officially expelled, dismissed, suspended, and/or investigated, while others are missing and may have been purged.
As analysts have told The Epoch Times, Xi’s purges have left a vacuum in PLA leadership. The dataset shows that 41 out of 47 (87 percent) PLA leaders, three-star generals and admirals, have likely been purged. This includes the vast majority of leaders Xi promoted in 2020 or later, as 32 of 35 of them were investigated and 29 of them purged. The purges affected 52 percent of the 176 PLA leadership positions, according to the China Power Project.
The purges accelerated sharply last year. Only one official was potentially purged in 2022, 14 in 2023, 11 in 2024, and 62 in 2025. This year, 11 officers have already been purged or have not been seen at key meetings.
“And it’s not clear that Xi Jinping is done with his purges,” said Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project, during a Feb. 24 webinar about the findings. “These purges have touched every part of the PLA.”
Unprecedented Purges
Experts continue to highlight the unprecedented and sweeping nature of the latest purges.
John Culver, senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, said during the seminar that Xi carried out military purges earlier in his career but that those did not “touch the operational track.”
“The closest that I can come to, in terms of the scale of what Xi’s doing, is probably the PLA turnover that followed the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis,” he said.
