China removes Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli from the state Central Military Commission

China removed General Zhang Youxia and General Liu Zhenli from the state Central Military Commission on Friday, Xinhua reported, after investigations into suspected serious violations of discipline and law. Zhang was vice-chairman of the commission and Xi Jinping’s deputy in the military chain. He also sat on the Politburo. Liu was a commission member and a senior professional soldier. Their names came off the National People’s Congress deputy list the same day, along with ten other lawmakers.

The state commission is the government twin of the Party Central Military Commission, the body that actually commands the People’s Liberation Army. Reuters noted that the two men have not been publicly stripped of their Party CMC posts. In practice the Party organ is the one that matters. Even so, deletion from the state list and from the NPC is how Beijing records that an officer has left the formal command structure.

The arithmetic is the story. The Party Congress in 2022 seated seven people on the CMC. After successive investigations that have already taken the equipment chief, theatre commissars and the former defence minister, only Xi and General Zhang Shengmin, the military discipline chief, remain as active members. A seven-seat command that now has two occupants is not a routine reshuffle. It is a command that has been emptied from the inside.

Friday’s NPC list also dropped Lieutenant General Zhong Shaojun, once director of the CMC General Office, and General Ju Qiansheng, a former commander of the Strategic Support Force. Gao Shiwen, a former mayor of Nanchang who worked at China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, went with them. Earlier this summer the legislature had already removed six other generals, among them Xu Xueqiang of the Equipment Development Department and the political commissars of the Air Force and the Western Theatre Command.

Equipment and procurement keep appearing in the same files. All three heads of the Equipment Development Department since that office was created have now come under investigation. That is the part of the PLA that writes cheques for ships, missiles and the manned space programme. Xu had also been commander-in-chief of manned spaceflight since 2022. A purge that repeatedly hits the office that buys hardware is a statement about where investigators think the money moved.

Zhang Youxia’s fall is the most consequential of the set. He was a princeling of the revolutionary generation, a veteran of the 1979 Vietnam war, and the officer foreign militaries treated as Xi’s military second. Removing him while leaving him, so far, unnamed on the Party CMC list lets Beijing control the pace of the announcement. The state-side deletion tells other officers the outcome without a courtroom scene.

Xi has said, including in March, that there can be no sanctuary for the corrupt in a force that “wields the gun.” The campaign that began in 2023 has now reached the men who sat next to him when that sentence was written. What it has not produced is a new slate of vice-chairmen. Until those seats are filled, operational orders still run through a commission that is, on paper, two people and a chairman who is also head of the Party and the state.

Foreign ministries will read the Friday notice for two practical questions. Who signs when Zhang Youxia used to sign. And whether a force mid-purge delays the training and procurement cycles that sit behind the Taiwan and Indian Ocean calendars. Beijing has not answered either question in public.