China removes Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli from the state military commission

China's National People's Congress Standing Committee removed Zhang Youxia as vice-chairman of the state Central Military Commission on Friday and dropped Liu Zhenli as a commission member. Xinhua carried the decision after the committee met in Beijing. Both men have been under investigation since January for what the defence ministry then called serious violations of discipline and law.

Zhang had been the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the People's Liberation Army. He sat as the senior vice-chairman of the commission under Xi Jinping and held a seat on the Politburo. Liu headed the Joint Staff Department, the office that writes combat plans. A January commentary in the PLA Daily said the two had betrayed the Party's trust and damaged its absolute control of the armed forces.

The state and Party commissions are treated as one body in practice. Friday's vote covers only the state posts. Neither man has been publicly stripped of the parallel Party commission seats. Their whereabouts have not been disclosed. No charge sheet has been released.

The commission is supposed to have seven members. After Friday it has two known sitting members: Xi, who chairs it, and Zhang Shengmin, the vice-chairman who runs military discipline. That is the thinnest top command the PLA has shown in public in decades of the current structure.

The same meeting removed Zhang and Liu as deputies to the National People's Congress, along with at least ten other lawmakers. The extra names included 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, was also struck from the list.

Zhang and Liu both fought in the 1979 campaign against Vietnam. Xi kept Zhang past the usual retirement line and used him as the day-to-day manager of the force. When Zhang met Jake Sullivan in Beijing in 2024, the then U.S. national security adviser later described a general who spoke without the caution of a man watching his back. That picture broke in January, when the defence ministry named him in the probe.

The purge has already cut through equipment, political work and theatre commands. In June the legislature stripped six other generals of their NPC seats, among them Xu Xueqiang of the Equipment Development Department and political commissars from the Western Theatre Command and the air force. Friday's list is the formal end of Zhang's state rank, not the start of the campaign.

Beijing has given no timetable for replacements. A commission with two public members cannot, on paper, run the full slate of equipment, joint staff, political work and theatre files that the seven-seat model was built to hold. Foreign militaries that track PLA decision speed will watch whether new names appear before the next Party plenum, or whether discipline work stays the only filled vice-chair.

Zhang's fall also removes a rare interlocutor who had sat across the table from U.S. and Russian officials. Liu's removal takes the Joint Staff chief out of the same room. Until new officers are named to those state posts, the public face of China's military command is Xi and the man who investigates the rest of the force.