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Is China’s Military Ready for War?

What Xi’s Purges Do—and Don’t—Mean for Beijing’s Ambitions

M. Taylor Fravel, 07/18/25

Anew wave of purges has engulfed the senior leadership of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army. Since the 20th National Party Congress in October 2022, more than 20 senior PLA officers from all four services—the army, navy, air force, and rocket force—have disappeared from public view or been removed from their posts. The absences of other generals have also been reported, which could foreshadow additional purges.

Most notably, since the fall of 2023, three of the six uniformed members of the party’s Central Military Commission, the top body of the Chinese Communist Party charged with overseeing the armed forces, have been removed from their posts. The first to fall was Defense Minister Li Shangfu (李尚福), who was removed in October 2023 and expelled from the CCP in June 2024. Then, this past November, Miao Hua (苗華), the director of the CMC’s Political Work Department, which manages personnel and party affairs, was suspended for “serious violations of discipline” before being formally removed from the CMC last month. And most recently, the Financial Times reported that He Weidong (何衛東1、何衛東2 – 需訂閱), the second-ranked vice chair who has not appeared in public since early March, had been purged.

Never before has half the CMC been dismissed in such a short period. Even stranger is the fact that all three generals had previously been promoted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping; they were appointed to the CMC itself in 2022, after Xi consolidated his control over the party at the 20th Party Congress. He Weidong was even a member of the Politburo, one of the party’s top decision-making bodies, comprised of the 24 highest-ranking party leaders. And Miao and He have been described by analysts as being part of a “Fujian faction” within the PLA, because the generals had been stationed in that province at the same time as Xi and are believed to have close ties with him.

The fact that these high-profile purges are occurring now is not lost on outside observers. In 2027, the PLA will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. It is also the year by which Xi expects China’s armed forces to have made significant strides in their modernization. Finally, the year is noteworthy because, according to former CIA Director Bill Burns, Xi has instructed the PLA to be “ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion” of Taiwan. Xi’s instructions do not indicate that China will in fact invade Taiwan that year, but, as Burns put it, they serve as “a reminder of the seriousness of his focus and his ambition.”

表單的底部With such ambitious goals set for the PLA, the question then arises as to how this new wave of purges could affect the PLA’s readiness. The purges themselves are likely to slow some weapons modernization programs, disrupt command structures and decision-making, and weaken morale—all of which would degrade the PLA’s ability to fight in the near to medium term. Beijing may now be forced to exercise greater caution before pursuing large-scale military operations, such as an amphibious assault on Taiwan, even as the PLA continues to pressure Taiwan with aerial activity and naval patrols around the island.

Nevertheless, it is useful to remember that Beijing has rarely waited for the right conditions before ordering the PLA into battle. In 1950, for instance, Chinese forces intervened in support of Pyongyang in the Korean War, even though China’s economy and society had been devastated by years of civil war. In 1962, the PLA attacked India, even though China’s most senior military officer had recently been purged for questioning Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. And in 1979, Beijing dispatched an ill-prepared PLA to Vietnam, where Chinese troops suffered significant losses for limited political gains. Now, as then, Chinese leaders may pursue war even if the domestic economic and political conditions appear unfavorable—and even if the PLA is not ready to fight.

CASTAWAYS

For outside observers, it is notoriously difficult to gather detailed information and analyze the ongoing purges in China. The CCP rarely announces them, and even when they are publicized, the charges leading to dismissal are often vaguely described only as violations of discipline. Charges announced publicly may also not reflect the true underlying reason for an official’s removal from office. Still, there are several likely reasons that Li, Miao, He, and other senior officers were purged.

First, a common reason for many purges is graft. Corruption has long plagued the PLA and the CCP more broadly. Since Xi came to power in 2012, Beijing has more than doubled its defense budget in order to fund the military’s rapid modernization. This flood of new money, especially related to weapons procurement and construction projects, has increased opportunities for officers and defense industry executives to pad their budgets or skim money off the top. Before becoming defense minister, Li had been in charge of the CMC’s weapons development department, which oversees the procurement process. A few months before Li’s dismissal, both the commander and commissar of the PLA Rocket Force, and two of the commissar’s deputies, were all detained. The PLARF’s rapid expansion on Li’s watch, including the construction of more than 300 silos and the significant expansion of its ballistic missile arsenal, likely offered many opportunities for self-enrichment.

Some generals may also have been purged because they were engaging in bribery related to promotions and patronage networks. This has been a long-standing problem for the PLA: often, the most well-connected officers, rather than the most competent ones, are promoted to higher ranks. Miao, the head of the Political Work Department, oversaw personnel and appointments. If the promotions he signed off on were not strictly merit-based, it may have contributed to his undoing. Miao’s predecessor, Zhang Yang, was placed under investigation in 2017 for similar reasons. Less than two months later, he died by suicide, and the following year, he was posthumously expelled from the party.

CMC members and other senior officers may also have been removed if they were deemed to be using personnel appointments to create their own power centers, or “mountaintops,” within the PLA. Senior officers who prioritize the accrual of personal power are a liability for Xi because they create conflicting loyalties and factional tensions within the armed forces that can harm operational readiness. Because Miao and He were newly appointed members of the CMC, they may have sought to strengthen their positions at the expense of veteran members, such as the first-ranked Vice Chair Zhang Youxia (張又俠), a childhood friend of Xi’s. Xi has kept Zhang, now 75, on the CMC despite the normal retirement age of 68.

Finally, it’s possible that the purged senior officers committed no offense at all beyond incompetence: Xi may simply have been dissatisfied with their performance and lost confidence in their ability to lead and achieve his goals for the PLA. As Joel Wuthnow and Phillip Saunders observed in their new book, China’s Quest for Military Supremacy, the structure of the relationship between the party and the armed forces makes it hard for Xi to trust his generals. The PLA enjoys substantial autonomy with little direct supervision, so the party must rely on the PLA to discipline itself. Moreover, the highly specialized nature of modern military affairs means that the party lacks the expertise to ensure that the PLA is meeting the party’s modernization goals.

INSECURITY DILEMMA

Whatever the reasons for the recent purges, they will almost certainly degrade China’s combat readiness and the Chinese leadership’s confidence in the PLA’s capabilities. In order for the PLA to prevail in potential conflicts on China’s periphery, especially a war over Taiwan, it seeks to master joint operations, which combine elements from the different services and branches to achieve military objectives. The complexity of such operations requires unity of command and integrated planning, the interoperability of platforms within and across services, delegation and flexibility, and robust command, control, communications, and surveillance systems. Reorganizing the PLA to better conduct such operations was one of the main reasons Xi launched unprecedented organizational reforms in 2015. Now, although Xi has a number of reasons to avoid taking major military action against Taiwan, he may also be concerned about how well the PLA would perform so soon after the purges.

If the CCP uncovered corruption in the weapons procurement system, for instance, the party leadership may doubt the reliability and performance of the advanced weapons systems developed and fielded over the past decade. According to U.S. intelligence, some of China’s new ballistic missiles were filled with water, not fuel, and the blast doors constructed for new silos needed to be repaired or replaced. Efforts are likely underway to review and recertify new and planned weapons systems to ensure they will function as expected, which may slow their development and deployment.

The purges also disrupt the functioning of the entire command system. The CMC, a seven-member body that Xi chairs to oversee all aspects of the PLA, has 15 subordinate units. Yet with three of its six uniformed officers missing in action, key decisions relating to operations, planning, and force development may be delayed until new permanent members are appointed. Before joining the CMC, for example, He played a key role in planning operations in his capacity as head of the Eastern Theater Command, whose forces would play a central role in any operation against Taiwan; now the apex of military decision-making in China lacks someone with his experience.

Decision-making and command may also be affected in other ways. Officers at all levels are likely to become much more risk averse for fear of making decisions that could later ensnare them in a purge. The willingness of more junior officers to take initiative will also suffer, reinforcing the PLA’s already strong tendency toward centralization in decision-making that undermines effective joint operations. Officers at all levels will spend more time engaged in political work and study sessions related to party ideology and discipline at the expense of their professional military tasks. Morale may suffer, too, as officers worry who might be next, fueling distrust within the officer corps and weakening cohesion.

READY OR NOT

But the focus on how the leadership upheaval in the PLA may affect its operational readiness should not obscure a basic fact: Xi may well deem it necessary to fight even if the PLA is not completely prepared. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, China has usually gone to war when conditions appeared to be unfavorable.

In 1950, after much debate among the party’s senior leaders, Beijing decided to intervene in the Korean War, transforming the conflict into one largely between China and the United States. At the time, the CCP was focused on consolidating control over the entire country and rebuilding the economy after its war with the Nationalists. Many senior party and military leaders, weary after years of a punishing civil war, were reluctant to go up against the strongest force in the world. Yet in the end, the strategic rationale of keeping the United States off China’s border (and ideally off the entire Korean Peninsula) trumped these concerns. Yet by the time of the armistice in 1953, China’s armed forces suffered more than 500,000 casualties, while the war ended roughly where it began, along the 38^th parallel, and the United States began to build an alliance network along China’s eastern periphery.

Early the following decade, China attacked India’s forces on the two countries’ disputed border. At the time, Mao was on the back foot politically after his disastrous Great Leap Forward, an industrialization campaign in which as many as 45 million people perished in famines. Yet Chinese party and military leaders concluded that war was necessary to blunt Indian pressure on Tibet and restore stability to the Chinese-Indian border. Moreover, the attack occurred only a few years after Peng Dehuai (彭德懷), China’s top military officer throughout the 1950s, was purged for questioning the wisdom of the Great Leap Forward. Peng’s dismissal also led to the removal of other senior military officers who were seen as closely tied to him, shaking up the PLA high command. In this instance, China enjoyed overwhelming superiority on the battlefield, destroying Indian forces and achieving its political objectives, as India did not challenge China on the border militarily for the next two decades.

In 1979, Beijing invaded Vietnam, ostensibly to teach Hanoi a lesson for entering into an alliance with the Soviet Union, then China’s nemesis, and for invading Cambodia, which Beijing was supporting. At the time, China had only started to recover from the economic and political upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping remained in a power struggle with Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. And the PLA was divided between Maoists and reformers. Deng was keenly aware of the PLA’s shortcomings, having described the force as “bloated, lax, arrogant, extravagant, and lazy”—hardly in fighting form. Deng even delayed the invasion by a month after his chief military adviser reported that the troops were not ready. Nevertheless, the need to signal resolve to counter Soviet encirclement outweighed the state of readiness. PLA forces paid a high price, with more than 31,000 casualties in just one month of fighting, and Vietnam did not withdraw its military presence from Cambodia until the late 1980s.

These military actions in Korea, India, and Vietnam represent the largest uses of armed force that the PLA has undertaken since the founding of the People’s Republic. In all three cases, political calculations trumped military readiness and favorable domestic conditions. Chinese leaders viewed these operations as conflicts of necessity, not choice or opportunity. If the recent purges harm the PLA’s readiness and reflect Xi’s confidence in the PLA, then opportunistic uses of force may be less likely in the near to medium term. But if Xi views military action against Taiwan as necessary, he will still order the PLA into battle.


M. TAYLOR FRAVEL is Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

More by M. Taylor Fravel 

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Inside China’s Secret Military Megacity: The Alarming Signs of a Coming War

Sahil Nair, 07/07/25

What I saw inside this colossal military complex sent chills down my spine. Could this be the spark that ignites World War 3?

Image generated by the author using Gork AI 請至原網頁查看圖片

I’ve been watching hostilities around the world for years now, but nothing prepared me for what I found about China’s newest initiative. The first time I saw satellite images of what is going up in southwest Beijing, I had to double-check the coordinates. What I discovered shocked and worried me with what this could mean to global security.

The Story Behind China’s Secret Military Fortress

Let me rewind to early 2022. I was reviewing routine satellite images when I saw something odd roughly 30 kilometres from Beijing’s city centre. Where once a hodgepodge of residences mixed with empty land, it was all being swept from the board. I figured it was some housing thing at first — China’s got enough of those to go around, I’m sure.

But as the months went by, the scale was impossible to ignore. This would not be just another building project. The Chinese government was constructing something huge, something that would make the Pentagon look tiny. And they were doing so by hundreds of millions of Google searches with a degree of privacy that made my investigative antennae go into overdrive.

Is China Building the Ultimate Wartime Command Centre?

After months of investigation, the truth emerged. China is building what military analysts now call the “Beijing Military City” — a sprawling, 1,500-acre fortress of tunnels and bunkers capable of withstanding nuclear strikes and only the second city to be so thoroughly protected — that will serve as a command centre for the People’s Liberation Army.

For context, the Pentagon stretches across 148 acres. What China is constructing is 10 times bigger. I’ve seen building projects but not like this. More than 100 cranes are in simultaneous operation at Miral’s site, working around the clock under floodlights that illuminate the massive complex from space.

Just the underground facilities cover 5 square kilometres — space to store six months of supplies for 50,000 people. And these are not mere storage spaces. The deepest bunkers, according to intelligence reports, involve alternating layers of steel, concrete and polymer gel — a structure that functions much like a car bumper to absorb the energy of nuclear blasts.

Why This Military Mega City is Sparking Global Panic

The more I dug into this story, the more I realized that this isn’t happening in a vacuum. China has quietly transformed its military with one goal in mind: complete military modernization by 2027. That’s not an arbitrary date — it is the centenary of the People’s Liberation Army and the US Department of Défense sources say Beijing wants total preparedness to take Taiwan by then if needed.

The timing is no coincidence. I’ve seen China’s military strategy change over the last decade and this facility is the realization of Xi Jinping’s dream. This is something other than the classic military base, dedicated to the housing of troops and war-fighting machinery; and yet, like such bases, it enables the wars of the future — wars far more detached than Attila’s sacking of Rome or Ulysses S. Grant’s reducing of Vicksburg — to be fought from underground.

The Technology That Makes This Base Unique

What makes this extremely scary is how high tech this facility is. In my research, I found three innovations that distinguish it from any military base I have studied:

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China’s PL-15 Air-To-Air Missile Appears To Have Been Used In Combat For The First Time

Thomas Newdick, 05/08/25

The air war currently unfolding between India and Pakistan is exceedingly murky, but one aspect that seems almost certain is the use of the Chinese-made PL-15 active-radar-guided air-to-air missile (AAM) by Pakistan. So far, Pakistan claims to have shot down five Indian aircraft and at least one Indian official has reportedly confirmed the crash of three aircraft but cautioned that the reasons were not clear. Unverified imagery suggests that one of the Indian Air Force’s prized Rafale multirole fighters may have been shot down. Regardless, the fighting between the two nuclear-armed states is the most intense for decades, now with the growing risk of the situation spiraling further out of control.

The air war currently unfolding between India and Pakistan is exceedingly murky, but one aspect that seems almost certain is the use of the Chinese-made PL-15 active-radar-guided air-to-air missile (AAM) by Pakistan. So far, Pakistan claims to have shot down five Indian aircraft, and there are multiple accounts, including from Indian officials, pointing to the crash of at least two aircraft, without specifying the reasons. Meanwhile, a French official has reportedly confirmed the loss of one of the Indian Air Force’s prized Rafale multirole fighters. Regardless, the fighting between the two nuclear-armed states is the most intense for decades, now with the growing risk of the situation spiraling further.

Imagery showing the apparent wreckage of a PL-15 missile began circulating on social media today. Reportedly, the missile parts fell in Hoshiarpur district, in the northeast of the Indian state of Punjab. In particular, a portion of the missile body, from immediately behind the radome, can be identified. This carries a serial number and a small door marked as a seeker test port, as seen at the top of this story.

Another image purports to show the missile seeker from the PL-15, which uses active electronically scanned array (AESA) technology, with active and passive modes, and which is said to provide better resistance to countermeasures than previous Chinese AAMs.

While the identity of the weapon can’t be verified beyond doubt at this point, a PL-15 seems most likely. Whether the missile in question successfully brought down a target is unclear. Whatever the case, Pakistan’s use of the missile is a significant development; this seems to be the first confirmed use of the weapon in an operational context.

As you can read about in our in-depth story on Chinese air-to-air missiles, the PL-15 is China’s standard active-radar-guided AAM, and it was intended to at least match the performance of the U.S.-made AIM-120D Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM). From the start, this missile was tailored for internal carriage, initially in the J-20 stealth fighter, and features distinctive cropped fins to reduce its dimensions. A further version, even better optimized for internal carriage, has since appeared, as you can read about here.

The basic PL-15 has a dual-pulse rocket motor that provides a reported range of 124 miles. Another important feature is a two-way datalink that allows the launching aircraft to provide guidance updates to the missile and the missile to provide its own information to the launching aircraft.

The potent PL-15 missile prompted the United States, among others, to start the development of new air-to-air weapons specifically designed to outrange them. In the meantime, the PL-15 is now replacing the older PL-12 across China’s fighter fleet and is also offered for export under the PL-15E name.

Published performance figures for the PL-15E include a range of 90 miles, somewhat less than for the domestic version, which could be the result of a different propellant or changes to the motor.

In Pakistan Air Force service, the PL-15E arms the JF-17 Block III fighter as well as the J-10C, for which Pakistan became the first export customer, with initial deliveries in 2022.

India has a counterpart to the PL-15 in the MBDA Meteor beyond-viual-range missile (BVRAAM), a ramjet-powered weapon that may well offer advantages over the Chinese missile. While Western analysts determine that the PL-15 has a comparable maximum range to the Meteor, the pan-European missile likely has a much larger no-escape zone and better long-range kill probability thanks to its ramjet motor.

Regardless of what the PL-15 was fired at, and whether it successfully engaged its target, Pakistan has posted a flurry of claims of Indian Air Force aircraft shot down.

A report in The New York Times cites three officials, local news reports, and accounts of witnesses, who said that “at least two aircraft” went down in India and the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir.

Various unverified imagery has been posted to social media purporting to show the wreckage of Indian Air Force fighters shot down or otherwise lost in combat. With so much propaganda circulating and information operations ongoing, all open-source imagery has to be taken as unconfirmed.

One of these shows an engine that appears to be from a French-made combat jet, initially identified as either an Indian Air Force Rafale or Mirage 2000, although certain details of the nozzle seemed to point more strongly toward the first option.

Subsequently, a photo began to circulate that purports to show parts of a Rafale’s tailfin and rudder lying in a field, said to be in Bathinda, Punjab. The wreckage bears the serial number BS-001, which would identify it as a single-seat Rafale EH.

A video apparently taken by locals in the village of Aklian Kalan, Punjab, shows what seems to be the remains of an MBDA MICA air-to-air missile, as well as its associated missile launch rail. The MICA is a weapon associated with both the Rafale and the Mirage 2000, although Aklian Kalan is notably only around 12 miles from Bathinda Air Force Station, home to Indian Rafales.

Since this imagery began to circulate, an unnamed French official confirmed to CNN that an Indian Air Force Rafale was brought down by Pakistan, but provided no details of exactly what brought it down.

Other imagery claims to show the wreckage of an Indian MiG-29 Fulcrum or Su-30MKI Flanker fighter, based on the Russian-made K-36DM ejection seat that’s visible. This aircraft is said to have come down in the Ramban district of Jammu and Kashmir, India. Previously, Reuters had reported that an Indian combat jet “crashed” for unspecified reasons somewhere in Jammu and Kashmir, and that its pilot was injured and taken to a hospital. A single pilot, if true, would point toward a MiG-29 rather than the two-seat Su-30.

All of these developments, as well as the surrounding claims and counter-claims, point to the confusion that is very typical when dealing with the heat of combat. With that in mind, it remains possible that at least some of these apparent losses were accidents, or perhaps blue-on-blue incidents. The involvement of surface-to-air missiles also shouldn’t be ruled out at this stage.

And while the loss of a Rafale, especially to a Chinese-designed fighter, if confirmed, would be a huge propaganda win for Pakistan and, to some degree, China, the reality is that modern air combat is far more than a simple fighter-versus-fighter affair. In the long run, other aspects, including training, munitions, networking, airborne early warning, electronic warfare, tactics, and much more, will play into successes and failures. With that in mind, even the combat loss of a Rafale doesn’t make that aircraft a dud, which is good news for the Indian Navy, too, this service having recently had an order for the carrier-based version of the fighter signed off.

In other developments, the office of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said that the country’s armed forces have been authorized to undertake “corresponding actions” after India’s strikes on Wednesday night.

For its part, India said that its Operation Sindoor hit nine targets that it described as “terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan and on Pakistan’s side of the disputed Kashmir region. Indian military spokespersons said that the targets belonged to two Islamist militant groups: Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told a briefing that “Intelligence and monitoring of Pakistan-based terror modules showed that further attacks against India were impending, therefore it was necessary to take pre-emptive and precautionary strikes.”

Pakistan said that six locations on its territory were targeted, but claimed that none of them were militant camps. A Pakistan military spokesperson said that at least 26 civilians were killed and 46 injured in the strikes. In a statement, JeM said that 10 relatives of its leader Masood Azhar were killed in an Indian strike.

Indian police and medics claim that at least seven civilians have been killed and 30 others injured by retaliatory Pakistani firing and shelling overnight.

Based on imagery that has emerged on social media, India appears to have used a version of its BrahMos supersonic cruise missile in at least some of these strikes, alongside attacks by Indian Air Force fighters. Also known by the designation PJ-10, this ramjet-powered weapon was developed and manufactured as a collaborative effort between India and Russia. The BrahMos is available in ground-launched, air-launched, sub-launched, and ship-launched versions, and the missile has a reported range of between 300-500 kilometers (186-311 miles).

The Indian government has said its latest strikes were retaliation for the terrorist attack that killed 26 civilians in Kashmir last month.

This is a developing story. We will update it as more news comes in.


Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com