On Feb. 11, the Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of China’s military, published yet another article invoking Zhang Guotao, a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party who broke with Mao Zedong in the 1930s and is remembered in Party mythology as the archetype of treachery and “splitting the Party and the army.” The article accused Zhang Guotao of “carrying out activities to split the Party and the Red Army,” language that transparently targets two recently purged military leaders: Zhang Youxia, the former vice chairman of China’s top military command body (the Central Military Commission), and Liu Zhenli, the former chief of the Joint Staff Department, China’s most senior operational military commander.
This was the sixth such article since Jan.16, the date that online sources say Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli were physically detained, eight days before their purge was officially announced on Jan. 24. All six articles share a revealing pattern: every one of them invokes the historical villain Zhang Guotao, and every one of them avoids mentioning Zhang Youxia or Liu Zhenli by name. The gap between the fury of the rhetoric and the absence of the actual targets’ names speaks volumes about how politically explosive these purges remain.
The six articles, with their dates and titles, are:
Jan. 18: “Courage Is Measured by What You Fear and What You Don’t”
Feb. 2: “Political Army-Building Special: Strong Organizations Make a Strong Army”
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Feb. 3: “On the New March, Never Lose the Drive to Push Through Barriers”
Feb. 9: “Political Army-Building Special: Talent Has Always Required Cultivation”
Feb. 9: “Political Strength Is the Most Fundamental Strength”
Feb. 11: “Upholding Principle Is a Core Trait of a Communist”
That these articles hammer the Zhang Guotao analogy repeatedly while refusing to name the purge’s actual targets is itself telling. It suggests that the Party’s propagandists have been instructed to whip up hostility toward Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli without giving soldiers a specific rallying point, perhaps because naming them would force the regime to provide formal charges it is not yet prepared to sustain.
The military newspaper is demanding loyalty it cannot get
The Feb. 11 article is the most revealing of the six. It frames its argument around the idea of “principle” and demands that soldiers launch a “struggle” against supporters and subordinates of the two fallen commanders. In language borrowed directly from the Cultural Revolution, the article declares: “At all times, one must take a clear stand and hold a firm position. There must be absolutely no ambiguity, absolutely no retreat. If you are vague and evasive on matters of principle during ordinary times, then at the critical moment you will abandon your principles and cross the bottom line.”
This passage sounds aggressive. In reality, it is a confession. It describes exactly the behavior the Party is trying to stamp out: widespread fence-sitting, evasion, and wait-and-see passivity within the ranks. The Liberation Army Daily would not need to publish six articles in less than a month demanding that soldiers “struggle” against the purged generals’ networks if soldiers were already doing so. The repetition is itself evidence of failure.
The phrase “crossing the bottom line” is especially charged. In the coded language of CCP military politics, it carries an implied reference to the possibility of an armed challenge to the leadership. For soldiers, “crossing the bottom line” can encompass scenarios up to and including something like the 1976 Huairentang Incident, when senior Party figures used military backing to arrest the Gang of Four and end the Cultural Revolution. The Liberation Army Daily does not raise this specter lightly.
The article’s own logic gives away the problem. When a regime’s propaganda organ has to beg its soldiers to be loyal, it is because the loyalty is not forthcoming.
Passive resistance is spreading through the ranks
The same article goes further, criticizing soldiers who are “watching which way the wind blows,” “hedging their bets,” and “keeping their options open.” It cites a quote attributed to Deng Xiaoping, the former CCP leader who ruled China from the late 1970s until his death in 1997, condemning those who “look at the source and watch the wind direction before speaking or acting,” and calling such behavior “a serious mistake in itself.”
Even more strikingly, the article admits that within the Party and the military, some people are “playing the nice guy for the sake of so-called ‘face,’” others “talk only of harmony” and “turn a blind eye to unhealthy trends,” while “the worst of them turn principle into ‘flexibility,’ crossing the bottom line and touching the red line.”
Read plainly, this is an extraordinary admission. The military newspaper is publicly acknowledging that the armed forces are engaged in a soft boycott of Xi’s purge campaign. Soldiers and officers are refusing to denounce Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, refusing to pledge political allegiance to Xi, and refusing to participate in the kind of loyalty performances that the CCP leadership clearly expected. Instead, they are keeping quiet, staying neutral, and waiting.
The article holds up three deceased military figures, Luo Ronghuan, Tan Zheng, and Huang Kecheng, as “models” of loyalty who spent “decades faithfully serving the Party” and “struggling against incorrect thinking within the Party” and who “were not afraid to tear off the mask of politeness.” The CCP’s propaganda machine promotes whatever it lacks most. When the Liberation Army Daily is begging soldiers not to be polite, it is because the soldiers are being very polite indeed.
Xi’s purges have created promotion bottlenecks, and officers are furious
The most unusual section of the Feb. 11 article concerns a historical anecdote about a job vacancy. In 1938, the article recounts, the position of brigade commander of the 344th Brigade of the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army became vacant. Zhu De, then the Red Army’s overall military commander, recommended that a regimental commander named Tian Shouyao be promoted to fill the role, but the CCP leadership in Yan’an rejected the recommendation. Tian Shouyao reportedly reacted with “resistant emotions.”
The Liberation Army Daily then criticizes this emotional response, but the real significance lies in why the story was told at all. CCP propaganda outlets do not print anecdotes about dissatisfied officers failing to receive promotions unless that problem is actively occurring. Under Xi’s sweeping military purges, which have removed dozens of senior officers over the past three years, a large number of command positions now sit empty. Officers who expected to move up have been blocked, and the frustration is clearly reaching levels that the Party feels compelled to address, however obliquely, in its own newspaper.
This is a problem of Xi’s own making. Every purge creates a cascade of vacancies, and every vacancy creates a set of officers who believe they deserve the job. When the promotions do not come, because the system is paralyzed by political suspicion and loyalty tests, the result is a corps of ambitious, capable military professionals with a concrete personal grievance against the leader who wrecked their careers.
Xi Jinping has united every faction of the military against himself
The article’s revelations, taken together, paint a picture of an armed forces establishment in which discontent runs from top to bottom. Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli commanded deep loyalty and extensive personal networks within the military. Those networks have not been dismantled simply because the two men were detained. The soldiers, officers, and commanders who owed their careers to Zhang and Liu are still in place, still connected to each other, and still watching to see how the situation develops.
Xi has managed to anger every identifiable faction within the military simultaneously. The allies and proteges of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli resent him for destroying their patrons. Officers like Miao Hua, the former political commissar of China’s military, and He Weidong, the former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission who were purged in earlier rounds, had their own networks of aggrieved loyalists. And now, the ambitious mid-ranking officers who had nothing to do with any faction but simply wanted to advance their careers are frustrated because the purges have frozen the entire promotion pipeline.
When an entire society is seething with resentment, when civilian grievances, bureaucratic grievances, and military grievances all point in the same direction, the regime is sitting on a volcano. The CCP’s own military newspaper, in its frantic appeals for loyalty and its inadvertent admissions of widespread passive resistance, has provided the clearest evidence yet that Xi Jinping’s hold on the armed forces is far weaker than the Party wants the world to believe.
