Zhang Youxia, until recently the most powerful general in China’s military, has been purged along with his son and close associates. His downfall fits a pattern that runs through the entire history of communist regimes: the founding generation seizes power through violence, then the system they built turns on their own families. Stalin’s regime destroyed Trotsky’s children. Mao’s Cultural Revolution destroyed the families of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Now Xi Jinping has destroyed the family of Zhang Youxia, whose father fought alongside Xi’s own father in the CCP’s founding wars.
Zhang Youxia was the kind of figure who looked immune to political destruction. As vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, the country’s top military command body, he was one of the most powerful generals in China’s armed forces and, for years, among the most trusted military allies of Xi Jinping, the CCP’s general secretary and China’s top leader.
Zhang had combat experience from the Sino-Vietnamese border war of the late 1970s. He had spent decades overseeing military equipment and procurement. He was a “red second generation” heir: his father, Zhang Zongxun, received the rank of general in 1955 as one of the founding military commanders of the People’s Republic. At every public event, Zhang Youxia occupied the space closest to the center of CCP power.
According to multiple reports, after Zhang Youxia himself was placed under investigation, his son and several close associates were also detained. The speed of his fall is striking. One of the most connected and protected figures in the Chinese military went from standing beside Xi Jinping to losing his freedom, his family’s freedom, and his political legacy in a matter of months.
Communist regimes have always destroyed their founders’ families
Zhang Youxia’s case is extreme, but the pattern behind it is not new. Communist regimes have repeatedly turned on the families of the people who built them. The heirs of communist power holders inherit the positions and the privileges, but they also inherit the system’s willingness to destroy anyone who becomes inconvenient.
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The earliest and most dramatic example is the family of Leon Trotsky, one of the chief architects of the 1917 October Revolution and the founder of the Soviet Red Army. His daughter Zinaida, forced into exile and suffering from illness and psychological collapse, killed herself in Berlin in 1933. His son Sergei, who had almost no involvement in politics, was executed by Soviet authorities in 1937 on fabricated charges.
His elder son Lev Sedov died in Paris in 1938 during a surgery widely believed to have been arranged by Stalin’s secret police. By the time Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940, every one of his children had already been killed or driven to suicide by the regime he helped create.
The CCP destroyed the families of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping the same way
The Chinese Communist Party’s own history contains the same pattern. Liu Shaoqi, once China’s head of state and second only to Mao Zedong in the Party hierarchy, saw his family destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. His son Liu Yunbin was a nuclear chemist working in China’s nuclear industry.
He played no role in any power struggle. Once the Cultural Revolution began, he was reclassified overnight from national asset to “son of a criminal,” subjected to public denunciation sessions, humiliation, and beatings. He killed himself by jumping in front of a train in 1967.
Liu Yunbin was no isolated case. During the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping’s son Deng Pufang was thrown from a building and left permanently paralyzed. Liu Yuan, another son of Liu Shaoqi, was imprisoned and subjected to struggle sessions. Countless children of senior Party officials were reclassified overnight from “revolutionary successors” to “children of black gang elements.”
Many people assume this was a one-time aberration driven by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. It was not. The Cultural Revolution was the most visible eruption of a deeper pattern: the CCP consolidates power through purges, maintains control through collective punishment, and treats every insider as a potential threat. When one campaign ends, the pattern does not stop. It reappears under a different name, targeting the next generation.
Xi Jinping purged the son of one of his father’s own comrades in arms
Zhang Youxia almost certainly never expected to be purged. He had risen higher than nearly anyone in China’s military. His father, Zhang Zongxun, fought alongside the CCP’s founding generation to establish the People’s Republic. The elder Zhang could not have imagined that his son would be brought down by the child of one of his own wartime comrades: Xi Jinping, whose father Xi Zhongxun served in the same revolutionary cohort.
The psychological dimension of these purges is as significant as the political one. CCP insiders who are eventually purged have typically spent their entire careers defending the system, believing that loyalty would protect them. Zhang Youxia served the CCP for decades, rose to its highest military ranks, and placed his family’s future inside the Party’s structure. The system repaid that loyalty by destroying him.
Zhang Youxia had enough military power to challenge Xi Jinping but never acted
According to multiple reports, Zhang Youxia had long harbored doubts about Xi Jinping and had accumulated enough influence within the military to mount a serious challenge. He never did. Analysts believe his primary concern was self-preservation: if the CCP system collapsed, Zhang would lose everything along with it. He was unwilling to risk the structure that gave him his power, even as that structure moved to take his power away.
This is the core dilemma facing every senior CCP insider. The system rewards loyalty right up until the moment it decides to punish it, and there is no reliable way to predict when that moment will come. Zhang Youxia had the resources and the positioning to act. He chose instead to remain inside the system and hope it would spare him. It did not.
By Xinye
(The views expressed in this article represent the author’s personal position and opinions.)
