View / Xi is purging. Is this Stalinism?

At the height of his paranoid “Great Terror,” Joseph Stalin wiped out his own Red Army leadership, arresting two thirds of his generals and executing three of his five marshals. One begged for his life in a letter upon which Stalin simply scrawled, “Scoundrel and prostitute.”

Like Stalin, China’s leader Xi Jinping is ruthless. More than seven million individuals have been punished in an anti-corruption campaign since he took office in 2012. Now, Xi has ordered the decapitation of the People’s Liberation Army by removing its top uniformed officer, Zhang Youxia, a decorated war veteran, along with another general: The pair were ostensibly targeted for graft, but also face suggestions of insubordination. Aside from Xi himself, only one other person still remains in the seven-member Central Military Commission.

Analysts are struggling to understand what motivated this onslaught, the biggest upheaval in the armed forces since the Cultural Revolution, a move that risks damaging morale within the PLA and dealing a blow to its effectiveness as a fighting force, at least in the short term.

But there may be a deeper, more urgent question. “Is this the ultimate illustration of Xi’s cold-blooded rationality,” Jonathan Czin, a Biden-era China director at the National Security Council, asked on the ChinaTalk podcast, “or are we seeing a shift in his leadership style where he’s either more paranoid or showing signs of aging?”

One can dismiss rumors of a coup attempt spinning around the internet outside China: The PLA is the armed wing of the Party, not an independent force, and there’s no sign of rebellion in the ranks. Indeed, the cashiered generals have all gone meekly.

If anything, according to Christopher Johnson, a former CIA analyst and now CEO of the China Strategies Group, Xi’s gutting of the PLA top brass shows a leader very much in control, both of himself and the military. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Johnson says Xi has just displayed his greatest asset — “a knack for long-term patient planning, punctuated by political blitzkriegs.”

It’s also clear that Xi is a true Leninist: He views corruption as a form of bourgeois degeneracy that will, unchecked, undermine the legitimacy of the Party. In Xi’s way of thinking, says Neil Thomas, a China analyst at the Asia Society, the fight against graft is a “forever journey.”

Yet there’s no doubt that Xi has now crossed a threshold. Many experts had assumed he would ease off his anti-corruption campaign once he had eliminated the powerful rivals in the Party and security apparatus — “tigers” as they’re called — who might have posed a threat, or tried to derail his political rise.

But instead, now that Xi is unassailable, he’s ramping up his anti-corruption drive — almost one million people were taken down in 2025 alone — and, in fact, targeting those closest to him.

In arresting Zhang, Xi is going after another “Princeling” — Zhang’s father, like Xi’s, was one of Mao Zedong’s top lieutenants. The younger Xi and Zhang grew up together in Beijing, attending the same elite schools, and their families were part of the same social circle within the capital’s revolutionary nobility. Xi made his career as a provincial administrator, Zhang as a gruff general, until recently one of the few active-duty officers with combat experience, having fought in the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

In spite of this pedigree, Zhang’s public vilification has begun. Corruption is one thing: Just about everybody among the top brass of the PLA is on the take, selling ranks or skimming money off weapons procurement, and Johnson told me the word in Beijing was that Zhang was particularly venal. Even so, at the age of 75, Xi could have let him slide into retirement. Instead, Xi’s acolytes seem bent on destroying him: The Wall Street Journal reported that he is accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the US.

The “Dictator’s Trap” is a well-documented phenomenon. Eventually, autocrats surround themselves with “yes-men” and sycophants who tell them what they want to hear, often out of fear. But that only fuels the suspicion of the supreme leader, and bad advice ultimately leads to the top man’s ruin. Stalin was an archetype; his decision to remove almost two third of his officer corps — executing half of them — on the eve of World War II had catastrophic consequences for the initial Soviet defense against Nazi Germany.

When I asked Konstantin Sonin, the Russian economist and a leading expert on Stalin’s purges, how he interpreted the current moment, he cautioned that paranoia may not be an adequate explanation. After all, he pointed out, Stalin had actual enemies as well as imaginary ones. And with Xi, “we see actions that are reactions to an acute threat.” China’s leader, with no succession plan, may have grave worries about his political future.

In other words, Xi’s great power — to take down rivals, to destroy friends, to dominate the army — may also be his greatest vulnerability.