Command Collapse
How Xi's war on trust is breaking China's military from within
The institutional paranoia that's been consuming China's civilian leadership has now reached its most dangerous target: the military. The same erasure protocol that's hollowing out ministries and provincial governments is systematically dismantling the PLA command structure, but with consequences that extend far beyond disappeared diplomats or missing finance ministers.
When Xi Jinping purges a foreign minister, it creates diplomatic confusion. When he purges generals, it creates the potential for catastrophic military miscalculation. And unlike civilian institutions, military organizations depend on trust, initiative, and rapid decision-making under pressure. These are precisely the qualities that Xi's approach systematically destroys.
The PLA today isn't just dealing with leadership turnover. It's experiencing a fundamental breakdown in the institutional trust that makes effective military command possible. What's emerging is a force that may look unified from the outside, but is structurally unready for the demands of modern warfare.
Trust, Broken by Design
Xi doesn't fear military coups. He fears contamination. Not just of ideology, but of judgment. In his calculus, loyalty that isn't absolute is disloyalty, and competence that isn't politically controlled is dangerous.
Since taking power, he has operated on a simple doctrine: secure the political perimeter at all costs. That perimeter now includes every level of military command. But unlike bureaucratic shuffling, military purges create discontinuities that could rupture under operational pressure.
Proponents of Xi's military reforms might argue this is a necessary, if brutal, house-cleaning. They would claim that rooting out deep-seated corruption, where promotions were bought and readiness was falsified, is essential to building a truly effective fighting force. However, this argument misses the crucial point: the “cure” has become more dangerous than the disease. While the old system may have been corrupted by greed, the new one is paralyzed by fear. The replacement of one form of institutional rot with another, more insidious one is creating a force that cannot think, adapt, or trust itself in a crisis.
Start with the PLA Rocket Force. In 2023, both the commander and political commissar disappear, replaced by Navy loyalists with zero missile experience. Li Yuchao, the Rocket Force chief, misses the Xiangshan Forum. Within weeks, he's gone too. Another unexplained absence in what's becoming a systematic pattern.
The scale accelerates through 2024 and 2025. More heads roll quietly: generals from the Strategic Support Force, Central Theater Command, and then the unprecedented removal of He Weidong, a sitting Vice-Chair of the Central Military Commission and Politburo member. No Politburo military figure has been removed mid-term since 1967.
By spring 2025, He Weidong's removal hasn't been publicly acknowledged, but his name simply vanished from internal PLA political study materials. Erasure has become the official notification system.
The PLA isn't just losing experienced leadership. It's losing institutional memory, operational wisdom, and the kind of independent thinking that military effectiveness requires. Xi's mistrust of internal actors now defines military governance. Promotions are decided by political fidelity, not operational competence. Information is curated, not reported. Trust, once an accelerant for command agility, has become a liability.
When Command Becomes Surveillance
In the PLA today, the chain of command functions less like a communications relay and more like a self-surveillance system. Commanders are monitored by political commissars. Commissars are monitored by the Central Military Commission. And everyone watches everyone else for signs of deviation.
The impact is institutional paralysis. Decisions are delayed. Training scenarios are sanitized. No one wants to be the officer who oversteps, because overstepping isn't defined by doctrine, but by political mood.
Rocket Force drills get postponed without explanation. Warfighting studies are pulled from publication. Regional command exercises are quietly canceled. In every case, the silence speaks volumes: uncertainty is safer than initiative.
Xi has centralized military power to such an extent that even senior commanders fear autonomous action. Mission command, a foundational concept in modern militaries, is now politically toxic in Beijing. The very idea that lower echelons might improvise is considered a threat to Xi's model of control.
This is visible in operations near Taiwan. Patrol patterns are scripted. Live fire drills are repeated without adaptation. There is no doctrinal innovation because there is no permission for experimentation. This isn't centralized command. It's command denial.
The Commissar's Dilemma
Political commissars were once educators, responsible for maintaining morale and explaining policy. Under Xi, they've become gatekeepers, installed to suppress independent thinking. But their expanded power has created new contradictions that are tearing apart military effectiveness.
Commissars aren't trained in operations. Their job is political cohesion, not tactical competence. But when they override operational commands or slow them down to ensure political compliance, capability suffers. The result is a systematic prioritization of political considerations over military effectiveness.
At the same time, the commissars themselves are now targets of suspicion. No one trusts the enforcers either. This creates horizontal mistrust that paralyzes decision-making at every level. Officers don't trust their commissars, commissars don't trust their officers, and both groups know they're being watched by higher authorities.
PLA insiders describe a force more prepared for political theater than battlefield readiness. The Economist quotes PLA Daily, noting that political officers “sit in conference halls more than war rooms, hold pens more than guns, and read texts more than maps.” That kind of bureaucratic rigidity is not the hallmark of an effective fighting force: it’s the blueprint for paralysis when things go wrong.
Information as Contraband
In any military, information is currency. Accurate intelligence, honest assessments, and rapid communication enable effective decision-making. In Xi's PLA, information has become contraband.
Field reports are filtered upward through multiple layers of political review. Assessments are retrofitted to match central assumptions rather than reflect ground truth. The central fear isn't operational failure, it's unanticipated failure that might reflect poorly on political leadership.
This dynamic has gutted the PLA's learning loop. Doctrine becomes increasingly outdated because updating it requires acknowledging current weaknesses. Wargames become scripted performances rather than genuine tests of capability. Strategic insight is treated as a political risk rather than an operational necessity.
Even after the Ukraine war revealed critical vulnerabilities in Russian command structures, similar patterns continue inside the PLA because correcting them would require admitting huge foundational problems. The very feedback mechanisms that enable military adaptation have been systematically destroyed in favor of political compliance.
The Recruitment Crisis
The institutional paranoia is also bleeding into the PLA's recruitment base, creating long-term problems that extend far beyond current leadership tensions. Military-affiliated universities are seeing fewer applications. PLA enlistment campaigns are struggling to meet targets. Most telling, cadets and young officers express less professional ambition and more resignation about their career prospects.
These young officers understand what system they're entering. It's not one that rewards military excellence or operational innovation. It's one that punishes errors more than it rewards initiative, and prioritizes political loyalty over professional competence.
This represents a fundamental shift in military culture. Previous generations of PLA officers, despite political constraints, maintained professional pride and institutional esprit de corps. The current generation is learning that military professionalism is politically dangerous, that independent thinking is career suicide, and that success depends on avoiding notice rather than achieving excellence.
This isn't just a readiness gap. It's a morale collapse that will affect PLA effectiveness for decades. When talented young people avoid military service, or enter it with low expectations and cynical attitudes, the long-term consequences extend far beyond current operational challenges.
Theater Commands in Paralysis
Each theater command faces its own operational pressures, but under Xi's regime, they are unified by a common reality: none can act independently. Regional commanders who once had significant autonomy now require political clearance for routine training decisions.
The result is visible in military exercises that lack innovation or adaptation. Training scenarios are repeated without variation because modification requires approval from Beijing. Live fire exercises follow identical patterns because deviation might be interpreted as political unreliability.
This scripted approach to military training creates forces that are drilled in specific scenarios but incapable of adaptation when circumstances change. The Ukraine conflict has demonstrated repeatedly that modern warfare demands flexibility, innovation, and rapid adaptation to changing conditions. The PLA is thoroughly destroying these capabilities in favor of political predictability.
Signal Loss at the Top
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Xi's approach is how it affects information flow to senior leadership. Xi's leadership style depends on curated visibility. He doesn't receive military reports, he receives political performances designed to tell him what his staff thinks he wants to hear.
When purges become the primary method of quality control, they erase not only disloyalty but dissent. And dissent is essential for military effectiveness. Strategic surprise doesn't occur because enemies deceive you, it occurs because you've silenced your own warnings.
Inside Zhongnanhai, military leadership gets assessments that match political expectations. Outside Zhongnanhai, those assessments look increasingly disconnected from operational reality. This creates the conditions for the kind of catastrophic miscalculation that starts wars nobody intended to fight.
Strategic Consequences
The erosion of trust within the PLA isn't just an internal matter. It directly affects China's ability to project power, deter adversaries, and navigate military crises effectively.
A military that cannot move without political permission cannot surprise enemies, but also cannot respond rapidly to unexpected threats. A command structure that suppresses feedback cannot adapt to changing battlefield conditions. A force that fears initiative cannot innovate tactically or strategically.
All of this increases the risk of miscalculation, especially in flashpoints like Taiwan, the South China Sea, and border zones with India. In moments of escalation, the PLA may not be able to respond effectively, not because it lacks equipment or training, but because it lacks the institutional trust and flexibility that effective military operations require.
Internal PLA assessments have increasingly warned that corruption and politicization are degrading military operational effectiveness. A US–China Economic and Security Review Commission report noted that “current and retired generals … warned that corruption was seriously damaging both performance and morale, to the point that ‘we would lose before fighting’.” This isn’t about equipment or training shortfalls. It’s a sign of institutional breakdown that jeopardizes effective command.
What to Watch
Several indicators can help track the continuing degradation of PLA effectiveness:
Disruptions in joint command drills or unusual reshuffling in theater exercises will signal continuing friction between political and operational requirements.
Long vacancies in military leadership positions or unexplained retirements indicate ongoing political cleansing that disrupts institutional continuity.
Changes in PLA publications and doctrinal materials can reveal shifts toward tighter political control.
More emphasis on ideology rather than operational competence in recruitment campaigns suggests growing anxiety about military loyalty.
Perhaps most importantly, watch for signs that military exercises are becoming more scripted and less adaptive. When training scenarios stop evolving, it signals that innovation has been sacrificed for political predictability.
The Brittle Force
Xi Jinping has redefined what it means to command China's military. He's chosen obedience over initiative, loyalty over capability, and control over operational effectiveness. The result is a force that may look unified from the outside, but is structurally unprepared for the demands of modern warfare.
This isn't about whether the PLA can fight. It's about whether it can adapt, innovate, and make the rapid decisions that modern conflicts require. Xi has built a military that's optimized for political loyalty rather than operational effectiveness, and the gap between these two requirements is growing wider every year.
The West fears a bold, aggressive PLA that might launch unprovoked conflicts. But the more pressing danger may be a confused, brittle military that makes mistakes because it can't process information accurately, can't adapt to changing circumstances, and can't tell its leadership when something is going wrong.
In the nuclear era, that kind of institutional breakdown isn't just a Chinese problem. It's a global strategic liability that affects everyone's security. The force that cannot improvise is the force that makes catastrophic errors. And in a system where trust has been systematically destroyed, the margin for error approaches zero.
Command collapse doesn't announce itself with dramatic failures. It reveals itself through small mistakes that cascade into larger ones, through missed signals and delayed responses, through the accumulated friction of a system that's lost the ability to function under pressure.
Xi's war on trust may have secured his political control over the PLA. But it's done so at the cost of creating exactly the kind of military incompetence that, in a crisis, could prove fatal for China and dangerous for the world.