China's Window Is Closing. So Is Its Command Structure

China's Central Military Commission normally seats seven men. It currently seats two. On January 24th, General Zhang Youxia, the senior vice chairman and the most powerful uniformed officer in China, was placed under investigation for serious violations of discipline and law. So was General Liu Zhenli, who ran the Joint Staff Department, meaning he was the officer responsible for coordinating combat operations, unit movements, and intelligence across every branch of the People's Liberation Army. Both men had combat experience from the war with Vietnam, which almost nobody in the PLA does anymore. Zhang had known Xi Jinping since childhood, their fathers having served together, and had survived every previous round of anti-corruption sweeps. He was removed anyway, and what remains at the top of China's military command is Xi and a discipline officer.

That is not an isolated event. More than a hundred senior PLA officers have been removed or have simply stopped appearing in public since 2022, including the rocket force commander, multiple theater commanders, an acquisitions chief, and a sitting defense minister. Analysts who study the PLA describe the campaign as prioritizing loyalty over competence and assess that it is degrading command cohesion at precisely the moment Beijing would need it most. This matters because the question everyone keeps asking about China and Taiwan is whether Xi will decide to move. The more useful question is whether the institution that would have to execute that decision is currently in any condition to try.

The reason the question is live at all is a calculation Russia already ran and lost.

In February 2022, Moscow looked at its own numbers and concluded that waiting was worse than moving. The demographic decline was visible. Energy revenue depended on European customers who were actively diversifying away. NATO expansion was approaching a line the Kremlin decided it could not absorb. Russia did not attack Ukraine from a position of strength. It attacked from the belief that this was the last moment its conventional military would still matter, and roughly four years and more than a million casualties later, that belief has been vindicated in the worst possible way. The army that entered as a supposed peer competitor demonstrated against an opponent with no meaningful air force that it was considerably less capable than its reputation, and it is now less capable still.