Xi Jinping brought down powerful rivals in military

In the early years of Xi Jinping’s war on corruption, the Chinese leader consolidated control over the world’s largest military by taking down powerful generals from rival factions and replacing them with allies and proteges loyal to himself, according to report by BBC.

A decade on, having given the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) a structural overhaul and stacked its top ranks with his own men, the supreme leader is still knee-deep in his seemingly endless struggle against graft and disloyalty.

And, like many strongman leaders in history, he is increasingly turning against his own handpicked loyalists.

Late last month, Xi purged one of his closest proteges in the military – a decades-old associate entrusted with instilling political loyalty in the PLA and vetting senior promotions.

Adm. Miao Hua, who sits on the Central Military Commission (CMC), the top command body chaired by Xi, has been suspended under investigation for “serious violations of discipline,” the Defense Ministry announced, using a common euphemism for corruption and disloyalty.

As the head of the CMC’s political work department, which oversees political indoctrination and personnel appointments, Miao is the most senior scalp in Xi’s latest military purge. Since last summer, more than a dozen high-ranking figures in China’s defense establishment have been ousted, including the last two defense ministers promoted to the CMC by Xi.

But none of them boast the kind of long-standing relationship Miao shared with the top leader, dating back decades to Xi’s early political career in the coastal province of Fujian.

The probe into Miao opens a new front in a widening purge that has raised questions over Xi’s ability to end systematic corruption in the military and enhance its combat readiness at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.

Over the past decade, Xi has overseen an ambitious transformation of the PLA into a “world class” fighting force that can rival the US military. A key goal of that modernization drive is to ensure China is ready to fight and win a war over Taiwan, the self-governing democratic island Beijing claims as its own.

But Miao’s downfall renews questions – raised during last summer’s purges – about how much confidence Xi has in his top generals who would be responsible for leading a war, said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University.

“If he fears that he has brought in people who are not unquestionably loyal to him or his agenda, that would be a huge problem.”

Experts say Xi’s purge of a longtime acolyte points to a familiar dilemma for autocrats, including his predecessor Mao Zedong: after eliminating political rivals, the supreme leader never stops looking for new threats to their absolute hold on power – including from their own close circle.