One was a general who had commanded Chinese forces arrayed against Taiwan. Another was an officer who had led the People’s Liberation Army’s training department and been praised for modernizing combat drills. A third had long served as the chief military aide to China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
These men are among dozens of once-rising senior military officers who have been detained, dismissed or simply disappeared from view without explanation over the last four years. Their downfall, documented in a study released Tuesday, reveals the staggering extent of Mr. Xi’s campaign to shake up the People’s Liberation Army, which culminated last month in the removal of the topmost general, Zhang Youxia.
The purge has stripped the military of its most experienced commanders and raised doubts about its readiness to go to war, including over Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory, according to data compiled by researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or C.S.I.S., a research group in Washington.
“In the near term, given the significant vacancies, it would be incredibly difficult for China to launch large military campaigns against Taiwan,” Bonny Lin, the director of the China Power Project at the center, who helped compile the data, wrote in an assessment of the results.
Since 2022, around 100 officers in the military’s top two ranks — general or lieutenant general — have been dismissed or sidelined, the study estimated. The tally includes about 11 officers who were purged even after retirement.
Those eliminated represented about half of the military’s senior leadership, spanning the top commanders as well as the leaders and deputy leaders of central departments and all of China’s five military theater regions, said M. Taylor Fravel, a professor and expert on the Chinese military at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who examined the data.
Replacing them will not be easy. The purges have shrunk the pool of candidates who would have the right combination of skills, experience and ironclad loyalty to Mr. Xi and the Communist Party. An officer must also usually have served three to five years in his or her current grade to be considered for promotion, Professor Fravel said.
“Xi has purged all of these people and, obviously, it’s framed as their lack of loyalty to Xi and to the party,” he said in an interview. “But he also needs expertise to have the military he wants — loyalty as well as expertise — and how will he find those people? That’s going to be harder now.”
The removals began as a trickle, with a single senior officer disappearing in 2022. That grew to 14, dismissed or disappeared, in 2023, and 11 more in 2024. By last year the purge was a deluge: About 62 were removed, many in the latter half of the year.
This year about 11 officers have been absent from meetings that they would usually be expected to attend, suggesting that at least some of them could also be in serious trouble. The downfall of General Zhang could set off yet more investigations into officers linked to him.
“You can think of the purge of Zhang Youxia as just completing the first phase, with more turbulence to come,” said Professor Fravel.
Some of the dismissed or disappeared officers owed their rise to Mr. Xi himself; others were stars whose credentials marked them as the future of the high command.
Among them: Lt. Gen. Wang Peng, who had earned a reputation for modernizing troop training; Lt. Gen. Zhong Shaojun, who had served as Mr. Xi’s chief aide for managing the People’s Liberation Army; and Gen. Lin Xiangyang, the commander who would have been at the forefront of any Chinese attack on Taiwan.
While there are other officers who could fill the vacancies, the wave of removals could have a cascading effect through the ranks. As investigations expand, any promotions will likely be subjected to microscopic scrutiny. Of 52 key military leadership positions examined in the study, only around 11 are officially filled, said Dr. Lin.
In the Chinese military, “for every senior officer, there are tens, if not hundreds, of lower officers whose careers have been tied to the senior officer,” said John Culver, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think this will ripple for at least two or three years.”
So far, the tempo of China’s military modernization does not appear slowed by the purges, but the command bottlenecks may hinder some operations. Dr. Lin of C.S.I.S. noted that China may have shortened and simplified military exercises around Taiwan last year because of the loss of skilled leaders.
Mr. Xi patched some holes in the military leadership late last year, when he promoted new commanders to the Eastern Theater Command, which oversees Taiwan, and the Central Theater Command, which helps protect Beijing. There is no sign yet of when he may install new commanders into the Central Military Commission, the apex body that controls the military.
Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues.
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