By Chen Jing
The abrupt downfall of Zhang Youxia, a vice chairman of China’s highest military body, marks the most consequential purge of Xi Jinping’s rule. This investigation argues that the episode was not a factional accident or failed compromise, but the culmination of a three-year entrapment operation that weaponized loyalty, deception, and sacrifice inside the People’s Liberation Army.
Xi Jinping’s endgame inside China’s military
In the opaque world of Chinese elite politics, one rule has never failed: when events defy logic, a larger design is at work.
On Jan.24, 2026, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, China’s ruling party) issued a terse but explosive announcement. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC, the Communist Party’s highest military authority), had been placed under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law.” The news landed like a political depth charge. With it died the long-held belief that struggles at the apex of CCP power would remain “intense but contained.”
Yet the real meaning of the moment only became clear when observers looked not at Zhang Youxia’s fall, but at who remained standing.
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Zhang Shengmin, the other CMC vice chairman and head of the military’s internal discipline system, was not only untouched. He was reportedly central to the operation that brought Zhang Youxia down. At that point, a long-ignored puzzle snapped into focus. The personnel arrangement adopted at the Fourth Plenum—once dismissed as dull, even conciliatory—was in fact the opening move of a meticulously staged political kill chain, three years in the making.
What looked like compromise was preparation. What looked like balance was bait.
The Fourth Plenum that fooled everyone
At the time of the Fourth Plenum—an internal CCP meeting on party governance—expectations were straightforward. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, was widely expected to launch a decisive purge of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA, China’s military): either installing loyalists wholesale or provoking a full counteroffensive from the military old guard clustered around Zhang Youxia.
Instead, nothing of the sort happened.
There was no sweeping reshuffle, no visible bloodletting. Only one personnel change stood out—and precisely because it made so little sense. Zhang Shengmin, then secretary of the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission (the PLA’s anti-corruption body), was promoted out of sequence to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.
The move immediately raised an uncomfortable question that no analyst could answer with confidence: Whose man was Zhang Shengmin?
The comforting misreadings
The dominant interpretations that followed were, in retrospect, exercises in collective self-deception.
The “balance” theory: Zhang Shengmin, it was argued, represented a mutually acceptable compromise. He was a native of Shaanxi Province, Xi Jinping’s home region, yet his career had been advanced by Zhang Youxia, particularly during his time linked to the Rocket Force (China’s strategic missile arm). His elevation was seen as a stabilizing buffer between rival camps—a lowest-common-denominator solution.
The “safety” theory: Others framed Zhang as a low-profile centrist. His rise, they claimed, signaled Xi’s inability to fully neutralize Zhang Youxia and pointed to a temporary truce inside the military.
The unresolved question—Is Zhang Shengmin Xi’s man or Zhang Youxia’s?—was quietly settled by assumption. Most concluded he leaned toward Zhang Youxia. That reading aligned neatly with the broader hope within the PLA for “rest and recovery” rather than upheaval.
This was exactly the effect Xi Jinping needed.
Zhang Shengmin was not a buffer. He was not a compromise. He was a poisoned chalice deliberately handed to Zhang Youxia—and Zhang drank without hesitation.
A buried warning from a vanished journalist
Evidence of Zhang Shengmin’s true role surfaced years earlier—only to disappear along with the person who recognized its significance.
On Jan. 26, 2026, Jiang Feng, a well-known overseas Chinese political commentator, recounted a chilling episode. Drew Thompson, a former U.S. Defense Department official responsible for China policy, had posted a WhatsApp screenshot dated Sept. 21, 2023—an act that belatedly detonated a long-dormant political bomb.
The other participant in the exchange was Minnie Chan, a senior military correspondent for the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language newspaper. After traveling to Beijing in October 2023 to report on the Xiangshan Forum (China’s flagship international security conference), she vanished. To this day, her whereabouts—and even her survival—remain unknown.
In the screenshot, Thompson posed a question that was extraordinarily sensitive even at the time: “Do you think Zhang Youxia and Zhang Shengmin are in trouble? Are they under investigation?”
Chan’s response contained no hedging, no diplomatic ambiguity. Just a single word:
“Yes.”
That answer was her last known public communication.
Its implication is devastating. As early as 2023, Xi Jinping had already initiated parallel investigations into both Zhang Youxia and Zhang Shengmin. The later downfall of Li Shangfu, then China’s defense minister, along with the six-year retroactive probe into procurement abuses at the Equipment Development Department (the PLA office overseeing weapons acquisition)—covering precisely the period when Li and Zhang Youxia were in charge—was never merely an anti-corruption campaign.
It was a political hunt, aimed at the real target while striking decoys along the way.
Minnie Chan disappeared because she saw through the structure of the trap. In the CCP’s black-box system, advance knowledge is not insight—it is a death sentence.
A real ‘infernal affairs’ inside the PLA
If both Zhang Youxia and Zhang Shengmin were under investigation in 2023, the question becomes unavoidable: why did one fall while the other ascended?
The answer points to a strategy as cold as it is familiar in authoritarian systems. Zhang Shengmin became Xi Jinping’s double agent.
By 2023, Xi reportedly held irrefutable evidence linking Zhang Shengmin to corruption in the Rocket Force, China’s nuclear and missile command. Instead of eliminating him, Xi offered survival on one condition: be my nail embedded next to Zhang Youxia.
After Li Shangfu’s removal, Zhang Youxia sensed the blade approaching. He began to mobilize his prestige within the PLA to resist. Xi recognized that a frontal assault risked instability—or worse. He therefore chose the most deceptive tactic available: deliberate weakness.
To convince Zhang Youxia that Zhang Shengmin had genuinely defected to the old-guard camp, Xi staged a prolonged illusion. He even resorted to the classic kǔròu jì—a traditional stratagem involving feigned self-sacrifice to deceive an opponent.
Sacrificing loyalists to perfect the deception
Between late 2023 and late 2025, developments inside the PLA confounded observers. Xi Jinping’s own trusted figures—He Weidong, a senior CMC vice chairman and frontline commander, and Miao Hua, the PLA’s political loyalty chief—fell in succession.
At the time, these events were widely interpreted as proof of Xi’s weakening grip over the military and a major victory for Zhang Youxia. Some even concluded that Zhang Shengmin had become the spearhead of a counter-purge against Xi’s inner circle.
This reading missed the point entirely.
Zhang Shengmin’s actions were not rogue maneuvers; they were tolerated, even sanctioned. To drive the nail deep enough—and to convince Zhang Youxia that his guard could finally be lowered—Xi Jinping was willing to sacrifice He Weidong and Miao Hua. You do not catch the wolf without feeding it meat.
Zhang Youxia had fought wars. He had seen real bloodshed. What he had never faced was this level of political calculation. Watching Zhang Shengmin dismantle Xi’s network, Zhang Youxia concluded that he had won.
And so he made the fatal error: he entrusted his back to the very man planted to destroy him.
Once again, outside observers underestimated Xi Jinping’s ruthlessness and the absence of moral constraint that has defined CCP strongmen from Mao Zedong to Jiang Zemin to Xi himself.
The detonation
The trap closed on the night of Jan. 19, 2026.
Believing the balance of power settled, Zhang Youxia relaxed. At that moment, the mine buried more than two years earlier detonated. Zhang Shengmin reportedly handed over Zhang Youxia’s most sensitive secrets—possibly including coup planning or core personnel lists—and may have acted as an internal facilitator during the final operation.
He personally delivered the man who had trusted him, promoted him, and shared his regional origins into political oblivion.
This explains why, from the two names Minnie Chan identified in 2023, only one has fallen—so far.
But survival is not victory.
The last man standing
The current Central Military Commission nominally has seven members. In reality, some are dead, some detained, some erased. Functionally, power now rests with two figures: Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin.
This is less a governing body than the final scene of a horror film. The last survivor is rarely spared because of luck. He survives because the script demands a final act.
Zhang Shengmin’s position is, in fact, the most dangerous of all. A recently circulated fake “resignation letter” attributed to him—clearly satirical—nonetheless captured a grim psychological truth: “Five of the seven CMC members are gone. I am filled with fear and request to resign.”
Why Zhang Shengmin has no exit
In the logic of dictatorship, a man like Zhang Shengmin cannot be permitted a peaceful exit.
First, he knows too much. He witnessed Xi Jinping deliberately sacrificing He Weidong and Miao Hua to complete a political entrapment. Such witnesses do not retire to write memoirs.
Second is the immutable fate of all traitors. Zhang Shengmin is not only a ruthless enforcer; he is a proven betrayer. If he could betray Zhang Youxia, there is no rational basis for Xi to believe he would not betray again.
History offers no exceptions. Wu Zetian’s Lai Junchen, the empress’s chief inquisitor. Stalin’s Yezhov, head of the Soviet secret police. Every man who did the ruler’s dirtiest work met the same end. Once the enemies are gone, the blood-stained blade itself must be snapped—to calm public fury and erase evidence.
Perhaps Zhang Shengmin already understands this, sitting alone in the vast halls of the Central Military Commission, fully aware of the old truth: When the rabbit is dead, the hounds are boiled.
He believed he had won by playing a perfect game of “Infernal Affairs.” In Xi Jinping’s eyes, however, he is merely the last dog awaiting slaughter—one that has already bitten its master.