Will Xi Jinping Go Easy on Zhang Youxia? The Answer May Decide His Fourth Term

Six months have now passed since the Chinese Communist Party announced the fall of Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of its Central Military Commission and the highest-ranking uniformed officer in China’s armed forces, but the Party has yet to say what it will do with him. In recent days, talk has spread online that Zhang may receive “lenient treatment,” keeping his military status and suffering only a demotion.

In the reading of exiled commentators, a soft outcome for Zhang would signal that Xi has been forced to give ground inside his own system and would cast doubt on whether he can secure a fourth term at the Party’s 21st National Congress next year.

Commentator predicts a suspended death sentence for Zhang Youxia

The Party announced on Jan. 24 that Zhang and Liu Zhenli, the commission member who headed its Joint Staff Department, the military’s top operational command post, had both fallen under investigation, though no result has been published for either man since.

On July 22, Cai Shenkun, the U.S.-based independent commentator who has driven much of the reporting on the case, rejected the leniency talk outright. “In recent days I have seen claims on X that Xi Jinping will deal with Zhang Youxia leniently, letting him keep his military status and handling it as a demotion. I consider this information extremely unreliable!” he wrote. “The reliable information remains what I disclosed earlier. Zhang Youxia will be handled on the model of Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu and given a suspended death sentence, and he will spend his last years either dying of old age in Qincheng Prison or waiting for Xi Jinping himself to be brought to account. Understand that Xi steeled himself to arrest Zhang Youxia at the price of offending the red second generation and the military second generation. There is absolutely no releasing the tiger back to the mountain now. The moment Zhang gets lenient treatment and a demotion, it means Xi Jinping’s ‘new era’ is nearing its end, a smooth renewal at the 21st Congress becomes impossible, and Xi and his people are finished!”

Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu are the two former defense ministers purged earlier in Xi’s military crackdown, and Qincheng, north of Beijing, is the prison where the Party locks away its fallen elite. The “red second generation” means the descendants of the revolution’s founding families, a class Zhang belongs to himself as the son of the founding general Zhang Zongxun.

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Netizens split over whether Xi can afford to ‘release the tiger’

Cai’s prediction drew both agreement and pushback from users on X. “The struggle between these two is kill or be killed. There is no releasing the tiger back to the mountain,” one user wrote, adding that Xi should remember Mao Zedong’s warning not to “seek fame like the Hegemon King.” The line comes from a 1949 Mao poem urging the complete defeat of a vanquished enemy, invoking the ancient warlord Xiang Yu, whose decision to spare a rival ultimately cost him his empire and his life. Another user agreed: “Certainly no leniency. Otherwise, is that not releasing the tiger back to the mountain?”

Others doubted a soft outcome could even hold. “Even lenient treatment would be a crushing humiliation for Zhang. Would Zhang accept it willingly? Zhang is a military chief. Would the military simply swallow it? I do not think the outcome will be that simple,” one wrote. Another reasoned that “if leniency means the Bun has scruples, then having scruples means Zhang would fight back. So the leniency logic does not hold. Locking Zhang Youxia up until he dies is Bun Xi’s only choice.” The Bun is a mocking nickname netizens attached to Xi years ago. A third user wrote that if Zhang keeps his military status with a demotion, Xi’s “new era” is reduced to a joke. “He dares release even the most iron of the red second generation back to the mountain, and still wants renewal at the 21st Congress? Wake up. Qincheng is the real lifetime tenure.” “Lenient treatment? After an arrest that difficult? Impossible,” another wrote.

Some argued the opposite. “At Zhang Youxia’s level, categories like demotion and leniency do not exist. If Zhang were harmless to Xi, you would transfer him off the military commission, hand him a vice chairmanship of the political advisory body to see out his old age, and be done,” one user wrote. Another judged from the delay itself, writing that with the investigation dragging on this long with nothing clear, a lenient outcome from Xi is probably possible, since a charge like “seriously trampling the chairman responsibility system” is very hard to put on the table. The phrase refers to the rule that final authority over the military rests solely with the commission’s chairman, Xi.

One user argued that the most likely scenario is that “the two knights, Zhang and Liu, are already S,” with “S” serving as a censorship-dodging substitute for the Chinese word for “dead.” The user claimed that the competing rumors now circulating were deliberately being leaked from “inside the wall”—a reference to China’s Great Firewall—and then repeated uncritically by those willing to believe them. “The two knights” is a wordplay on the second character of Zhang Youxia’s given name, xia (侠), meaning a chivalrous or knight-errant figure.

“He swallowed a big pork rib in one gulp and it is stuck in his throat,” another wrote of Xi’s state of mind. “He cannot get it down and he cannot spit it out. Miserable!”

Yun Qi says leniency, if it comes, would be a forced retreat by Xi

Yun Qi, a U.S.-based commentator, told Vision Times that the reports should be viewed from two angles. Given the brutality of the Party’s internal power struggles, leniency toward Zhang would be difficult to imagine. For Xi, backing down now could amount to political suicide and would run counter to the uncompromising image he has long cultivated. That image is encapsulated in Xi’s oft-repeated story that, as a young laborer, he once carried a 100-kilogram load of wheat for five kilometers along a mountain road without shifting it from one shoulder to the other—a boast that has since become shorthand for his refusal to yield.

Yet every current sign in the Zhang and Liu cases, Yun Qi said, suggests Xi has met very considerable resistance. For all the outside talk that Xi’s grip is total and nothing can shake him, the challenge and doubt he faces inside the Party could not be clearer than in this case. A “lenient” outcome therefore cannot be excluded, though it would never reflect Xi’s own intent; it would mean Xi had been forced to retreat a step in the infighting.

Ma Xingrui’s case moves while Zhang Youxia’s stands still

Ma Xingrui, a Politburo member like Zhang, was placed under investigation on April 3. His case moved quickly thereafter. On June 26, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress stripped Ma and 13 other officials of their delegate seats. Then in July, shortly before the Party’s informal summer retreat at Beidaihe, Ma was expelled from the CCP and removed from public office before being transferred to the judicial authorities, as Vision Times previously reported.

Zhang and Liu, however, still retain their delegate seats. Since January, the legislature has stripped officials of their seats at four separate sessions, yet neither man has appeared on those lists. In contrast to Ma’s case, Zhang’s has shown no comparable public movement.

Cai argued that the delay points to at least two possibilities: either investigators still lack sufficient evidence to formally conclude the cases against Zhang and Liu, or their fate remains the subject of unresolved disagreement within the Party-state and the military.

On July 16, Cai went further during an online program, claiming that Zhang had admitted trying to force Xi to relinquish power and had said that “rewriting history was one step away.” Cai also alleged that Zhang had support from some Party elders, claims Vision Times has reported previously but which cannot be independently verified.