I predict Xi will go a lot deeper to catch up to Mao. If I were the next in line I would flee the country whilst I could. Totalitarians always take many casualties with them in their paranoid crash out.

Sounds pretty mild, compared to the obvious benchmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge#Purge_of_the_army_...

Beyond the loyalty angle, this is a pretty stupid play. Sure, China has about 2B people, so good strategists should be reasonably available, but it takes decades of training and experience to make an effective battlefield general. If they actually intend to go all imperialist and start doing truly stupid things like invading Taiwan, they are going to get absolutely plastered without a good cadre of experienced officers and enlisted men. And the “vanishing” of the upper echelons is only attractive to yes men and sycophants; the ones who will be the least effective in any real engagement.

Now, from that aforementioned loyalty angle… this definitely works. If you purge dissent and people with a history of lateral, non-conforming thinking, you most definitely get a system where people ask “how high?” when you scream “jump!”.

I mean, Trump has been doing much the same with the American military, albeit less dark (only relieving them of their positions). It’s the authoritarian/fascist playbook in action, and it will mean much less resistance in the ranks when ‘murica decides to invade Canada, or Greenland, or any other juicy target.

The scale here is what's truly staggering—tracking over 100 senior officers purged since 2022 suggests this isn't just routine anti-corruption, but a fundamental reshaping of the PLA's leadership. It's hard not to see the historical parallels being mentioned here. Much like Stalin's purges of the Red Army before WWII, there's a massive trade-off between political loyalty and operational competence. Replacing decades of institutional knowledge with "yes men" might secure the regime internally, but as history shows, it often leaves the military brittle and prone to catastrophic failure when actually tested on the battlefield. If the goal is regional power projection, hollowed-out command structures are a massive strategic liability.