Water in Missiles, Generals in Chains: Inside China’s 2025 Military Corruption Storm

  The Great Purge 2.0: Xi Jinping Is Eating His Own Generals  

November 24, 2025

Something extraordinary is happening inside the People’s Liberation Army, and for once the Chinese Communist Party isn’t even pretending it’s routine housekeeping.

On October 17, 2025, Beijing announced that nine of the country’s most senior military officers—including the number-two uniformed officer in the entire country—had been expelled from the Party and the PLA for “serious violations of discipline.” Translation: they’re finished. Some will disappear into Qincheng Prison; others may simply vanish from history.

The name that made the world sit up straight was General He Weidong, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, a member of the 24-person Politburo, and until March of this year considered one of Xi Jinping’s most trusted protégés. He hasn’t been seen in public for eight months. Now we know why.

This isn’t the first wave of purges—far from it—but it is the most shocking. Since 2023, Xi has removed or detained at least 29 generals he personally promoted after 2012. Roughly one in five of “Xi’s generals” is gone. The seven-seat Central Military Commission—the body that effectively runs China’s armed forces—now has three empty chairs. That hasn’t happened since the darkest days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

   Why now? Why his own people?

Three explanations are circulating in Beijing-watching circles, and all of them can be true at the same time.

1.  Corruption that actually matters

   The Rocket Force scandal that kicked off the current wave in 2023 wasn’t about Swiss watches or mistresses. Investigators allegedly discovered that missile silos had been filled with water instead of fuel and that warheads had the wrong guidance packages. When your nuclear deterrent is literally compromised, “anti-corruption” stops being theater and becomes existential.

2.  Loyalty above everything

   Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has always been a dual-purpose tool: clean house and remind everyone who the real boss is. The fact that even He Weidong—someone who served with Xi in Fujian and commanded the Eastern Theater opposite Taiwan—could fall tells every officer one thing: no relationship is sacred except the one with Xi himself.

3.  Preparing for war—or at least the appearance of it

   Xi’s publicly stated goal is for the PLA to achieve “centenary combat readiness” by 2027, the 100th anniversary of its founding. A military riddled with graft, fake reporting, and officers more interested in real estate than red lines cannot seize or hold Taiwan. The purge is the painful price of trying to turn a peacetime patronage machine into something that can actually fight.

    The human cost inside the ranks

Imagine being a colonel or one-star general right now. Your boss disappears. His boss disappears. The guy who replaced him lasts six months and then he disappears too. Promotion is now a curse: the higher you climb, the brighter the spotlight. Initiative is punished; loyalty is rewarded—until it isn’t. The PLA’s culture of “positive reporting” (i.e., telling the leadership what it wants to hear) is hardening into concrete.

    What this means for the rest of the world

Short-term: the PLA is distracted, decapitated in several key nodes, and risk-averse. That’s good news for Taiwan, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and anyone who doesn’t want a hot war in the Western Pacific tomorrow morning.

Medium-term: Xi will eventually refill those empty CMC seats with younger, ideologically pure officers who owe their entire careers to him personally. When that cohort is in place—probably by the 21st Party Congress in 2027—the PLA will be leaner, meaner, and far more uniform in its thinking. That version may be more willing to follow dangerous orders.

  Final thought

Every strongman dreams of an army that is both competent and unquestioning. History says you can usually have one or the other, but rarely both. Xi Jinping is betting that in the age of hypersonics and nuclear drones he can break that iron law. The purge we’re watching is the price of that bet.

And the meter is still running.