Cleans in the Chinese army and the drone revolution. Why does Xi Jinping remove the “old guard”?

During the yearly gathering of the National Assembly of People's Representatives in March 2026, known as the 2 Sessions (两会, ling huì), the president of Xi Jinping sent an uncompromising message to officers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). He called for the complete rooting of corruption, stressing that there is no place in the military for disloyalty or “hide corrupt officials”. These words, although they fit into Xi's longstanding rhetoric, fell at a peculiar minute – in the shadow of the largest purgatory on top of the Chinese army for decades. However, behind authoritative allegations of corruption lies a deeper dispute over the future of Chinese armed forces, in which inexpensive drones and robotics win against expensive, complicated equipment.

Xi Jinping's message: key phrases and their interpretation

The 2 Sessions of 2026 began on March 5, erstwhile the National Assembly of People's Representatives (OZPL) gathered in Beijing in a evidence truncated composition – only 2765 delegates, which is the lowest attendance since 2013, despite the years of the pandemic. This absence was not accidental: 19 people were removed from the list of delegates just before the session, including 9 military officers, and 3 more generals were removed from the People's Political Consultative Conference of China.

Speaking on 7 March 2026 to the military delegation during the 2 Sessions, Xi Jinping, simultaneously serving as president of the Central Military Commission (CKW), demanded that the military “establish strict control and strict rules, carefully monitoring the key aspects of its activities.” He paid peculiar attention to the effective usage of defence funds and to the usage of them exclusively for purposes that would effectively increase the state's military capacity. He stressed that as part of the 15th five-year plan (2026-2030), the army had to undergo a deep organization review.

The verses that dominated the message of state media – Xinhua and CCTV – are primarily “Revolutionary hardening” (revolutionary tempering, 革命性锻造) and “absolute leadership of the organization over armed forces”. The first of these concepts, derived from the Maoist tradition, means the purification by the trial—and is simply a signal that Xi treats the anti-corruption run as an component of a deeper ideological transformation of the army, not just a police investigation. The second is simply a consequence to fears that extended networks of connections within PLA have begun to make alternate loyalty centres, independent of the party.

World media reactions: from Tokyo to Moscow

World media and analysts rapidly picked up these words, interpreting them through the prism of ongoing cleansing. Russian “Gazeta.ru” and RBK portal noted Xi's informing against “hiding corruptionists”, citing earlier reports of arrests of leading generals. Russian commentators, observing Chinese military changes with attention, noticed in Xi's words a signal of deep distrust towards their own leadership – which in the context of Russian experience with Ukraine sounds familiar.

In Japan, erstwhile commander of the Self-Defense Force, General Yoshihide Yoshida, described the Purges in PLA as “dangerous”, fearing that Xi's increasing consolidation of power could paradoxically destabilise the situation in the region. Yoshida pointed out that mass removal of experienced commanders creates a decision vacuum that increases the hazard of miscalculation in a possible Taiwan conflict. The Australian ABC News stressed in turn that Xi for the first time so openly acknowledged the problem of corruption in the army, which in itself is simply a signal of an unprecedented scale of phenomenon.

Taiwanese experts, as quoted by the Singaporean paper “Lianhe Zaobao”, estimation that the anti-corruption run aims to complete “cleaning the field” before the 21st legislature of the Communist organization planned for 2027. prof. Kou Chien-wen of the National University of Chengchi in Taipei indicated that the removed military delegates are linked to 2 “lines” of cleaning—a network of erstwhile political commissioner Miao Hua and the network of erstwhile vice-president CKW Zhang Youxia – suggesting that the run is systematic and far-reaching.

“Old Guard” and corruption in the arms procurement process

Since 2022, more than 100 elder PLA officers have been removed or “disappeared” in China, including 36 generals officially confirmed as being covered by the Purge. The scale of this phenomenon is unprecedented: with 47 generals serving in 2022 or promoted after that date until 87 percent were removed or are suspected of being removed.

At the top of the list of detached figures are inactive late considered pillars of China's military power:

The authoritative reason for their collapse is “political and corrupt problems” and “a serious violation of Xi Jinping's authority as president of the CKW”. However, the analysis of career paths of displaced generals points to something more: they represented the “old guard” which over the years benefited enormously from the conventional model of arms procurement. This model was based on the production and acquisition of expensive, highly complicated military equipment – from aircraft carriers to advanced rocket systems. The Rocket Force (all 4 erstwhile commanders of this formation were removed) and the Navy, whose corruption at orders led, among others, to the sinking of a fresh Zhou-class submarine at the Wuhana shipyard in 2024 .

This system, resembling the approach of the American military-industrial complex in its pathologies, abounded in irregularities. Corruption in tenders for powerful ships or rocket systems allowed to build extended guanxi networks (informal connections and favors) among the highest commanders and directors of state arms conglomerates. Xi Jinping's advisers, however, realized that this model was becoming not only costly, but besides fatally obsolete on the modern battlefield.

Lessons from Ukraine and the mediate East: Twilight of costly equipment

The value of traditional, costly military equipment has been brutally verified in fresh conflicts. The war in Ukraine has clearly proved that a organization without a mass of inexpensive drones – and effective systems to destruct them – is doomed to immense losses and tactical failures. An even stronger blow to the doctrine of the “old guard” came from the mediate East, during the clashes between the US and Israel and Iran.

Iran, with inexpensive Shahed drones (e.g. Shahed-136), effectively paralyzes and destroys key components of advanced defence systems in the Persian Gulf. The cost asymmetry here is shocking. The production of 1 Shahed drone is estimated at just $20,000 to $50,000 – depending on model and equipment. Meanwhile, missiles utilized by the United States to capture them (e.g. with Patriot systems) could cost from $2 to up to $4 million per piece. According to the calculations quoted by NBC News, for all dollar spent by Iran on the Shahed drone, the arabian Emirates had to spend $20 to 28 on its shooting down.

For Chinese command, it became clear that mass production of cheap, autonomous machines is more strategically effective than investing billions in single, easy to destruct conflict platforms. The fast refurbishment of arms, supply chains and the doctrine of war has become a necessity. However, this was contrary to the interests of the “old guard”, for which it meant cutting off from lucrative contracts and dismantling the guanxi network. opposition to these changes, masked by the care of “traditional capabilities”, was yet interpreted by Beijing as sabotage and “trail”, which triggered an avalanche of arrests.

PLA robotics: from “human wave” to swarms of machines

The Chinese People's Liberation Army under Xi Jinping undergoes a extremist transformation towards modular, automated and robotic weapons. The main burden of combat activities is to be transferred from surviving soldiers to machines that are proven from a safe distance by operators supported by artificial intelligence algorithms. Already the 14th five-year plan (2021-2025) explicitly stated that “future wars will be unmanned and intelligent.”

Examples of this direction are increasingly spectacular. At the beginning of 2026, Chinese state tv CCTV presented strategy tests in which 1 soldier, supported by artificial intelligence algorithms developed at the National Defence Technology University, is able to control a swarm of over 200 unmanneds simultaneously. These drones can autonomously separate tasks among themselves: from reconnaissance, by confusing the opponent's defense, to kamikaze attacks on indicated targets. Each of them is equipped with an “intelligent algorithm”, which through common communication and “autonomic negotiations” creates, as the investigator Xiang Xiaojia put it, “a powerful, cooperative intelligent swarm”.

In 2025, the “Jiu Tian” drone (Nine Heavens) was tested – an aircraft carrier with a wingspan of 25 metres, capable of releasing 100 to 150 smaller impact drones from interior retention tanks. Parallel PLA exercises the tactics of “human-machine combat teams” (human-machine colllaborative combat teams) in which surviving soldiers command groups of robots and drones during simulated urban combat. Researchers at Georgetown University, analyzing thousands of PLA tender documents, besides identified programs for the construction of armed robot dogs, humanoid combat robots, autonomous submarine tracking systems, and AI tools for information operations.

Artificial intelligence alternatively of combat experience

This sharp turn towards autonomy and robotization has yet another very crucial reason for China, seldom cited straight by Beijing. The Chinese People's Liberation Army suffers from a critical deficiency of real combat experience. The last full-scale conflict in which Chinese soldiers participated was a short and poorly successful invasion of Vietnam in 1979 – completed by the withdrawal of Chinese troops after a period of fighting, with severe losses made by the experienced Vietnamese army.

Currently, there is virtually no general with front experience in active PLA command. For more than 4 decades, Chinese officers have been promoted through political loyalty, academic accomplishment and bureaucratic maneuvers – not by proving themselves in the heat of battle. It lacks organization cognition of how soldiers and officers will behave in the stress of modern, high-intensity conflict, how to respond to unexpected losses, how to keep coherence of command in the chaos of battle.

Technology is the solution to this problem. According to analyses of researchers from Georgetown University, China is building artificial intelligence-based systems to support leadership decisions to replace intuition and combat experience. Machines and algorithms do not panic, do not fear, and can process immense amounts of data from the battlefield in fractions of seconds. The transfer of hazard to inexpensive drone swarms and combat robots is intended to compensate for the deficiency of “being in a fight” of Chinese soldiers, while minimising human losses – which is crucial from the point of view of the interior policy of the KPC, where each Chinese soldier is the only boy of a household raised in the government of 1 child.

However, researchers point to a serious hazard of this strategy: AI systems mainly trained on public data and simulations may be susceptible to information manipulation by the opponent, and the deficiency of data from real conflicts – specified as classified images of military platforms or radar signatures – constitutes a crucial gap in device learning capabilities.

Purge in the Chinese army is not just a regular fight against corruption. It's a brutal forced change of the war paradigm. Xi Jinping eliminates commanders with costly, conventional weapons and protecting their own networks of connections, paving the way for the next generation army. An army in which the triumph will be decided not by costly aircraft carriers or ballistic missiles, but by millions of cheap, intelligent drones, commanded by soldiers who have never seen a real battlefield – but who will be replaced by machines that do not request to see it.

Leszek B. Glass

Email: [email protected]

© www.chiny24.com

Source:

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