China’s top general, second only to Xi Jinping, the nation’s leader, in the military command, has been put under investigation and accused of “grave violations of discipline and the law,” the Ministry of National Defense said on Saturday, the most stunning escalation yet in Mr. Xi’s purge of the People’s Liberation Army elite.
The general, Zhang Youxia, is a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party body that controls China’s armed forces. Another member of the commission, Gen. Liu Zhenli, who leads the military’s Joint Staff Department, is also under investigation, the Defense Ministry said. Its announcement did not say what either general was alleged to have done wrong.
General Zhang’s downfall — few if any Chinese officials placed publicly under investigation are later declared innocent — is the most drastic step so far in Mr. Xi’s yearslong campaign to root out what he has described as corruption and disloyalty in the military’s senior ranks. It is all the more astonishing because General Zhang seemed to be a confidant of Mr. Xi, who has known him for decades.
“This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents the total annihilation of the high command,” Christopher K. Johnson, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who follows Chinese elite politics, said of the investigation of General Zhang.
With the two generals effectively out, the Central Military Commission has just two members left: its chairman, Mr. Xi, and Gen. Zhang Shengmin, who has overseen Mr. Xi’s military purges. Mr. Xi has now removed all but one of the six generals he appointed to the commission in 2022.
Mr. Johnson, the president of China Strategies Group, a consulting firm, said Mr. Xi seemed to have concluded that problems in the military ran so deep that he could not trust the top command to cure itself and must look to a new cohort of rising officers.
He appears to have “decided he must cut very deep generationally to find a group not tainted,” Mr. Johnson said. “The purging of even a childhood friend in Zhang Youxia shows there now are no limits to Xi’s anti-graft zeal.”
Rumors that the general might be in trouble had spread for days, since official news reports left clues that he and General Liu had been absent from a Communist Party meeting. But General Zhang has disappeared from view before, and a senior official is usually out of sight for months before the party confirms that he is under investigation.
The speed with which General Zhang’s ouster was announced seemed intended to stanch the potential damage for Mr. Xi, said Su Tzu-yun, an expert on the People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, a body funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.
“This could be a big blow to morale inside the P.L.A.,” Mr. Su said in an interview, referring to the removal of a seemingly invulnerable commander.
