【The Inevitability of the Communist Party's Great Military Purge】The Most Powerful Confidant Is the Most Dangerous — Zhang Youxia Has Fallen Too!【Zhiding Lecture Hall · Enlightenment Forum · Yu Maochun】EP219
This video is hosted by Miles Yu and analyzes the logic of communist totalitarian rule behind the downfall of Zhang Youxia, the highest-ranking active-duty general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The article points out that the communist dictatorial system pursues absolute loyalty. The more centralized power becomes, the more fearful the leader grows, leading to the continuous and brutal purging of the military high command closest to the core and holding the most real power. The so-called anti-corruption and treason charges are essentially the dictator's institutional self-preservation to manage fear.
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The sudden downfall of Zhang Youxia, the highest-ranking active-duty general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), once again confirms the brutal truth of communist dictatorship: what rulers fear most is not foreign enemies, but their own people not being obedient enough. In the dead end of pursuing absolute loyalty, the more centralized power becomes, the more fearful the leader grows, always suspecting that everyone is not kneeling with sufficient sincerity. Dictators must package political struggles as patriotic actions, making foreign hostile forces the most convenient tool.
Last week, General Zhang Youxia, the highest-ranking active-duty general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was suddenly taken down. This is not just another high-level purge news story, but yet another reminder to the world: what communist dictatorship fears most is not the enemy, but its own people not being obedient enough. In a communist system, the army is not the country's army, but the party's army; more precisely, it is the supreme leader's army. To secure the dragon throne, there is only one ironclad rule: military power must be held in one's own hands, and held until the knuckles turn white. The problem is that dictators love to talk about absolute loyalty, but absolute loyalty is precisely the hardest thing to obtain absolute verification for. Do you look loyal today, but will you turn against me tomorrow? Are you shouting slogans now, while plotting behind the scenes? Therefore, the result of a dictator pursuing absolute loyalty is often not peace of mind, but deeper fear and more severe paranoia, ultimately turning into wave after wave of purges. This is not Xi Jinping's personal psychological illness; this is the structural logic of communist rule. From Stalin to Mao Zedong, from Kim Jong Un to Xi Jinping, the more centralized power becomes, the more everyone is required to kneel lower; and the more you demand that everyone kneel, the more likely everyone is to be suspected of not kneeling with sincere enough intentions.
The core of a communist regime is a supreme leader who monopolizes all power; the party, the state, the military, and the police must all obey him alone. But the absurdity is that no matter how dictatorial he is, he still has to rely on high-ranking officials and bureaucrats to execute his orders, and these people often hold the guns, military power, intelligence, and the operation of the entire military machine. Thus, the contradiction arises: those closest to power are the most useful, but also the most dangerous. In other words, the more capable you are, the more likely you are to be seen as a threat; the more prestige you have, the easier it is to be viewed as a potential rival setting up your own shop. Therefore, a dictator will inevitably fall into an inescapable paranoia, constantly feeling that someone is plotting against him, engaging in double-dealing, or flirting with foreign forces. Consequently, "foreign forces" become the most convenient tool, because once you label someone as a traitor, you can use the most righteous posture to package the cruelest political struggle as the most patriotic action. This script was already played out by Stalin. In 1937, Marshal Tukhachevsky, the most outstanding general of the Soviet Red Army, was accused of colluding with Nazi Germany to overthrow Stalin. The charges were fake, but that didn't matter; what mattered was that he was too capable, too prestigious, and too close to power. As long as he was alive, Stalin couldn't sleep. During the Great Purge, Stalin was particularly fond of arresting Trotskyists because these people had international relations and overseas connections, making them the easiest to be identified as foreign agents. Of the five Soviet marshals, three were killed for this reason, and the two who survived did so for a very realistic reason: they were militarily incompetent and posed no political threat. In other words, not being strong enough was actually safer.
China is, of course, no exception. Since 1949, purges within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military have come in waves, and the fear behind them has never changed: will those who hold the guns turn them against the leader one day? In the Mao Zedong era, those who were purged were often not incompetent fools, but those who didn't kneel low enough. Peng Dehuai merely followed the trend, criticizing the Great Leap Forward and the People's Communes along with Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, and was immediately branded with the crime of being anti-party, ending his political life on the spot. Later, even Lin Biao, the successor handpicked by Mao Zedong, was accused of staging a coup and eventually died in a mysterious plane crash while flying to Moscow. Mao Zedong's fear did not come from nowhere. After the Malinovsky incident in 1964, Mao became thoroughly convinced that military coups and mutinies supported by foreign forces were not fiction, but reality. At that time, after the Soviet Communist Party overthrew Khrushchev in October, Zhou Enlai and He Long went to Moscow to test the waters for reconciliation. The then Soviet Defense Minister Malinovsky, a "China hand" who had commanded the Northeast Communist forces at the end of World War II, said something intriguing directly to He Long: the Sino-Soviet relationship had been ruined by Khrushchev and Mao Zedong; now that we Soviets have gotten rid of Khrushchev, you Chinese should also get rid of Mao Zedong. When Mao heard this, he was furious and distraught. This sentence was like a thorn planted in Mao's heart that could never be removed; it was a critical page in the history of the CCP, leading to huge and catastrophic political consequences.
Even more ironic is that Mao Zedong's paranoia about his subordinates plotting against him became so obsessive that he couldn't even protect Liu Shaoqi, the most loyal lackey within the system. Mao cursed him as a traitor, an internal mole, and a scab—a Khrushchev lurking by his side—and Liu was eventually tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution. This is the cruelest part of a communist regime: the closer you are to the core, the faster you die. Mao Zedong died, but this logic continued to be carried forward, its tyranny undiminished. Zhao Ziyang was not a career soldier, but he suffered the same fate. He told the truth to the visiting Gorbachev: China was not a collective leadership; on the surface, Deng Xiaoping, the retired strongman who sold the abolition of lifelong tenure and the rejuvenation of cadres, was the supreme ruler of the country, the absolute authority ruling from behind the curtain. Furthermore, during the June Fourth (Tiananmen) period, as Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Zhao Ziyang was unwilling to order a massacre. This lack of ruthlessness and excessive honesty directly sentenced him to political death.
By the time of Xi Jinping, the purges in the military not only didn't stop, but intensified. Since taking power in 2012, more than 100 high-ranking PLA officers have been purged, a scale arguably the largest since the Cultural Revolution. On the surface, it's called anti-corruption, but in reality, it's more like a political mine-clearing operation: the closer you are to Xi Jinping, the more dangerous you are. In China, the position of Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission is arguably one of the hardest chairs to sit in, because you hold real power and are closest to the supreme leader, so you breathe next to his paranoia every day. Since 1949, nine vice chairmen of the military commission have been purged, most of them accused of colluding with the enemy. During Xi Jinping's tenure, the recently retired Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihu fell first. In 2023, an unprecedented massive purge occurred: the Rocket Force commander, the head of military procurement, and theater commanders were removed one after another, and in the end, even those promoted by Xi himself were purged. In 2025, He Weidong and Miao Hua were also purged, and now it's Zhang Youxia's turn—Xi's long-time ally and fellow princeling. This is even more intriguing, because when you start purging even the loyalists, it proves one thing: Xi Jinping is no longer looking for bad guys, but for people who make him feel uneasy.
It is highly noteworthy that this time, it appears to be escalating into the oldest and most lethal accusation of a communist regime: treason. There are rumors suggesting that Zhang may be accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the United States. As shown above, the political effect of such a charge is excellent: you can use the name of defending national security to package the most naked power struggle as the most sacred act of justice. This is the ultimate logic of communist purges: the higher you climb, the more likely you are to be branded a turncoat traitor. In this system, whether you can survive does not depend on ability, integrity, or merit, but on one thing: whether you can forever avoid the fear of the supreme leader and keep yourself from being targeted by him. Because in the eyes of a dictator, the greatest threat is never a foreign country; the greatest threat is the military leader closest to him, the one who best knows how to pull the trigger. Ultimately, the military purges of the CCP are never about anti-corruption, but a systemic instinct for self-preservation. A dictator is not governing a country, but managing fear; he is not building a strong military, but ensuring that the muzzle will never turn toward himself. Comrade Ceaușescu of Romania did not put enough effort into this and met a terrible end, and this is precisely the most absurd aspect of the communist system: it claims to be the most stable, the most united, and the most disciplined, yet it forever lives in the delusion that someone is plotting to assassinate it. The closer one is to the core, the more dangerous it is; the more capable one is, the more likely one is to be purged; the more loyal one is, the more likely one is to be suspected. Under this political logic, Zhang Youxia will not be the last, and the next one will not be a surprise. Because in a communist dictatorship, the greatest crime is not corruption or incompetence, but keeping the supreme leader awake at night.