When your anti-corruption campaign has been running for over a decade, has ensnared millions of officials, and has now consumed multiple chiefs of the military's most senior body, one of two conclusions is available: either the campaign is extraordinarily successful, or the institution being purged is extraordinarily corrupt. Xi Jinping's ongoing restructuring of the Central Military Commission suggests a third possibility — that 'anti-corruption' and 'political consolidation' have become so thoroughly intertwined that separating them would require a forensic accountant and a political scientist working in the same room.

Analysts at CSIS note that Xi is acutely aware of how his predecessor Jiang Zemin retained CMC chairmanship for two years after stepping down, effectively neutering his successor. Xi, it appears, has decided that the solution to this problem is to ensure there are no successors left with enough institutional support to try the same manoeuvre. The mechanism chosen is corruption charges, which in China's one-party system have the dual advantage of being easy to find and impossible to publicly contest.

The purge's longevity raises a philosophical question that Chinese state media is not currently entertaining: if a party has been purging corrupt members continuously since 2012 and has not run out of corrupt members, what does that suggest about the party? Mao Zedong, who invented this particular management style, purged lieutenants and then sometimes brought them back. Xi appears to be streamlining the process by skipping the return trip.