China's anti-corruption campaign, now in its second decade and having consumed millions of officials like a bureaucratic woodchipper, is still going. The question analysts are apparently paid to ask — and to their credit, actually asking — is whether the purge is about corruption or about Xi Jinping ensuring that the People's Liberation Army remains his personal loyalty machine rather than an independent institution capable of facilitating inconvenient political transitions.

The answer, per a CSIS report by analyst Brian Hart, is: probably both, but mostly the second one. Xi watched former leader Jiang Zemin retain his CMC chairmanship for two years after stepping down, effectively neutering his successor. Xi, it seems, has no intention of providing that particular civics lesson to whoever comes next — assuming anyone does. The CMC has been visibly reshuffled across 2023, 2025, and 2026, with the pattern of replacements suggesting that competence is a secondary qualification to demonstrable personal devotion.

Mao Zedong, who essentially invented the Chinese political purge as a management tool, purged officials so enthusiastically he sometimes recycled them. Xi's father was himself a purge victim. Xi has apparently studied family history carefully and drawn the lesson that it is considerably better to be the purger than the purgee.