These are nervous days for China’s senior military officers. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Communist Party’s powerful Central Military Commission (CMC), has been placed under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law.” Zhang Youxia, long regarded as an ally of paramount leader Xi Jinping, was the military’s second-highest-ranking officer, directly beneath Xi himself. He is the highest military leader to be brought down by the anti-corruption campaign that, since Xi took office in 2012, has disciplined millions of Party and state officials across all sectors of Chinese society.
With Zhang Youxia’s removal, the CMC has been effectively hollowed out: of the seven members who constituted the commission at the start of the current term, five have now been removed or are under investigation. Only two figures remain: Xi Jinping, who serves as chairman, and Zhang Shengmin, the military’s chief of discipline and anti-corruption enforcement.
What is going on? Why have so many generals been removed from power and punished? The short answer is that we outsiders do not know. What we can say, however, is that there is every indication that the anti-corruption drive is genuine, holding Chinese leaders, civilian and military alike, to stringent standards of competence and moral integrity.
Western Speculations
This is not the line most Western speculations pursue. Instead, the predominant explanans is a concealed struggle for power. Maybe Xi thwarted a coup or broke through stubborn factional resistance. Did he get paranoid? Or was Zhang’s purge a show of strength? Or did Zhang refuse an order to mobilize for an invasion of Taiwan? Perhaps Zhang was the bearer of bad news—that the PRC is nowhere near ready for such a move—and paid the price. You can speculate all you want.
One problem confronting all such speculations is that Xi seems to have been a major driver behind Zhang’s career. Their fathers, Zhang Zongxun and Xi Zhongxun, were comrades-in-arms during the Communist Revolution, both hailing from Shaanxi Province and serving together in the First Field Army during the civil war. This shared revolutionary pedigree placed their sons in overlapping elite networks as second-generation Reds. Zhang rose in the CMC in the wake of Xi’s rise to power.
Of course, with sufficient creativity, you can integrate this complicating factor into your speculative narrative. Western speculation tends to make a great deal out of very little; so much so that the British newspaper The Economist has joked about the return of Pekingology, the venerable Cold War–era craft of divining Chinese elite politics from communiqués, photographs, and telling omissions. Go wild: the wilder the hypothesis, the more Western audiences will like it.
Yet all the speculating operates almost exclusively within a register of cold-blooded power politics. In doing so, it risks missing what is probably the most important dimension of the ongoing purges under Xi Jinping: their moral—or spiritual, even quasi-religious—earnestness.
Logic
This logic behind the purges becomes intelligible when placed within the broader arc of Xi’s rule. At the beginning of his tenure in 2012, Xi launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that ensnared figures once thought immune. Even former Politburo Standing Committee members were not exempt. Xi pledged to crack down on “tigers and flies,” signaling that no official was too senior or too insignificant to escape discipline.
In the 2010s, outside commentators severely underestimated Xi’s campaign, believing it would be temporary and mainly target political opponents. Yet Xi has demonstrated a willingness to act against allies and longtime associates if they compromised the system’s moral integrity. Even relatively minor infractions can trigger draconian consequences. And the campaign is ongoing.
To understand why Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is so extensive, durable, and uncompromising, it is necessary to reflect on how Xi likely understands his leadership role through the lens of Chinese political thought. The purges, if that is even the right word, have everything to do with a particular moral conception of politics and societal order. Xi considers it his task to enforce a moral puritanism upon leaders of the Party and the state, who are expected to serve as the highest moral exemplars but too often fall short.
Less Differentiated
This, in turn, points to a dimension that Western observers often miss: the moral, spiritual, even semi-religious character of the Communist Party’s authority. In the Chinese tradition, political and religious authority have historically been far less sharply differentiated than in the modern West.
Western intuitions about Xi are therefore overly secular, shaped by centuries, indeed millennia, of conceptual and institutional differentiation between political and religious authority. From the medieval doctrine of the Two Swords and the uneasy interaction between emperor and pope in the Holy Roman Empire, to the early modern crystallization of the separation of church and state, Western political thought has been trained to see political leadership as largely non-sacral.
That hyper-differentiated Western scheme fits China poorly, because Xi is both Caesar and pope, while the Party-state under the CPC’s direction functions simultaneously as church and state. The CPC is the great teacher, charged with uplifting the people in a comprehensive sense, materially, morally, and spiritually.
This comprehensive, relatively undifferentiated understanding of leadership echoes a long imperial tradition that fused what Westerners conceive of as the separate realms of religion and politics. Chinese emperors up until the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) ruled as sons of heaven, maintaining cosmic and moral order through ritual sacrifices to heaven, earth, and ancestors; political failure, moral decay, and natural calamity were understood as signs of a loss of heavenly mandate rather than merely administrative shortcomings.
Yes, the Communist Party of China is very modern, drawing heavily on Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic egalitarianism, that is, on imported Western categories of thought. Still, one of the many legacies of imperial China is the socio-structural situation in which the political center must fulfill tasks that Westerners, with their more cleanly differentiated template, would consider “religious,” an insight already incorporated into the mid-twentieth-century comparative theorizations by sociologists Talcott Parsons and Shmuel Eisenstadt.1
I mean to say that sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and sinologists have long known about this socio-structural legacy. The problem is that journalism and social media commentary tend not to carry over much of this theoretical knowledge, and therefore almost always process new events in a “naïve,” Western-centric manner.
Moral World Center
Zhongnanhai, the Party’s headquarters—fittingly located within a former imperial garden complex adjacent to the Forbidden City—is far more than the apex of political power as conceived in a Western, secular, and institutionally differentiated sense. It functions instead as China’s moral center, from which order radiates outward, through the Party, across the state, and into society at large, and beyond.
Corruption and incompetence at the very top are intolerable. Even a minor moral stain at the apex threatens China’s entire order.
That, in turn, would have international repercussions too. Foreigners beyond China’s borders would be adversely affected if the Chinese center were not properly ordered, because China has a distinctive mission on the world stage in the twenty-first century.
Westerners may scoff at the notion of such a Chinese mission, yet, through its industrial capacity and technological innovation, China already makes an unprecedented material contribution to the world. Beyond this lies China’s urgent “spiritual” responsibility to channel the emerging geopolitical multipolarity (or bipolarity) toward a peaceful world of mutually respectful diversity.
To put it in Chinese terms, China makes the leading contribution to the emergence of a “new era” (新时代), in which different nations and civilizations are expected to harmonize, forming what official discourse calls a “community with a shared future for humanity” (人类命运共同体), a vision that some philosophers describe as a renewed tianxia world (天下世界). Political order rests on the moral rectitude of those who rule, especially in China, the country that is seen as bearing the Weltgeist (世界精神), to borrow the Hegelian formulation of philosopher Xu Jilin in his essay “New Tianxia-ism” (新天下主义, 2015).
I cannot lay out here the entire complex field of Chinese utopianisms and teleological imaginaries, Party-doctrinal concepts, and politico-moral idealisms—and doing so would in any case far exceed my competence. What should be clear, however, is that a very different moral metaphysics operates within the CPC, one that is largely invisible to Western audiences.
A simple heuristic can help avoid many misunderstandings: when confronted with the CPC’s lofty or stringent rhetoric and decisions, Western observers should think not “politics” alone, but “politics plus religion.”
Topics: China Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues
Eric Hendriks, a Dutch sociologist and graduate of the University of Chicago and Peking University, is Director of the China Initiative of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.
Talcott Parsons, The Social System (London: Routledge, 2005 [1951]), pp. 123–24; Shmuel Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York: Routledge, 2017 [1963]), pp. 191–92.