With the "fall" of a high-ranking Chinese general, the United States has lost an important contact in Beijing's highest military body and now faces a People's Liberation Army that is increasingly lacking stable and experienced commanders, former US officials and analysts said, UNN reports with reference to Reuters.
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China's Ministry of Defense announced on Saturday that Zhang Youxia, the second most powerful person in the government under Chinese President Xi Jinping as vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), is under investigation. This is the latest and most high-profile of the purges in the country's top military leadership amid Xi Jinping's fight against corruption in the armed forces.
For Washington, Zhang's unexpected removal deprives a respected and well-known figure in China's armed forces at a time when successive US administrations have worked to establish high-level contacts to avoid conflicts between the world's two most powerful armies, the publication writes.
Several former senior officials told Reuters that Zhang's dismissal came as a shock.
Xi Jinping allowed Zhang to communicate with the US during the Biden administration after a 17-month period during which China virtually completely cut off military-to-military communication following then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.
Such high-level ties – in China's political system, Zhang holds a position above the defense minister – were seen as an important relationship and a channel that remained viable for further negotiations.
Zhang, one of the few leading officers with combat experience from China's invasion of Vietnam in the late 1970s, was seen in the US as a competent advisor to Xi Jinping, who heads the Central Military Commission, which now has only one general, career political commissar Zhang Shengmin.
"Who will Xi Jinping call in a crisis situation if there is only one person in his commission?" said Drew Thompson, a senior research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, who spoke with Zhang as a former US Department of Defense official.
Thompson said he believed Zhang was the only active PLA officer who could give Xi Jinping objective advice on China's military capabilities and shortcomings, as well as the human cost of conflict.
"There is a risk that Xi Jinping will receive bad advice from sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear," he said. "This creates a risk of miscalculation."
A senior US administration official said the White House could not comment on "reports of palace intrigue" in China, adding that the Trump administration was "building an army capable of deterring aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain."
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
"The more resolutely the people's armed forces fight corruption, the stronger, more cohesive, and more combat-ready they become," Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in response to a Reuters question about Zhang.