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An October 2025 Beyond the Horizon article mentions that Xi's sweeping purge of nine senior PLA generals, including Central Military Commission (CMC) and PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) Commander Wang Houbin, was framed as an anti-corruption campaign but primarily served to consolidate his personal control over the military.

This tightening grip may be part of a broader political project. G Venkat Raman mentions in a May 2025 Observer Research Foundation (ORF) report that Xi's accelerating consolidation of power stems from his drive to secure“regime security” and place“politics in command” at the center of all policymaking.

Raman notes that Xi views centralized authority as essential to realizing the“China Dream,” managing economic stagnation, and countering what China perceives as rising external threats.

He notes that Xi's dominance enables long-term strategies to achieve technological self-reliance and accelerate military modernization - a core element of Xi's ideological and strategic drive to strengthen regime security and position China for great-power competition.

Yet purging these networks did not remove the incentives that sustain corruption; the Beyond the Horizon article notes that by dismantling entrenched patronage networks accused of bribery and procurement scandals, Xi reinforced loyalty as the paramount criterion for advancement.

However, it points out that while centralization curbs rival factions, it paradoxically entrenches corruption, as officers rely on political alignment rather than merit to survive. It states that while Xi's purges strengthen the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) dominance, they risk undermining transparency, morale, and competence, leaving the PLA disciplined by fear rather than institutional accountability.

Delving deeper into how corruption may be corroding China's military capabilities, Xuan Dong mentions in a June 2025 report for the Institute for Security & Development Policy (ISDP) that corruption in China's military is rooted in decades of commercialized military services and an expanded procurement system that enabled bribery, kickbacks and substandard equipment.

Dong points out that despite Xi's decade-long anti-graft campaign, systemic abuses persist, including fraud in weapons development and bribery-for-promotions schemes. He adds that purges of top equipment officials have disrupted planning, while fear-based politics erode professionalism and cohesion. He adds that corruption is fundamentally degrading the PLA's credibility, readiness, and long-term modernization.

If left unaddressed, such distortions risk producing the same hollowing effects observed in other authoritarian militaries.

One need only look at the early months of the Russia-Ukraine War to see the impacts of corruption on military capability. In a May 2022 article for the peer-reviewed Survival journal, Robert Dalsjo and other writers point out that systemic corruption hollowed out Russia's military long before its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, creating inflated troop rosters, poor training, neglected equipment, and false readiness reports that collapsed under combat pressure.

Dalsjo and others say graft, embezzlement and falsified paperwork-from padded personnel numbers to maintenance shortfalls-produced a“Potemkin” image of modernized forces that senior commanders and the Russian leadership believed.

They state that the war exposed systemic rot – undermanned units, broken logistics, unusable kit, poor morale and incompetent coordination. They note that corruption-driven deception directly degraded Russia's combat power and contributed to its early battlefield failures.

Given Russia's precedent, China might find itself in a similar situation should it decide to use force to reunify Taiwan. The implications for China's own strategic ambitions-especially Taiwan-are significant.

The US Department of Defense's (DoD's) 2024 China Military Power Report mentions that Xi's sweeping purges have disrupted key modernization programs, including missile programs that the document identifies as central to China's capability for a Taiwan contingency.