BEIJING — On the day the United States marked its 250th birthday, Xi Jinping presided over a ceremony in Beijing that carried its own reckoning. China’s supreme military commander presented promotion orders to two officers, elevating them to full general, a rank that until recently could be bestowed without marking anything exceptional. Zhang Shengmin, the CMC’s remaining vice chairman, presided over the proceedings and read the promotion orders signed by Xi, Xinhua reported. In the summer of 2026, filling a general’s vacancy in the People’s Liberation Army requires accounting for who vacated it.
The two promoted were Zhang Shuguang and Wang Gang. Zhang becomes the new head of the Central Military Commission’s Discipline Inspection Commission, the body responsible for investigating corruption within the PLA. Wang Gang takes command of the PLA Air Force. Both appointments fill roles left vacant by a purge that has gutted China’s senior military leadership to a degree without modern parallel, the South China Morning Post reported.
The scale of what preceded Thursday’s ceremony is the context that makes it significant. The CMC began its current five-year term in 2022 with seven members. By July 2026, only Xi and Zhang Shengmin are still serving in their original capacity. Former vice chairmen Zhang Youxia and He Weidong are under investigation. Former defense ministers Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe received suspended death sentences. Former CMC members Liu Zhenli and Miao Hua face ongoing investigations. The body that governs the world’s largest military has been stripped to two functioning members at its apex, with Xi himself the only figure to have navigated the entire period without disruption.
Zhang Shuguang takes over from Zhang Shengmin as anti-corruption chief, placing the investigative machinery of the CMC under a new general at the moment when that machinery is still processing the cases it generated. He now formally leads the body that built the files on his predecessors’ colleagues. Wang Gang, promoted to the same rank, inherits command of an air force that has maintained a sustained pressure campaign over the Taiwan Strait, with incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone running at an elevated pace through 2025 and into 2026. The identity of the officer commanding that campaign matters for how it is calibrated in the period ahead.
The purge that created these vacancies accelerated sharply after 2022 and proceeded without the kind of public accounting that would allow observers outside China’s inner circle to assess what drove each case. Li Shangfu, elevated to defense minister by Xi personally in 2023, was gone within months and eventually sentenced. Wei Fenghe, his predecessor, received the same. The removal of two defense ministers and two CMC vice chairmen within a single five-year term has no recent precedent in PLA history. Whether the purge was driven by genuine financial corruption, factional maneuvering, or their intersection has never been stated publicly in verifiable form.
The appointments confirm that Xi’s method continues: loyalists elevated through the accountability structures he controls, replacing those who fell to the same structures. Zhang Shuguang’s promotion through the inspection pathway is a signal about how the CMC’s next chapter is intended to function. The ceremony comes as military modernization across the Asia-Pacific has accelerated simultaneously. North Korea commissioned its first destroyer last month in a ceremony Kim Jong Un described as fulfilling a pledge to build a nuclear-capable fleet. India’s defence exports have risen 57-fold in twelve years, reflecting a strategic emphasis on self-sufficiency that has reshaped procurement decisions across the region. Thursday’s Beijing ceremony places the PLA’s senior reconstitution inside the same regional dynamic.
Five of the seven CMC positions from the 2022 cohort remain unfilled or are occupied by officials under investigation. Whether the July 3 promotions represent the beginning of a broader reorganization, or whether Xi intends to continue operating with a structurally diminished formal commission, will only become apparent as further appointments do or do not follow. There is no publicly available timeline for when the CMC might return to its full complement.
What no official statement has addressed is the operational question beneath the institutional one. The generals who were removed took institutional knowledge with them, the informal networks and undocumented command relationships that do not appear in any set of promotion orders. Purges consolidate loyalty to whoever conducted them. They do not automatically transfer what the purged people knew. The PLA’s capacity to execute complex operations, particularly in any contingency involving the Taiwan Strait where Wang Gang’s air force would play a central role, depends on both loyalty and competence simultaneously. Xi now has generals whose ranks he personally presented. Whether their competence matches what was removed is the question his adversaries invest significantly in answering, and his state media cannot address.
