Don’t Mistake a Purge for a Peace Offering

by Prof Sriparna Pathak and Dr Nishit Kumar

China watching is especially vulnerable to coincidences that look like signals. General Zhao Zongqi’s removal is a case in point. General Zhao Zongqi headed the Western Theatre Command during the 2020 crisis and was also the commander who oversaw Doklam in 2017. Chinese state media has confirmed that Zhao Zongqi was removed from the posts of Standing Committee member of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and Deputy Director of the Committee on Ethnic and Religious Affairs, and that his membership in the National Committee was revoked. But Zhao is the smallest name in a purge that has now consumed two defence ministers and the PLA’s most senior uniformed officer, and reading his ouster primarily through Galwan says more about India’s appetite for a thaw than it does about what China is actually signalling.

Zhao’s removal came barely a fortnight before New Delhi hosts the BRICS Summit, with Xi Jinping widely expected to attend. Indian coverage quickly foregrounded Zhao’s India connection. A report in a prominent news magazine described him as the general who ordered the Galwan operation to “teach India a lesson”; an account in a leading news daily called him the “Galwan, Doklam general axed by Xi”, and a video story on a TV channel similarly led with Xi’s purge hitting a general “linked to Galwan.” Other reports went a step further by juxtaposing his removal with Xi’s expected visit to India for the BRICS Summit. None of this is factually irrelevant, but placing these facts together creates a tempting inference that the fall of the former India-facing commander somehow belongs to the emerging India-China thaw. There is, so far, no evidence from China that it does.

The question nobody is asking: why now?

If Zhao’s removal were really about Galwan, PRC has had six years to act on it. He handed over the Western Theatre Command in December 2020, reached retirement age normally, and subsequently transitioned into a senior CPPCC role, with no public indication that his handling of the 2020 crisis had damaged his political standing. If this were retribution for a border clash gone wrong, or a gesture calibrated for India, why does it arrive in the same week that two more senior men, General Zhang Youxia (PLA’s top uniformed officer and CMC vice-chairman) and General Liu Zhenli (chief of the Joint Staff Department) were formally stripped of their state posts after months under investigation? That timing tells a different story than the one being sold to Indian readers.

A purge, not an incident

It is useful to see Zhao’s removal against the actual arc of Xi’s military purge, which has been running continuously since 2023 and has by now touched nearly every rank of the PLA’s senior command:

Year	Notable Purges
2023	Commander Li Yuchao and other Rocket Force leaders are dismissed over missile-program graft; Defence Minister Wei Fenghe, himself a Rocket Force veteran, is expelled from the Party that October.
2024	Wei’s successor, Li Shangfu, disappears from public view within months of taking office and is formally expelled from the Party by June. The CMC’s own Political Work Department comes under suspicion, and its director, Admiral Miao Hua, is suspended.
2025	General He Weidong, a sitting CMC vice-chairman, vanishes from public appearances after March and is formally expelled in October. He is expelled alongside eight other generals, including Miao Hua and the Eastern Theatre Commander Lin Xiangyang, in what analysts describe as the dismantling of a single patronage network built around Miao and He. Zhang Shengmin is elevated to vice-chairman to fill the gap.
2026	Zhao Zongqi’s removal follows one day later, on 26 August. Zhang Youxia (the senior CMC vice-chairman and the PLA’s highest-ranking uniformed officer) and Liu Zhenli (chief of the Joint Staff Department) are placed under investigation in January and formally stripped of their state posts on 28 August.

As per CSIS’s report, around 101 senior PLA officers have been dismissed, disappeared, or investigated since 2022 before Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli are even added to the list. Five of the CMC’s seven seats have now turned over. What is left standing beside Xi Jinping on the Commission is, in effect, one general: Zhang Shengmin, himself a career anti-corruption officer promoted specifically to keep the body functioning.

Reading against this timeline, Zhao’s removal looks less like a standalone India gesture and more like another episode of purge that already consumed two defence ministers, a CMC vice-chairman, the head of the political-loyalty apparatus, and now the PLA’s most senior uniformed officer. A commander who last held operational relevance in 2020 is a comparatively minor figure to catch in that net.

PRC has spent five years celebrating Galwan, not concealing it

PRC treatment of the PLA personnel involved in Galwan points in the opposite direction. If the clash were an embarrassment China wanted buried, the soldiers involved would have been quietly sidelined. Instead, China incorporated them into an official narrative of sacrifice and border heroism.

Soldiers

Promotions/Accolades

Qi Fabao

(the regimental commander injured leading the charge against Indian troops)

He was made a “Hero Regimental Commander for Defending the Border” by the Central Military Commission,

Given the July 1 Medal (the Communist Party’s highest honour) in 2021 and inducted into the CPPCC in 2023,

Paraded as an Olympic torchbearer in 2022 (triggering an Indian diplomatic boycott of the opening ceremony),

In March 2025, he was still being feted by the CPPCC as an “outstanding member,” with Global Times and People’s Daily running the story.

Chen Hongjun, Chen Xiangrong, Xiao Siyuan and Wang Zhuoran (the four soldiers who died in the clash)

Chen Hongjun received posthumous honours including the July 1 Medal

All had their belongings placed on exhibition at the Chinese Military Museum

All of this is not the kind of thing a country does to disassociate itself from Galwan. This is its antithesis, the construction of a continuous narrative of heroism centred on the conflict that Zhao has since been retrospectively held responsible for. If Zhao’s removal were intended to signal retrospective regret over Galwan, that interpretation sits uneasily with Beijing’s continuing public commemoration of the PLA personnel celebrated for their role in the clash.

A pattern worth remembering

There is a broader pattern worth remembering. In India-China relations, improvement at the diplomatic level has not necessarily meant that competition or friction along the boundary has disappeared. The 2017 crisis was followed by the Wuhan informal summit in 2018 and Mamallapuram in 2019, both intended to stabilise relations at the leadership level. Yet the boundary remained unsettled, culminating in the crisis in eastern Ladakh in 2020. The point is not that diplomatic engagement was meaningless, or that one episode inevitably produced the next. It is that political stabilisation at the top and military competition on the ground have repeatedly coexisted.

On 25 August, the 25th meeting of Special Representatives between the Chinese FM Wang Yi and Indian NSA Ajit Doval was held in Beijing, and both sides characterised it as being “comprehensive, in-depth, friendly and candid.” But there have been media reports of yet another border dispute in Taksing village in Arunachal Pradesh.

What the summit will and won’t tell us

If Xi does travel to New Delhi on 12-13 September, the optics of the visit alone will inevitably be read as another marker of the thaw, but such assessments should be treated with greater caution. A large delegation and a leaders’ handshake at a multilateral summit are not, by themselves, evidence of a resolved boundary dispute; they are evidence that both governments have decided a public breakdown serves neither of them right now. Those are different things, and some of the Indian commentary keeps collapsing them into one. Zhao’s removal may eventually tell us something important about Xi Jinping’s control of the PLA. For now, it tells us remarkably little to nothing at all about China’s intentions toward India.

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Dr Sriparna Pathak is a Professor of China Studies and serves as a Senior Fellow at the Jindal India Institute at O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), Haryana, India. The views expressed here are personal.

Dr Nishit Kumar is an Assistant Professor at the Subhas Chandra Bose Chair of International Relations, Chanakya University. He has a PhD in Chinese language, literature and culture from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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