The PLA’s senior cadre training programme marks a shift from anti-corruption purges to cadre reconstitution, with political loyalty central to leadership selection amid continued institutional and operational challenges
On 8 April 2026, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) organised its first All Military Senior Cadre Training Course [第一期全军高级干部培训班] at the PLA National Defense University (NDU) in Beijing. The over 200 officers attending the course at the NDU were mainly major generals and above, with a smaller number of lieutenant general–equivalent officers. The programme was also extended by video conference to relevant corps-level (军级) and above units across the PLA, broadening its reach across the senior command structure.
President Xi Jinping personally opened the course and delivered the keynote speech, stressing that the PLA must mark its 2027 centenary with a renewed political outlook by deepening political rectification [深化政治整训], preserving the ‘purity and glory’ of the armed forces and forging senior cadres with a revolutionary spirit. This unprecedented programme for senior military officers is clearly intended to reinforce political loyalty and cultivate a cleaner cohort for elevation to higher-echelon posts ahead of the next Party Congress.
In recent years, the PLA has undergone a massive anti-corruption and power-consolidation drive led by China’s top leadership. This campaign has led to the purge of over 100 senior military officials. The dearth of senior officials in the PLA has become acute. Even crucial theatre commands have seen disruption; for instance, the Western Theatre Command’s nine former and serving generals have been removed. Consequently, the command is expected to be run by deputy commander-level officers, while the theatre commander and the political commissar remain indisposed.
In recent years, the PLA has undergone a massive anti-corruption and power-consolidation drive led by China’s top leadership. This campaign has led to the purge of over 100 senior military officials.
The campaign, therefore, has transformed from an anti-corruption drive into a political filtration mechanism, removing perceived ‘rotten eggs’ and their influence from military leadership while seeking elite discipline, enforcement of loyalty, and pre-congress identification of unblemished officers for future roles.
Selection, however, will not be easy, as large-scale removals are bound to create panic within patronage networks throughout the officer corps. The loss of institutional memory, disrupted lines of succession, and weakened command architecture are certainties, rendering the officer corps risk-averse, bureaucratic, and procedure-driven as fear percolates down the ranks, making officers increasingly cautious and suspicious.
The PLA began transforming its organisational structure toward joint warfare in 2004, after closely observing the United States (US) military performance in the Iraq War. These “below-the-neck” reforms reached a critical threshold in 2015, seeking major high-command restructuring to enhance transformation and combat capability. Xi subsequently launched these higher-echelon reforms in 2015, expecting the PLA to stabilise within a decade under new command relations.
However, his current dissatisfaction reflects that this process has fallen short. Instead, the PLA has become a cesspool of institutional rot. Expanding defence budgets, excessive secrecy, and relative insularity have bred pervasive corruption, rent-seeking, and a ‘pay-for-promotion’ culture. Consequently, witnessing the failure to curb this negative mindset or develop substantial joint warfare capabilities, Xi has moved to discard the current top leadership, replacing them with a younger, relatively unblemished cohort.
To strengthen jointness and operational effectiveness, Xi intends to drive a fluid, integrated personnel system centred on theatre rotations, Central Military Commission (CMC)-command transfers, and cross-service postings. Specifically, an elite training model through the NDU and Party schools can break service silos, weaken branch loyalties, and build a unified officer corps. However, Xi has remained unsuccessful in this endeavour so far.
The loss of institutional memory, disrupted lines of succession, and weakened command architecture are certainties, rendering the officer corps risk-averse, bureaucratic, and procedure-driven as fear percolates down the ranks, making officers increasingly cautious and suspicious.
Three corruption pathways in the PLA remain especially resilient. First, procurement oversight is still weak, leaving equipment acquisition, logistics, construction, missile and aerospace chains, and promotion-linked kickbacks as the most vulnerable sectors; in the absence of structural reform, new elites may simply inherit old incentive systems. Therefore, collusion between PLA officials and businessmen has often been targeted in anti-corruption drives. Second, promotion screening is increasingly tied to discipline inspections and scrutiny of patronage networks, yet the growing weight of political education risks allowing loyalty to eclipse operational competence. This is precarious because the political vetting stage has historically been most susceptible to pay-for-promotion, meaning stronger oversight organs could unintentionally reproduce the very corruption they are meant to eliminate.
Finally, Xi has repeatedly urged senior officers to ‘speak the truth’, revealing a deeper concern over information integrity within the command system. He appears concerned that prolonged purges and promotion systems privileging personal loyalty over competence may breed risk aversion, sycophancy, and false reporting. Especially in areas such as missile reliability, logistics readiness, and Taiwan scenarios, this lack of information integrity and inflated readiness claims could produce dangerously misleading strategic judgments.
The NDU training programme for senior PLA officers in April 2026, therefore, is not a routine professional military education event, a point underscored by its extensive and highly visible coverage in Chinese official media. It reflects three crucial trends. First, Xi is conducting two parallel power-consolidation campaigns within the PLA. The initial emphasis was on negative discipline by the removal of disloyal actors; the second focus now shifts to positive reconstruction, wherein the goal is to produce and shape future successors. This cadre-reconstitution phase, in which the PLA is actively producing a new cohort through political indoctrination and revolution-style moulding, bears the unmistakable hallmarks of this ongoing rectification campaign.
Second, the course’s participants come from the precise promotion pool from which future theatre commanders, service chiefs, CMC department heads, and military delegates to the Party Congress will be selected. The course, therefore, will not only train officers but also sort, test, and signal who remains viable for future elevation. The aim is to vet politically reliable officers, expose them to Xi’s priorities, and establish an ideological baseline shared by the entire senior officer class.
The NDU training programme for senior PLA officers in April 2026, therefore, is not a routine professional military education event, a point underscored by its extensive and highly visible coverage in Chinese official media.
Third, the course’s near-exclusive focus on political education, encompassing loyalty to the Party and ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,’ highlights its central feature: mastering the ‘Two Establishments, Four Consciousnesses, Four Confidences, and Two Upholds.’ Xi’s personal inauguration of the course, broadcast via video conference throughout the PLA, transforms the event into a direct Chairman-to-command-chain transmission exercise. Accordingly, the emphasis returns to the ‘Chairman Responsibility System’ and the defence of the core leadership.
Xi’s rectification campaign has made tangible progress in dismantling rival patronage networks, elevating personally loyal younger generals, and imposing fear-based discipline across the upper echelons. Yet factionalism is unlikely to disappear. Informal alignments rooted in academy affiliations, provincial backgrounds, unit loyalties, campaign cohorts, and service identities will continue to provide fertile ground for new exclusivities and latent blocs. The central unresolved question is whether Xi can translate political cleansing into better commanders, more truthful staff systems, cleaner procurement practices, and genuinely stronger combat effectiveness.
For regional powers, this moment offers a major strategic lesson. While the PLA has rapidly expanded its high-technology arsenal through military-civil fusion and state-driven industrial strength, its human dimension remains incomplete. As a vast institution shaped by revolutionary legacies, entrenched norms, and historical inertia, meaningful transformation will be a long-drawn process of change.
Political education is set to deepen across the ranks, with cadres and enlisted personnel alike subjected to increasingly regular study and ideological sessions.
Moreover, the remaking of senior commanders will not remain confined to the top. It will cascade steadily through lower echelons and field formations, reshaping the wider PLA officer corps. Political education is set to deepen across the ranks, with cadres and enlisted personnel alike subjected to increasingly regular study and ideological sessions.
Promotion pathways, meanwhile, are likely to slow noticeably as officer selection moves through a dense vetting system, with repeated scrutiny of personal networks, factional ties, and any past association with purged senior figures. For many officers, career progression may become as much a test of political insulation as of professional merit.
The next few years are therefore likely to be turbulent and uncertain. Such an environment may push some officers toward caution and risk aversion, while encouraging more ambitious ones to take bold initiatives to attract the top leadership’s attention. Either way, this period demands sustained and close scrutiny of PLA developments.
Atul Kumar is a Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF).
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Atul Kumar is a Fellow in Strategic Studies Programme at ORF. His research focuses on national security issues in Asia, China's expeditionary military capabilities, military ...
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