Over the past few years, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, has removed dozens of senior military officials from their roles. Last month, he put Zhang Youxia, then the top-ranking official in the People’s Liberation Army, under investigation for “grave violations of discipline and law.” Xi has long warned of widespread corruption within the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and P.L.A., and has correspondingly purged many of his onetime political and military colleagues, even when, like General Zhang, they were considered to be his allies or confidants. In doing so, he has strengthened his position within the C.C.P., where he is considered the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. But his latest move has raised questions about what exactly he is trying to achieve within the C.C.P., and whether his military shakeup is a prelude to a move against Taiwan.

I recently spoke by phone with Bill Bishop, who writes the China policy newsletter “Sinocism” and has studied China for more than two decades. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what’s behind Xi’s aggressive governance style, whether China views the Trump Administration’s alienation of NATO allies as a geopolitical opportunity, and how purges have historically worked within the C.C.P.

What does an “anti-corruption campaign” mean to you in the context of today’s China? How well does it describe what’s actually going on?

I was living in China between 2005 and 2015. I was there for the Hu Jintao era, and then the first three years of the Xi Jinping era. In the last few years of the Hu era, which ended in 2012, corruption was out of control, and you really got the sense that things could continue to spiral in ways that were pretty dangerous. So to understand Xi’s anti-corruption drive, you have to understand that there was a real corruption issue, but you also have to recognize how he used a Party body within the C.C.P. called the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. The commission is meant to combat corruption, but it’s also about ideological enforcement and political correctness, in the C.C.P.’s version of political correctness.

This anti-corruption campaign is about actual economic corruption, but it’s also, in many ways, the tool that Xi Jinping has used to reshape the ideological contours of China and increase political and ideological enforcement. Corruption is still a problem, even if it’s gotten somewhat better. But this was always a multidimensional exercise.

Can you just talk a little bit about what specifically was out of control, and dangerous for who, exactly?

There were Gilded Age levels of corruption. You knew that certain people were basically above the law. They would flaunt it publicly. It was a very in-your-face kind of wealth disparity, and that gap was growing, which certainly had the potential to cause real social discontent. And then the internet was exploding at the same time, and suddenly people all over the country were learning about some crazy corruption cases. In The New Yorker, Evan Osnos had this great piece about a sex scandal where a police chief is accused of having affairs with and financially supporting two sisters who work in his department. The police department’s clarification was that the two sisters with whom he was having affairs weren’t twins. It was the “not twins” defense. And it became this crazy story online because it was just so egregious and so out of control. The Party came in and clearly understood that if they didn’t actually tamp this down, it was going to really exacerbate a lot of social tensions and could ultimately undermine political security and bring down the Communist Party.

But we know corruption within the C.C.P. is still happening, with even members of Xi’s family implicated. Is it just less visible?

Yes, I think it would be naïve to think there’s no corruption, but I do think that it is much more hidden now, and that is important from a social-stability perspective. It’s also hidden in the sense that people aren’t aware of it, even if it’s happening, because the information environment is so much more controlled than it was even six or seven years ago. One thing I will say about Chinese corruption is that, even as egregious as it was in the last few years of the Hu era, China still got stuff done, unlike a lot of other countries where corruption is out of control. They still built high-speed rail systems, even though the guy who oversaw them, Liu Zhijun, is in jail for life because he was corrupt. So yes, there’s corruption, but it was almost like a tax on them getting stuff done, rather than something that actually prevented them from getting stuff done. The real risk was the potential impact on stability and public opinion, as well as how it corrupted politics. You had people who were buying promotions on the civilian side, as well as in the military, because being promoted was such a money-making opportunity.

Were there different phases of this anti-corruption drive, and did its contours reveal something about Xi’s political priorities?

At first, Xi focussed very heavily on the security services—the source of hard power on the civilian side. This allowed Xi to rip apart networks of people in the security services who didn’t necessarily support him, then put his own people in and build up that support. If you’re the dictator and you’re trying to insure that your personal position is secure, you need to consolidate and control the sources of hard power. And the civilian side was really the richest target and the easiest target for him, easier than going after the P.L.A. The P.L.A. has been successful at resisting lots of reforms and cleanups over the years. So he targeted the civilian side first, and then he started working through the P.L.A.

When did that start with the P.L.A.?

The real turning point that signalled that something big was going to happen was the fall of 2014. Back in 1929, Mao had convened the Gutian Conference, which was really about the C.C.P. taking control of the military and really about Mao consolidating his power. Xi effectively reënacted this in 2014, summoning all the top generals to Gutian, and it was clear from the messaging that came out of that meeting, and the steps Xi took afterward, that this was the beginning of this massive anti-corruption campaign inside the P.L.A. I think this had multiple objectives. There was real corruption. There was a massive problem in the P.L.A. where, if you wanted to get promoted to certain levels, you had to actually buy that promotion. So various people would put money up because they figured once this person got promoted, they could get a return, since it would open up all these graft opportunities. It was almost like they were angel-investing in a P.L.A. officer.

There was also the question for Xi was how to unravel these networks and put your own people in, so that you ultimately have control over the P.L.A., and it becomes the kind of fighting force you want.

Does the purging of Zhang Youxia make sense within this strategy, or does it seem like something new?

Zhang was promoted and thrived during the incredibly corrupt era of Hu’s leadership. He oversaw, for a period of time, the P.L.A.’s equipment department and its weapons-development and -acquisition programs, which, given how much the P.L.A.’s budget has increased over the past several decades, had massive graft opportunities. And, since that Gutian meeting, the C.C.P. has been rooting through the top ranks of the P.L.A. Now, the Central Military Commission has been reduced from seven members to Xi and one vice-chairman: Zhang Shengmin.

But why now, and why so quickly? That is something that I don’t have a great answer for. And I have not found anybody who has a great answer. Some people argue that, in order to make an accusation like this, you have to work up the vine, and you have to build cases, which becomes harder and harder the more senior they are. There are rumors that Zhang was building a putsch against Xi. But I think that’s bullshit, and ultimately we really don’t know. It is such a black box.

One theory behind Xi’s military purges you did not bring up was that he wants people who are in line with his foreign-policy priorities.

I talked about how he needed to clean out corruption because he wanted to build a professional fighting force. That is absolutely one of the reasons. It’s about the combination of control over the P.L.A. and insuring the P.L.A. leadership has the right political standing or political positioning, but it is also about having an actually competent P.L.A. that has good weapons, and can fight. The leadership is constantly talking about fighting and winning. Xi’s stated goals for the P.L.A. are all about actually being able to fight and win wars and becoming a world-class army.

Sure, but any leader of any country, democratic, nondemocratic, whatever else, is going to want a military that’s competent. But you may also want a military leadership explicitly aligned with your foreign-policy priorities, whatever those may be. And those strike me as different things.

I think what you’re getting at is the speculation out there that perhaps this latest round of purges was triggered by the fact that Zhang Youxia was not aligned with Xi on Taiwan, for example, and that there was some sort of discord between what Xi thought the P.L.A. should do and what the generals wanted. It’s possible, but I am skeptical of that because I think that the way the system is structured, it would be pretty shocking if the most senior generals had been really pushing back on Xi around that. It’s possible, but we just don’t know, and that’s the problem.

Do we know what happens to high-ranking figures who are purged?

On the civilian side, they’ll usually have a trial, and then it’ll be announced that they’re getting sentenced for some range of years, or for life. Rarely do senior civilian officials get executed. It has happened to some of the people in the financial system who were purged, but in general, they get sent off to a pretty comfortable prison life at a sort of Club Fed-type facility outside of Beijing. On the military side, we don’t know.

There has been a lot of concern about how President Trump has alienated NATO allies in recent months, leading to questions about how this may reshape American foreign policy in some fundamental way. Do you have any sense of whether the Chinese government thinks the Trump era could dramatically reshape international relations? And could that be to China’s advantage?

I think if you go back to what Xi has been saying for years, he’s been talking about how we are in an era where there are changes in the global landscape unseen in a century, and the Trump Administration’s recent moves just reinforce what he’s been saying about how the world is changing. So the C.C.P. absolutely does think that the world is changing.

I think it’s a mixed bag for them. On the one hand, it’s creating a lot of opportunities for their external propaganda approach, which for many years has been about weakening the U.S. position in the global order as much as they can. We are now helping them with that cause in a lot of ways, more than maybe some previous Administrations did. But, at the same time, the C.C.P. also benefitted a lot from the U.S.-led order. They are, I think, concerned about some sort of sudden collapse into real chaos. And so I think they would prefer to see a managed decline of the order, where they can more thoughtfully find ways to exploit it, which I think they’ve already been doing over the last decade or so.

How so?

Look at how much more influence China has gained at the U.N., and what they’re doing in the Global South to change the global conversation. In the majority of countries around the world, they’ve laid the groundwork for taking Taiwan, making sure they’ve all signed on to this idea that it’s an internal matter. During the Biden Administration, for example, the Chinese were getting really upset about this talk of NATO opening an office in Tokyo and bringing NATO to Asia. So, there was a long campaign by the C.C.P. arguing that NATO expansion into the region would heighten the risk of war. Now, when you look at the stresses emerging in the NATO alliance because of the Trump Administration’s approach to Ukraine, as well as their position on Greenland, it’s not like NATO’s collapsed and everyone hates America, but it creates these fissures in these long-standing relationships that then the Chinese think that they can somehow find ways to exploit. I think the Chinese would’ve been much more successful exploiting these cracks in Europe if they weren’t supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine.

I wanted to ask about China’s continued support for Russia. There’s been a lot of talk that China has replaced America as the world’s status-quo power. We have even seen several NATO leaders alienated by Trump reaching out to Xi, creating a real window for China. But a major problem with fulfilling that vision is China’s close alliance with Russia amid the war in Ukraine. What does China get from this alliance with Russia?

I think ultimately the answer is that the Chinese see Europe as weak. And I think they really believe that the Russia relationship, the Putin relationship, is important. Putin losing this war, or Putin losing power, would be seen by Xi Jinping as disastrous. They also have a border with Russia. And this is great for China because Russia is completely focussed on Ukraine, and China wants a lot of commodities from Russia. There has also been some talk about them getting undersea-warfare, submarine-related technologies, that the Russians have and the Chinese don’t. But I also think that one of the reasons there seems to be such an affinity between Xi and Putin is that they both believe that the fall of the U.S.S.R. was one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. And I do also think that Xi clearly has a very strong anti-Western and anti-American vein.

The other big impediment to a closer relationship between Europe and China is China’s mercantilist trade policies, and the fact that Germany, especially, is starting to realize that large swaths of its economy are going to be gutted by Chinese competition. But the Chinese response, as best I can tell, is telling these countries, “You’re just going to have to deal with it. We’ve risen, we’re big, we’re powerful,” as opposed to actually listening and saying, “Maybe we should modify our behavior.” It’s one of those things where, from an American perspective, you think of China’s stubbornness as a positive. If they were really able to modify the position, they could make much more progress with European countries than they have now.

I want to briefly return to Xi’s campaign against corruption or dissent, because you said it takes time to build a case against military members or C.C.P. leaders. That’s interesting because there are dictatorial systems in the world where if the leader wants something done, it’s done overnight.

On the one hand, Xi can be the paramount leader. He can be the guy who is in charge, the boss. But it’s a massive country, with a massive bureaucracy, both civilian and military, and you can see from the way they’re trying to fix things in the economy that just because Xi says something doesn’t mean it happens right away. Things also get more distorted the further down the bureaucracy they go.

And this is not a Chinese Communist Party problem. There have been several millennia’s worth of examples of this problem in the old Chinese imperial system. And so I think, in some ways, it gets oversimplified into this sort of binary: Xi’s the dictator, so therefore he can do whatever he wants, versus Xi is in charge of this massive set of bureaucracies. Neither is exactly true. Even though Xi can get much of what he wants done, it is not as simple as issuing an order and then having everyone immediately obey.

How much harder is it to get information about Xi than it was about his predecessors?

It’s much harder now, but it’s not just harder for foreigners; it’s also harder for people in China. The information flows have been massively constricted by design, both internally and externally. He is a leader at a unique time in Chinese history where you could argue it’s, at least in the modern era, the richest and most powerful it’s ever been. And so it has capacities and capabilities and resources that his predecessors could only dream about.

It doesn't really get talked about much in the media, or the Western media, but—leaving aside China’s push for economic decoupling and their requests for self-reliance in a whole bunch of areas, which are completely legitimate, especially given the way the U.S. has restricted China’s access to certain key technologies—China is also undergoing a significant push to decouple intellectually, led by Xi. They are very much talking about this idea of Chinese modernization, and it's very explicitly presented as modernization that is not Western modernization. Western modernization led to all sorts of colonial, imperialist predation. They're trying to build a whole Chinese knowledge system, whether it’s economics, philosophy, or social sciences, to effectively decouple from the Western systems that have dominated intellectual thought for the last decades or centuries. And so there’s something deeper there than simply wanting to have a big and powerful country with a really strong military and be really rich. ♦