The removal of PLA senior generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli in January 2026 represented the peak, if not the end, of a massive purge of the military leadership that began in mid-2023. The absence of credible information from Beijing has allowed many theories about the causes of these dismissals to circulate, which often center on factional politics or power consolidation. An examination biographical records, however, yields more support for the view that most purges are in

China’s leadership, state media, and foreign policy analysts consider the U.S. a declining but dangerous power. That assessment has remained durable since Michael Swaine analyzed views in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in his 2021 essay for China Leadership Monitor , though the frequency of that assessment has fluctuated. The resilience of such views in the PRC press reflects genuine assessments of U.S. internal contradictions, the Chinese Communist Party’s Leninist pre

The proposal for the 15 th  Five-Year Plan (FYP), approved by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party at its 4 th  plenum in late October 2025, is substantively similar to the proposal for the 14 th FYP. The most important message conveyed in this document is that the party will continue to pursue the security-centered development strategy unveiled in October 2020. Based on the more pessimistic assessments of China’s external environment, the proposal for the ne

The 21st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which will convene in late 2027, will continue the Xi Jinping leadership as he enters his fourth term as supreme leader.   When Xi secured his third term as party leader at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, he effectively abolished the term limits that had been in place since the 1990s, so it is unrealistic to expect that he will not seek a fourth term at the forthcoming Party Congress. Regardless of widespread rumors

Minxin Pei, The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism. Princeton University Press, December 2, 2025, 344 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0691223346 Insights Interview What distinguishes your book from other works on post-Mao China? In the field of political science, most scholarly books on post-Mao China focus on specific or narrow topics. They help us understand certain developments or issues, but they do not provide a broad narrative of political changes during the last