High-level PLA general purged for opposing Xi, official military newspaper of China says

NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

China’s official military newspaper disclosed new details on the ouster of the most senior general in the People’s Liberation Army, attributing his exit to differences with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The PLA Daily, the official outlet, said in a front page commentary that Gen. Zhang Youxia disagreed with the Chinese leader on the pace of efforts to build up China’s armed forces by 2027, the 100-year anniversary of the PLA and, significantly, the deadline Mr. Xi has set for the military to be ready to use force to take Taiwan.

The commentary is one of only two official PLA public remarks since the Jan. 31 ousters of Gen. Zhang and a second senior officer, Gen. Liu Zhenli.

The generals were punished as “corrupt elements” in the Chinese Communist Party’s military wing, the outlet said.

The report said the purge “eliminates obstacles and stumbling blocks hindering the development of our cause, removes the impurities affecting combat effectiveness, and ignites the fighting spirit for overcoming challenges, injecting powerful momentum into the development of a strong military.”

Most of the commentary repeated past propaganda slogans warning all military officers and troops to “unify their thoughts and actions” with Mr. Xi, the CCP Central Committee and the now two-member Central Military Commission. Gen. Zhang was vice chairman of the commission.

“Our army is a people’s army under the absolute leadership of the Party, and the iron wall of the Party and the country,” the commentary said.

As the military approaches the 2027 centenary goal, it is beset with “many arduous and challenging risks and challenges,” the report stated. As a result, the PLA needs to strengthen its sense of mission, bolster political training and “improve our ability to win,” the report added.

China expert K. Tristan Tang said the article published Monday emphasized political control over the military and points to a lack of control as the cause of the recent purges.

The report suggests that Gen. Zhang failed to pursue the general policy slogan of seeking to “accelerate force transformation and construction, and advance high quality national defense and military modernization.”

“This contrast, coupled with the stronger accusation that Zhang damaged both the political ecology of the PLA and ‘political awareness’ … suggests that Zhang did violate the requirements of political control over the military and caused problems related to the full process of planning formulation and implementation,” Mr. Tang said in a report published by the think tank Jamestown.

Mr. Tang, with Secure Taiwan Associate Corp. and the Center for China Studies at National Taiwan University, said an that an analysis of PLA Daily coverage suggests Gen. Zhan disagreed with Mr. Xi over force-building plans, specifically the 2027 goal of building a strong military and that the differences were detrimental to PLA combat force development.

“This situation presents a military problem in form, but it constitutes a serious political problem in substance,” he said, noting that the firing may have been the result of Mr. Xi believing that his authority was undermined by the officer.

“Even if newly appointed senior commanders declare the PLA’s centenary goals met in 2027, its joint operational capability is unlikely to have been substantively achieved — much as Zhang Youxia, a competent and experienced commander, appears to have recognized,” Mr. Tang said.

Former CIA analyst Christopher K. Johnson said it would be a mistake for U.S. policymakers to regard the latest PLA leadership purge as reducing the threat of an attack on Taiwan.

“To be sure, the chaos in the high command will have real-time operational impacts,” Mr. Johnson, now president of China Strategies Group, said in an article in Foreign Affairs. “But that limits Xi’s options less than some outside observers may think: the PLA now has several military options that should be considered off the shelf in a crisis.”

Commerce chief says China ‘weaponizing’ rare earths

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said this week that China is “weaponizing” its control over rare earth minerals and other goods and the Trump administration is taking steps to counter the problem.

Mr. Lutnick said in a speech Tuesday that the administration will use its economic power — pricing, tariffs and industrial policy actions — to bolster the security of critical minerals supply chains and keep them in U.S. and allied control.

The Commerce secretary told a gathering of business leaders hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the administration also wants to secure access to advanced microchips that are threatened by China in Taiwan, a world leader in advanced chip fabrication.

“Critical minerals is just the name that everybody understands that’s been weaponized,” he said. “We’ve made it clear to everybody that we’re going to be there across critical minerals and across all the other choke points that we are studying and we are seeking to address.”

China announced in October an expansion of restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals and permanent magnets needed for key civilian and military industrial products.

The action prompted President Trump to scale back high U.S. tariffs imposed on China by the administration and tone down the tough rhetoric directed at Beijing.

“We need to bring semiconductors to America,” Mr. Lutnick said. “You can’t have all semiconductor manufacturing 80 miles from China. That’s just illogical, right?”

Mr. Lutnick said in the next three years his goal is to achieve a 40% market share in leading-edge semiconductor production.

“That means we’re going to see $1.2 trillion of semiconductor manufacturing,” he said. “This is not datacenters, right? This is wafers that then create trillions of dollars of GDP while those datacenters buy those chips that are now made in America.”

America is currently producing 2 million high-end Nvidia Blackwell chips used in artificial intelligence and in the past produced zero, he said.

Key chemical ingredients for the chips are needed “because if we make it, like you all know with critical materials, if you want to make semiconductors but you don’t have gallium or yttrium, then you need to solve for the full bill of materials so that you’re not subject to the whims of others,” Mr. Lutnick said.

The United States is now moving to prevent “choke points” from being used by adversaries to limit U.S. economic power, he said.

“We did a critical mineral stockpile, not for the military, we already have that, but for business, so that if it gets weaponized, the government can be there to support our industry,” he said.

Nuclear lab producing required warhead pits

The director of the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory said the lab has exceeded all goals in producing plutonium pits for nuclear weapons as required by law.

Los Alamos Director Thom Mason said the Energy National Nuclear Security Agency produced a “diamond-stamped” or war-reserve quality, first production unit of a W87-1 plutonium pit in October 2024.

The diamond-stamped pit has since become a model for W87-1 pits produced since.

“I can’t tell you the exact number [of pits], because that’s classified,” Mr. Mason told the newsletter Exchange Monitor, on the sidelines of a nuclear deterrence conference. “if we told you how many pits we make every year, and you kept track, you would know how many W87-1s there are, and that’s a classified thing.”

Mr. Mason said the past year has been exceptional in warhead pit production. “We met or exceeded all our production objectives, and at the same time, we significantly ramped up the pace of infrastructure work to remove old equipment and install new state of the art equipment so that we can increase the production up to full rate production over the next couple of years,” he said.

The fiscal 2019 Defense Authorization Act requires production of 30 plutonium pits by 2026 at Los Alamos, the location where the first plutonium pits were made in 1945.

Bob Webster, deputy director for weapons at Los Alamos, also said during the conference that the lab is now ahead of schedule for the goal of producing 30 plutonium pits per year by 2028 at Los Alamos.

Congress required in law that the National Nuclear Security Administration produce no less than 80 warhead reserve pits. Fifty additional pits will be made at a new Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, near Augusta, Georgia, that will not be fully operational until the mid-2030s.

The pits from Los Alamos will be used for W87-1 warheads to be deployed atop the forthcoming new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles that will replace aging Minuteman III ICBMs.

Pits for W93 nuclear warheads will be made at Savannah River and deployed on Navy submarine-launched nuclear missiles.

The Washington Times reported in October that the NNSA was not saying whether Los Alamos had met the legal requirement to produce war reserve plutonium pits, which are the core of thermonuclear bombs.

Critics have charged that the nuclear weapons complex had failed to fulfill its legal requirements for pits.

For example, Los Alamos produced one war reserve pit from October 2023 to October 2025, and until last week’s comments by the officials, there had been no comments on war reserve pit production.

China balks at U.S. arms control offer

Trump administration efforts to convince China to join strategic nuclear talks with the U.S. and Russia were shot down recently by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Spokesman Lin Jian said Tuesday that a U.S. proposal to include Beijing negotiators in arms talks was unfair and unreasonable.

“At this stage, demanding China’s participation in arms control negotiations is neither fair nor reasonable,” he said.

“China has noted the constructive proposals previously put forward by Russia regarding follow-up arrangements to the New START Treaty and hopes the U.S. will respond positively and genuinely uphold global strategic stability,” Mr. Lin said.

The 2010 U.S.-Russian treaty is set to expire on Thursday.

China is required, as one of 187 signers of the 1967 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to join talks on nuclear disarmament.