Alex Ritson

It's not unusual in this opaque system.

to not find out the details of these things.

But obviously, if they're delegates to this Congress, this annual Congress, and they're a few days out before that Congress is about to start, removed from the Congress, well, it shows they've been purged.

And so the important thing really is that...

It's ongoing for months now.

Xi Jinping has been cutting a swathe through the upper echelons of the PLA and nine more.

It seems incredible, but they just keep going down.

Yeah.

And people have talked about them perhaps being seen by President Xi as potential rivals.

But are there potential rivals?

Would anyone dare?

It is an interesting question.

Analysts would say it doesn't really matter how real the threat is.

It's how Xi Jinping feels about the threat.

So it's not so much maybe that he would realistically think a couple of generals are going to get together and lay on a coup, but the idea that power could even a little bit be slipping from his hands or that there could be groupings within the party not really listening to him.

He's just so all-powerful.

We've not seen anything like it since Mao.

And he has used, it seems, this anti-corruption crackdown, and that's the kind of official excuse for the more broad crackdown, that this is all about corruption, to take out his political enemies.

And by that, anyone who's not completely on board with the mission...

And who knows what you've got to do to fall foul of this.