Chris Buckley

I've been covering Chinese politics for over 20 years now.

And in the past few years in China, there's been a steady rhythm of senior military officials who have either been officially dismissed or simply disappeared.

But there was nothing like the announcement of the removal of Zhang Youxia, China's topmost uniformed officer.

Now, this is a stunning development.

Shakespearean is a word that's been used by a lot of people to describe this.

Chinese politics under Xi Jinping is a black box.

It's extremely difficult to get reliable information from the innermost circle of Xi Jinping.

Nonetheless, we do know that the Chinese military newspapers have come out with a few broad accusations against Zhang Yuxia.

One of them is corruption.

The other one is a broad accusation of disloyalty against Xi Jinping.

Now, the corruption allegation is a bit easier to understand in the context of

the Chinese military over the past few decades.

It has become a notoriously corrupt institution.

The more difficult charge to figure out is what they're meaning when they're saying that Zhang Youxia, who seemed to be one of Xi Jinping's most loyal generals, was also involved in some sort of act of disloyalty against him, some betrayal of the principles of power within the Communist Party.

That's harder to get at.

But what we're seeing at the moment is a Chinese high command that seems...

not simply unprepared for the challenges of war, but simply not there.