The Chinese Military’s Unending Rectification in the Run-Up to 2027
| AUTHOR | Anushka Saxena |
| DATE | November 6, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | China Defence Geostrategy |
On November 5, 2026, the PLA Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s armed forces, published a short commentary by Liu Weijiao (刘维姣), a regular commentator for the newspaper whose rank or unit is never revealed. This likely means Liu is an individual or a group of writers within the newspaper’s commentariat. The commentary, titled “Integrate political rectification into daily life and make it a regular practice” (把政治整训融入日常抓在经常), is one of the more honest accounts I have read in the paper contemporarily, in terms of what it has to say about the state of play vis-à-vis the PLA rectification campaign.
The piece makes a few important confessions – for example, it says that at one time, a “certain” unit had so many tasks piled up that the grassroots were “exhausted from coping” (疲于应付), and rectification and daily work had become “two skins” (两张皮), running in parallel without touching. Eventually, as the piece argues, “rectification was written into” the unit’s “task coordination table,” which led to a spike in theory exam scores.
Liu also argues that such rectification risks “becoming idle spinning” (空转), and that its real exam room is “the training ground, not the meeting room.” It wants criticism at Party meetings to carry some “spice” (辣味), without “beating around the bush.” So, confessedly, the anxiety or concern is around the campaign becoming more ritual than anything meaningful.
Further, the piece argues that the training and exercise styles in the PLA have returned “from hollow to real” (从 “虚” 向 “实”), and that personnel selection and use have shifted “from unwritten rules to explicit rules” (从 “潜规则” 向 “明规矩”). This is essentially an admission that PLA exercises so far, if not completely hollow, were much more hollow than reported or believed by the leadership, and promotions, of course, happened based on unwritten rules. That squares with the charges of indulging in “pay-for-promotions” and “forming cliques” levied against Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, whose expulsions were ratified at the recently concluded Fifth Plenum on October 29, 2026.
Finally, Liu warns that the rectification is only going to continue and deepen. “The political tests facing our military are complex,” Liu writes, taking Xi’s own words from Yan’an, and “the impact of eliminating pernicious influence and accumulated malpractice has not yet hit bottom” (肃清流毒积弊的影响仍未见底). Old problems “may change their appearance”, and new ones “will quietly surface.” And, rectification “has no end date” (任务无穷期).
Understandably so, the run-up to PLA’s centenary in 2027, and the 21st Party Congress in October that year, is the period Liu calls “crunch time” (吃劲时候). It is hard to say how much training time this consumes, or how commanders weigh it against readiness. But China’s love for contradictions seems to be turning on it, because the CPC can’t have both – a rectification too shallow to be meaningful, and one so routine that nobody takes it seriously.