Miao Hua and He Weidong are gone from China's Central Military Commission, and the commission Xi Jinping chairs now holds him and General Zhang Youxia and no one else with a vote. Miao ran political work, the department that vets loyalty before it vets competence, since 2017. He Weidong outranked every uniformed officer but Zhang, and he was the youngest vice chairman put on the commission at the 2022 Party Congress that was supposed to hand Xi a command generation that would carry him past 2027. Both men were Xi appointees. Both are now expelled from the Party, the sentence Beijing hands down when it wants a name struck from the record rather than merely reassigned.

A commission this thin is not what a chairman builds when he plans to hold the same seats through the 2027 centenary deadline he has set for a modernized force. It is what he builds when the appointees he already trusted stopped being the ones he trusted. Zhang Youxia, the one man left standing beside Xi, took his seat in 2017 and has now outlasted three purge cycles that removed the officers promoted alongside him. The next test is whether the 20th Central Committee's next plenum fills the vacant seats with Zhang's choices or Xi's, and whether either man is still confident enough in the other to let it happen without a third name added to the expulsion list first.