Forbidding the Palace Coup: An Analysis of Promotions and Purges in the People’s Liberation Army

Abstract

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) faces enduring challenges in its civil-military relations, such as in establishing norms of professionalism, ensuring social representativeness, and resolving the loyalty-competence tradeoff in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This thesis investigates two types of coup-proofing strategies employed by the civilian leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in order to maintain both internal and external security: promotions and purges of its senior military leadership. Existing biographical data on 1,056 promotions of 876 senior PLA officers who served between 1949 and 2025 was exploited to determine the effect of various social characteristics like birthplace, gender, ethnicity, family background, and education on likelihood of entering the senior military leadership. From this basis, a new dataset on 132 military purges between 1949 and 2025 was constructed to assess the impact of leadership transitions, seniority, and social characteristics on this smaller-n sample. The findings suggest that different themes in civil-military relations have played contradictory and overlapping roles in the PRC over time. The new synthesis theory developed by this thesis bridges the gap between the classic civil-military concepts of professionalism and convergence. It predicts that hard-authoritarian leaders like Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping are more likely to choose coup-proofing strategies that increase loyalty at the expense of competence, whereas soft-authoritarian rulers during the era of collective leadership (Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao) were unable or unwilling to make the same sacrifice. Lastly, the implications of these findings for policymakers in the United States are discussed and developed into concrete recommendations.