When Xi Jinping rang in the new year from Beijing, he called on China to remember the legacy of Yan’an, the rural stronghold where Mao Zedong transformed revolutionary guerrilla fighters into a disciplined force under his command that would go on to take the country.

习近平在北京迎接新年的到来时，呼吁中国铭记延安精神。当年在这个农村根据地，毛泽东将革命游击队战士锻造成一支纪律严明、听他指挥的部队，最终夺取了全国政权。

It may have been a hint of what was to come. Yan’an was also where Mao Zedong launched his party’s first major “rectification,” a campaign of political terror that eliminated rivals and cemented his absolute authority over the party. Three weeks after Mr. Xi’s speech, China effectively purged the military’s top commander Gen. Zhang Youxia, who had once been seen as a confidant of Mr. Xi’s.

这或许预示了接下来会发生的事情。延安也是毛泽东发起中共党内第一次大规模“整风”之地——这场政治恐怖运动消灭了党内对手，巩固了毛泽东在党内的绝对权威。习近平讲话三周后，中国对军队最高指挥官、曾被视为习近平亲信的张又侠上将进行了实质上的清洗。

Like Mao, Mr. Xi is pursuing a kind of spiritual renewal of the party and the military he commands, what he calls constant “self revolution.” And like Mao, that has taken the form of constant purging of enemies, associates and now, those in his inner circle, too. It is a new level of ruthlessness for a man who has already concentrated power in himself to a degree not seen since Mao.

与毛泽东相似，习近平正推动对他统领的党与军队进行一种精神层面的革新，他称之为不断的“自我革命”。与毛泽东一样，他也采取了不断清除敌人和盟友的形式，现在又开始清除核心圈子的成员。对于这位已将权力集中到毛泽东时代以来前所未有程度的领导人而言，这显现出更甚以往的残酷性。

Over the past three years, Mr. Xi has essentially ousted five of the six generals in China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission, which controls China’s armed forces. Only two members are left: Mr. Xi himself and a vice chairman who has overseen Mr. Xi’s purges.

过去三年间，习近平已基本将中央军委六位将军中的五位逐出这个掌控中国军队的最高军事决策机构。现仅剩两名委员：习近平本人及负责清洗行动的副主席。

“It is quite astonishing,” said Yue Gang, a retired colonel of the People’s Liberation Army.

中国人民解放军退役上校岳刚说：“这个确实比较震惊。”

中国军队最高指挥官张又侠上将（中）曾被视为习近平的亲信，但他在今年早些时候遭到调查。

In the weeks after, Chinese officials have offered little explanation as they sought to project normalcy. Mr. Xi hosted foreign leaders in Beijing and convened a meeting with party officials on policy work. On Wednesday, he met with military units by video conference and conveyed his greetings for the Lunar New Year. Acknowledging that the past year had been “very unusual and very extraordinary,” Mr. Xi sought to show that the rank-and-file were loyal to him, saying that the troops were still “completely reliable and trustworthy.”

在随后的几周里，中国官方几乎没有作出解释，同时努力营造一种一切如常的氛围。习近平在北京接待了外国领导人，并召集党内官员召开政策工作会议。周三，他通过视频会议与军队官兵会面，并致以新春问候。习近平承认过去的一年“很不寻常、很不平凡”，他试图表明基层官兵对他的忠诚，称部队仍然“完全过得硬、信得过”。

Online discussion has been restricted as social media platforms filter search results and comments related to General Zhang.

社交媒体平台过滤与张又侠有关的搜索结果和评论，网上讨论受到限制。

The few official editorials released on the subject hark back to the campaign of ideological cleansing first modeled at Yan’an and suggest that at the heart of the ouster is Mr. Xi’s control over the military, a powerful empire within the party.

为数不多的官方社论回溯了在延安时期开创的思想整风运动，并暗示此次清洗的核心关乎习近平对军队这个党内强大帝国的控制权。

A front-page editorial in the People’s Liberation Army Daily characterized the investigation as a necessary hygiene, a process of “uprooting sick trees” and “removing hidden cancer” so that the military would be “reforged and reformed.” Another editorial in the same paper described Mr. Xi’s leadership as the “the source of strength, direction, and future” for the military.

《解放军报》头版社论将此次整肃比作必要的清洁工程，称其是“肃流毒”“清积弊”的过程，旨在使军队得到“重塑”。该报另一篇社论则将习近平的领导力描述为军队的“力量所在、方向所在、未来所在”。

身着红军制服的游客在延安革命纪念馆毛泽东雕像旁合影。

“Mr. Xi believes he needs to build a foundation of absolute ideological unity and personal loyalty for future battles,” wrote John Garnaut, a founder of Garnaut Global, a geopolitical risk advisory firm. He noted that the language used by the party showed that Mr. Xi was drawing on Maoist and Stalinist playbooks absorbed in his youth as the son of a revolutionary fighter.

地缘政治风险咨询公司Garnaut Global创始人高安西(John Garnaut)指出：“习近平认为他需要为未来的战斗建立绝对的思想统一和个人忠诚的基础。”他指出，中共使用的措辞表明，习近平正借鉴他青年时期作为革命者之子所吸收的毛泽东主义和斯大林主义理论。

Over his 13 years in power, Mr. Xi has often cited Yan’an, the Communist Party’s main revolutionary base until 1948, as inspiration for his own culling of cadres as well as a way to signal his own supreme authority in the party in the tradition of Mao. After Mr. Xi secured a third term as head of the party, breaking with precedent, he visited the city with his top officials.

在他掌权的13年里，习近平屡屡提及延安——直到1948年，这里一直是中共的主要革命根据地——把它作为自己整肃干部的灵感来源，并以此延续毛泽东传统，彰显自己在党内至高无上的权威。在打破惯例实现党内第三次连任后，他率领高层官员重访延安。

He and General Zhang also made the pilgrimage to Yan’an in 2024 for a meeting, heavy with symbolism, on “political work” in the Chinese military. Mr. Xi exhorted the senior military officers, which included three other senior generals that he would later also purge, to remember their original revolutionary mission.

2024年，他与张又侠再次前往延安，举行关于中国军队“政治工作”的会议，这次会议带有浓厚的象征意义。习近平敦促军方高层（其中包括后来也被他清除的另外三名高级将领），要牢记初心使命。

Visiting the former residences of revolutionary leaders like Mao and Zhou Enlai on that trip, he declared the importance of the party’s “absolute leadership over the military.”

那次访问中，他参观了毛泽东和周恩来等革命领袖的故居，宣布了党“对军队的绝对领导”的重要性。

“For Xi Jinping, he sees that legacy and that kind of campaign as one of the party’s greatest treasures. He wants to go back to history and use those methods,” said Joseph Torigian, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at American University in Washington. “He thinks he can do it right.”

“对习近平来说，这种政治遗产和这种运动是党的最大财富之一。他想回到历史经验，并运用这些手段，”华盛顿美利坚大学中共党史专家唐志学(Joseph Torigian)说。“他认为自己可以正确运用。”

Securing control over the People’s Liberation Army has been the key challenge of every leader since Mao, who immortalized its importance by declaring that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Colonel Yue argued that Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, struggled to manage the military and had been outmaneuvered by two vice chairmen of the commission.

自毛泽东时代以来，确保对人民解放军的掌控始终是历任领导人的核心挑战，毛泽东曾宣称“枪杆子里面出政权”，将这一原则的重要性永载史册。岳刚认为，习近平的前任胡锦涛在掌控军队方面力不从心，曾被军委的两位副主席架空。

根据中国官方媒体发布的照片，习近平于2024年与张又侠一同前往延安视察，其间他强调了党对军队“绝对领导”的重要性。

“We’ve had this lesson before,” Colonel Yue said, who argued that General Zhang may have tried and failed to weaken Mr. Xi’s hold over the military. The “smooth” takedown of General Zhang, he said, shows how “impossible it is to shake the leadership of Xi Jinping.”

“因为这个前面有教训，”岳刚说，他认为张又侠可能曾试图削弱习近平对军队的控制，但没有成功。他说，张又侠被“平稳地顺利地”拿下，表明动摇习近平的领导地位“是不可能的”。

“The attempt to undermine the power didn’t succeed. Instead, it resulted in a disastrous outcome,” he said.

“你这个架空也没有得逞，反而可以说碰到头破血流，”他说。

Since Mr. Xi came to power in 2012 he has overseen an intense campaign to clean up the military, where corruption had been on the rise since market reforms in the 1980s and as military spending soared. He sees absolute loyalty as vital to one of his key goals of building a 21st-century, combat-ready force capable of defending China’s interests — like its claim over Taiwan.

自2012年上台以来，习近平主导了对军队的严厉整肃。自20世纪80年代市场化改革以来，随着军费开支激增，军队腐败现象一直呈上升趋势。习近平认为绝对忠诚对于实现他的核心目标至关重要——打造一支具备21世纪作战能力的军队，以捍卫中国利益，例如对台湾的主权主张。

And as Beijing competes more directly with the United States, ensuring the military’s loyalty in times of crisis and possible conflict is even more important.

随着北京与美国的竞争日益直接，在危机甚至可能发生冲突的情况下确保军队的忠诚显得尤为重要。

“The party must always command the gun, never the other way around,” said the Chinese military expert Song Zhongping.

 “要让党指挥枪，不是枪指挥党，”中国军事专家宋忠平说。

When Mr. Xi talks about the spirit of Yan’an, he glosses over details of the purging of thousands of party members at Yan’an through psychologically brutal sessions of self-criticism that led some to suicide. Mr. Xi uses some of those methods of political indoctrination, including mandating study sessions of his personalized doctrine, Xi Jinping Thought, and encouraging the reporting of one’s peers or superiors for violating Mr. Xi’s edicts, according to Wen-Hsuan Tsai, a scholar of elite Chinese politics at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

当习近平谈及延安精神时，他刻意回避了延安运动中以残酷的自我批评对数千名党员进行整肃的细节，那些带有强烈心理压迫的整肃甚至导致一些人自杀。台湾中央研究院政治所研究中国高层政治的学者蔡文轩指出，习近平沿用了部分政治灌输手段，包括强制学习他个人的理论“习近平思想”，并鼓励举报违反习近平指令的同僚或上级。

“It turns the whole party into a trial of mutual reporting, so no one can be trusted — not your parents, not your superiors, no one,” Dr. Tsai said.

蔡文轩说：“把整个党内变成一种相互举报的试炼，所以就没有人可以相信，就是你的父母、你的长官、你的谁，你都不能相信。”

“His type of regime needs constant enemies and purges to maintain fear,” he said.

“他还是要不断地找敌人来做清洗，因为（只有这样）这个政权才可以让大家恐惧，”他说。

自毛泽东以来，确保对军队的控制权始终是中华人民共和国历任领导人的关键挑战。

Mr. Xi’s rectification campaign, while not as bloody or extreme as Mao’s, extends across the party apparatus, targeting graft as well as perceived disloyalty. Last year, 983,000 officials were punished for violating party rules, the highest number on record, according to data released by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s internal anti-corruption body.

习近平的整风运动虽然不像毛泽东时期那样血腥或极端，却遍及整个党政体系，既打击贪腐，也针对被认为不忠诚的人。根据党内反腐机构中央纪委公布的数据，去年有98.3万名官员因违反党纪受到惩处，创下历史最高纪录。

The sudden removal of senior officials with no explanation has become a hallmark of Mr. Xi’s rule, inspiring uncertainty and fear among Chinese officials in what analysts say is either a sign of his increasing paranoia or a tactic to keep the leader’s enemies, as well as his allies, guessing.

在没有任何解释的情况下突然撤换高级官员，这已成为习近平执政的一个标志，在中国官场引发了不确定性和恐惧。分析人士称，这可能是习近平越来越偏执的表现，也可能是一种让敌人和盟友都猜不透的策略。

Rather than quietly retire General Zhang at the next leadership transition, in 2027, Mr. Xi chose to publicly and loudly disown him.

习近平没有让张又侠在2027年下一次领导层交接时悄然退休，而是选择公开、高调地与他断绝关系。

“This purge manifests a position of strength,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “Xi can move his finger and remove the most powerful leader of the Chinese military.”

“这次清洗体现了一种强势姿态，”华盛顿史汀生中心中国项目主任孙韵说。“习近平动动手指，就能撤换中国军方最有权势的领导人”。