According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia, China’s vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), sent a company of troops (over a hundred or more) to the government’s Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on 18 January. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping. A few hours before, the Chinese president – alerted by an informant – set in motion countermeasures. Troops under the command of Cao Qi, head of Xi’s Central Guards Bureau, ambushed Zhang’s soldiers. In the ensuing gunfight at Yangxi Hotel, nine guards were reportedly killed along with dozens of Zhang Youxia’s soldiers.

Throughout China, military movements have been banned and troops and officers have been confined to barracks. This is the bloodiest of a blizzard of rumours that have swept the internet over the weekend. If true, this is the most dramatic military scandal since the death of Mao Zedong’s army chief Lin Biao in 1972.

Without explicitly mentioning a coup attempt, it was reported by state media that Zhang and another member of the CMC, Liu Zhenli, had been arrested for ‘serious violations of discipline and law’. The accuracy of the internet rumours would seem to be supported by the exceptional speed and severity of the announcement in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) official newspaper, which confirmed Zhang’s arrest for ‘seriously betraying the trust placed in them by the party and the Central Military Commission’. The national defence department confirmed the purported crimes they were being investigated for. Conspiracy was not mentioned but corruption was; not a difficult charge to substantiate, as all senior Chinese military officers and politicians can be assumed to have their snouts in the trough – Xi and his family included.

Zhang, like Lin, began to fear that having helped Xi to gain power, he would himself be purged

What is the background to this dramatic story? Firstly, coups, assassinations and murder are not new to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). At the end of the Long March, the CCP’s year-long trek between 1934 and 1935 to escape the chasing Kuomintang (nationalist) forces of the Chinese Republic’s dictatorial leader Chiang Kai Shek, Mao Zedong led so-called ‘struggle sessions’. Senior party members were forced to confess ideological crimes; the consequences were usually imprisonment and execution. For Mao, the purpose........

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