How China’s caution in the Iran conflict shows its military limits

The churning happening all round the world is accelerating, with implications for most of the nations of the planet.

Take Donald Trump’s new war on Iran.

The serious Nikkei in Tokyo is titled: “After Iran, China faces difficult calculus on Trump, oil and Taiwan."

The argument is that the US and Israeli airstrikes against Iran “have shuffled the global geopolitical chessboard just four weeks before the American and Chinese leaders are due to sit down together in Beijing, leaving analysts debating which side has the strongest pieces to play and whether the summit will happen at all”.

Chinese Weaponry

Recent conflicts raise other issues: How advanced is China in terms of new weaponry? Can Beijing be considered as a significant player in the near future in any serious armed conflict?

The Times of India points to an important question: “Pakistan, Venezuela & Now Iran: Why Chinese-made Weapons Keep Failing.”

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It is a fact that Chinese-manufactured weaponry, considered to be cheaper, though equally effective, than its Western alternatives, “has imploded spectacularly in recent conflicts. From India dismantling Pakistan's defences during Operation Sindoor to America's surgical raid snatching Venezuela's Maduro to US-Israeli strikes pulverising Iran's shields, Beijing's gear has proven inept. What was hyped as 'battle-tested innovation' now reeks of shoddy engineering, weak software, and zero real-war grit,” says the Indian daily before giving details such as Venezuelan air defences, “bloated with hype but starved of competence, registered zero intruders despite a $2 billion investment in Chinese gear.”

Can Beijing rectify this?

The PLA Today

But there is more. I have already partially highlighted it in this column. Where is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) at? Whom can the Chinese Army liberate or even defend today?

Apart from the fact that Beijing has been very quiet on the happenings in Venezuela and the Middle East, probably not knowing how to react (except through some verbal condemnation), China is not physically capable of countering any US or Israeli offensive, particularly due to its untested equipment.

The New CSIC Report

And then the constant purges in the PLA.

A new report called “The Purges Within China’s Military Are Even Deeper Than You Think", published by the Power Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), based in Washington DC, observed: “Over the last few years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has waged an internal political war within his own military, conducting unprecedented purges of the PLA. Due to the opaque nature of China’s political system, there has not previously been a systematic assessment of these purges. To shed light on the scope and impact of the PLA purges, the CSIS China Power Project constructed the CSIS Database of Chinese Military Purges, which contains detailed information on over 100 PLA senior officers who have been purged or potentially purged since 2022.”

The conclusion of the authors was that the PLA purges are far more extensive than previously understood; it noted that since 2012, Xi Jinping “has repeatedly purged senior military leaders to root out corruption — which Xi sees as an impediment to his ambitious military modernisation agenda — and to remove political obstacles”.

The second part of this assessment is certainly more accurate.

In 2023, Xi initiated a second major round of purges — “this time far bolder and more extensive than before”.

And finally, at the end of 2025, Gen Zhang Youxia, senior vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), was sacked.

All this has decimated the PLA’s high command, leaving only one sitting general on the CMC, Zhang Shengmin, who was promoted to vice chairman in late 2025: “While purges of the CMC have garnered the most attention, this only scratches the surface. According to CSIS data and analysis, 36 generals and lieutenant generals have been officially purged since 2022. The data also shows 65 additional officers are missing or potentially purged (an assessment that is made based on their absence at important meetings which they were expected to attend). This brings the total of confirmed and potential purges to a staggering 101 people,” mentioned the report.

More Corroboration

Vision Times, a media outlet providing the overseas Chinese-speaking community a source of information more accurate than the official Communist propaganda, noted the large number of absences at the recently held meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, which, according to the publication, could indicate some serious internal strife: “While no official explanation has been provided, the unexplained absences come amid ongoing leadership reshuffles within China's armed forces.”

It particularly names two senior military figures.

According to Xinhua, 152 members attended the first plenary meeting of the session, presided over by NPC Chairman Zhao Leji. Yet based on official figures, the 14th NPC Standing Committee originally consisted of 175 members. After eight members had their qualifications revoked and two resigned, the body currently has 165 members, meaning 13 were missing in action: “Observers noted that at least two PLA generals, He Ping and Zheng Weiping, currently serving as deputy directors of the NPC committee, were absent from the meeting.” Previously they held political commissar posts.

Public records show that both He Ping, a former political commissar of the Eastern Theatre Command, and Zheng Weiping, who served as political commissar of the Strategic Support Force till 2020, were considered close to Gen He Weidong, till recently CMC vice chairman, and Gen Lin Xiangyang, who commanded the Eastern Theatre Command from 2022 to 2025. Both these three-star generals had been close to Xi Jinping in the past.

Vision Times says: “Whether the latest absences signal routine scheduling conflicts, internal reshuffling, or deeper developments remains unclear. In China’s tightly controlled political environment, where personnel decisions are often announced only after the fact, such unexplained gaps tend to fuel speculation.”

The Situation on the Ground

So far, reports only analyse the senior echelons of the PLA; hardly anything has transpired from the lower ranks (major general and below). It is here that one could read the truer state of the PLA today.

For example, Lt Gen Wang Kai, who served as commander of the 37th Division of the 13th Group Army during the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 and in July 2013 became commander of the PLA 13th Group Army before being transferred as deputy commander of the Western Theatre Army in 2017, has not been seen for months.

Since March 2021, he has been commanding the Tibet Military Region opposite India, and in October 2022, he was elected as a member of the 20th Central Committee.

Lt Gen Yuan Honggang served till recently as a member of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) Standing Committee and Political Commissar of the Tibet Military Region. It appears that he was discreetly transferred to the Xinjiang Military Region in January 2026.

It means that today, the Tibet Military District has no commander and no political commissar (incidentally, the commander and political commissar of the Western Theatre Command are also missing).

A glimpse of recent meetings in the TAR also shows that the PLA presence in these gatherings has drastically reduced; for example, during the two TAR Regional Meetings (Congress and Consultative Conference) in January, very few senior PLA officers were noticed.

On February 27, a meeting of the TAR Party Committee on Military Affairs and of the First Secretaries of Tibet Military Sub-districts was held in Lhasa. The object of the gathering was “the need to persistently use Xi Jinping's Thought on Strengthening the Military to forge the soul and consolidate military-government and military-civilian unity, strive to create a new situation in Party-led armed forces and national defense mobilisation”.

It was supposed to be a meeting with the military, but it was presided over by Wang Junzheng, TAR Secretary, and attended by the civilian members of the TAR Standing Committee, seated before the PLA officers.

Wang delivered a speech asserting that Xi Jinping, “with a broad vision, has scientifically coordinated the ‘two overall situations’ (the global situation with ‘great changes unseen in a century' and, internally, the domestic situation, ie, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation)".

Wang continued to say that Xi has issued a series of important instructions on national defence and military building, to “establish the Party's goal of building a strong military in the new era, and to implement a series of strategic measures to strengthen the military; Xi Jinping's thought on strengthening the military has led the modernisation and combat capabilities of the armed forces to a new level”.

The forthcoming Two Meetings (the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference) may tell us if there are new appointments to replace the casualties among the senior PLA leadership, but the big question remains: Can an army with untested weapons, without generals and only ideological instructions (‘follow the party'), win a war?

(The writer is Distinguished Fellow, Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (Delhi). Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)