Has Xi Jinping Unified His Own Enemies? | Robert Suettinger

American Thought Leaders · Mar 14, 2026 · 1h 5m

To understand the significance of the sweeping military purges in China and how Beijing is reacting to America’s war with Iran, I’m sitting down with eminent China scholar Robert Suettinger, a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst, a senior advisor at The Stimson Center, and author of “The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.”

“There’s no question of the fact that Xi Jinping is now less of a dominant leader than he was six or eight months ago,” Suettinger says.

Earlier this year, Xi purged two top generals from the CCP’s military brass, on the heels…