Abstract 

President Xi Jinping’s unprecedented purge of the Central Military Commission and many leading PLA Generals has navigated Sinologists into uncharted waters. What led Xi to decide that he needed to act now? How will Xi reorganize the PLA/CMC and who will he select to fill the many vacancies?  Will loyalty be the sole criteria? Will the wholesale changes make the PLA more capable of modern warfare? How long will this process last and how much impact will it have on PLA morale and readiness?

About the Speaker 

Dennis Wilder is a senior fellow with the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues and serves as assistant professor of the practice in Asian studies at the School of Foreign Service. He is also a Visiting Professor of the Practice at the Bush School of Government and Service, Texas A&M. Wilder has held several prominent roles in U.S. national security and intelligence, including serving as the National Security Council’s director for China from 2004 to 2005, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for East Asian affairs from 2005 to 2009. His tenure included planning a series of presidential trips to Asia, most notably for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. From 2009 to 2015, he served as senior editor of the President’s Daily Brief, the key intelligence update for U.S. leadership, and later became the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific from 2015 to 2016. Earlier in his career, Wilder spent the 1975–1976 academic year studying Mandarin Chinese at New Asia College, Chinese University of Hong Kong, under the Yale-in-China program. He holds a B.A. from Kalamazoo College and an M.S. in foreign service from Georgetown University.