The 46 officers Xi Jinping removed from National People's Congress and CPPCC seats this week lost their political standing, not their commissions. That distinction runs through the PLA's General Political Work Department, or more precisely through the officer-management bureau inside it that decides whether a stripped legislature seat converts into a stripped rank, a reassignment, or nothing at all. Mei Chen's brief today reads the purge against Beijing's blockade planning for Taiwan; the ledger that matters this week sits one floor down, in the CMC's own finance and audit arm, which has to decide within its normal autumn budget cycle whether those 46 officers keep drawing PLA pay while their political status is unresolved.

The precedent is the 2023 rocket force purge, when Beijing took roughly eight months to move from legislature removal to formal military tribunal for General Li Yuchao, a gap during which his unit's procurement budget kept flowing under his successor's signature, not his own. Li Shangfu's ouster the same year ran a similar clock: seat stripped in a July plenum session, court-martial confirmed the following June. If the CMC's audit arm, now reporting to a body Xi has cut to two standing members from the customary seven, runs the same eight-to-eleven-month interval on this cohort, the formal rank action lands sometime between April and July 2027, inside the same year Xi has set as his combat-readiness deadline and Taipei's NT$1 trillion defense budget takes effect.