About Solo Wing

Solo Wing

Solo Wing is an English-language Substack newsletter by the writer Pixy that reconstructs Chinese military and Chinese Communist Party politics from Chinese-language sources and photographs. It publishes long analytical essays rather than news briefs, and its tagline in the wider China-watching community captures its ambition precisely. Vermilion China, the United States-based publication on strategic confrontation with China, recommends Solo Wing with the line “Think China as China thinks the world.” That recommendation, listed on Vermilion China’s own recommendations page alongside other specialist publications it reads and endorses, has helped make Solo Wing a reference point in English-language China security-watching circles, where detailed sourcing on People’s Liberation Army personnel changes is scarce and highly valued.

What Solo Wing Is and Who Writes It

Solo Wing is published on Substack under the address pixy1.substack.com by an author who writes under the name Pixy. The publication does not present itself as a news service, a think tank product or a commercial research product. It is a single-author analytical newsletter, and its authority rests entirely on the quality of its reading of primary material. The clean-file record for this rollout notes that the author’s base is not stated, and that Beijing is the nominal city assigned for China-focused outlets of this kind, following the precedent set in earlier batches of the same rollout. What can be verified from the publication itself is its method and its subject matter: sustained, essay-length attempts to explain how the Chinese Communist Party and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army, actually work, written for readers who already follow Chinese politics closely and want more than wire copy and official statements.

The author’s voice is analytical rather than reportorial. Pixy does not claim access to classified information, and the essays stress that the analysis is based on publicly available information. That self-limitation is central to the publication’s credibility. In an field crowded with rumour, anonymous social-media claims and instant commentary on every personnel disappearance in Beijing, Solo Wing distinguishes itself by slowing down, assembling the public record in sequence, and explaining what that record can and cannot support. Readers are shown the working: which PLA Daily article appeared, which pseudonym signed it, which plenum was sitting, and why the timing matters.

The Method: Reading Chinese Sources Closely

The methodological foundation of Solo Wing was set out explicitly in an early essay, “Beyond the Whispers: Analysis, Methodology and Pekingology,” which the later essays repeatedly cite as their framework. Pekingology, in this usage, is the disciplined study of elite Chinese politics from fragmentary public signals: leadership appearances and absences, the ordering of names in official reporting, the language of editorials in Party and military newspapers, and the biographies and patronage networks of senior officers. Solo Wing applies that tradition with unusual patience. A single pseudonymous commentary in the PLA Daily, for example, is not treated as colour but as evidence, because in the Chinese system specific pen names are a recognised way for the leadership to release authoritative political signals.

The essays also make deliberate use of photographs and public imagery alongside texts. Personnel analysis of the PLA depends heavily on who is seen, where they are seated, whether they appear in uniform at a given event, and whether their images disappear from official coverage. By combining textual sources, such as Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announcements and PLA Daily rectification propaganda, with visual and biographical evidence, Solo Wing builds the multi-part personnel studies for which it has become known. The approach is reconstructive: the reader is given a chronology, the connections between officers are mapped, and only then is an argument offered about the logic behind a purge or a promotion round.

The PLA Purges as Central Subject

The defining subject of Solo Wing is the rolling purge of the People’s Liberation Army under Xi Jinping, and in particular the acceleration of that purge after Xi secured a third term at the 20th Party Congress in 2022. The essay “Cracking the PLA Cipher: Self-Revolution Aims to Forge the Edge” laid out the sequence as the publication records it. In July 2023 the commander and political commissar of the PLA Rocket Force were removed simultaneously, along with a large number of other Rocket Force officers. On 31 August 2023 Central Military Commission member and defence minister Li Shangfu was placed under investigation, and on 21 September 2023 his predecessor Wei Fenghe was also placed under investigation. Li was removed as State Councillor and Defence Minister in October 2023, and Admiral Dong Jun, the former Navy commander, was appointed Defence Minister in December of that year.

The chronology continues through the structural upheaval of April 2024, when the PLA abolished the Strategic Support Force and split it into the Information Support Force, the Military Aerospace Force and the Cyberspace Force, and through June 2024, when Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe were expelled from the Party. Solo Wing places these events inside a longer argument about “self-revolution”: the Party’s own language for a permanent campaign of internal rectification. The publication’s contention, developed across essays, is that the purge is not simply an anti-corruption drive of the kind seen after 2012, but a deliberate transformation of the relationship between the Party and its army, dismantling what one later essay calls the PLA’s self-governing ecosystem.

And Then There Were None: Reading the High Command

The companion essay “And Then There Were None? Clues to Turmoil in China’s High Command” takes its title from a September 2023 social-media post by Rahm Emanuel, then United States Ambassador to Japan, who compared Xi’s shrinking cabinet to Agatha Christie’s novel as the foreign minister, the Rocket Force commanders and then the defence minister disappeared in succession. Solo Wing uses that quip as a starting point for a much more granular exercise: tracing the officers caught in this round of purges, their connections to one another, and the institutional logic that links their falls.

The essay’s treatment of Wei Fenghe illustrates the method. Wei was the first general Xi promoted after coming to power, his service, the Second Artillery Corps, was the first military unit Xi inspected, and in 2015 that force was upgraded into the Rocket Force as an independent service, with Wei as its first commander and later the first Defence Minister not drawn from the PLA Army. Against that history of trust and investment, the essay sets the scale of the subsequent Rocket Force scandal, in which, as Pixy writes, three consecutive commanders since the force’s founding and virtually its entire leadership were purged. The essay also explains the career mathematics underneath the drama: promotion from Second Lieutenant to Senior Colonel normally takes about twenty-four years and typically another twenty to reach General, while the post-2015 reforms compressed senior posts, so that mass removals through purge also function, in the publication’s analysis, as a mechanism for rapidly promoting a younger cohort.

Fallout: The Purge Reaches the Top of the Commission

The most recent major essay in the sequence, “Fallout: Xi Jinping’s Detonation within the PLA,” argues that the campaign entered a far more volatile phase in March 2025, when the investigation of Central Military Commission Vice Chairman He Weidong set off further waves of purges, culminating, in the essay’s account, in January 2026 with the fall of CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and Chief of the Joint Staff Department Liu Zhenli. By any meaningful metric, Pixy argues, in terms of scale, seniority, institutional reach and temporal density, Xi’s third-term purge of the PLA is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese Communist Party.

The essay’s close reading is characteristic. It singles out a PLA Daily article of 12 January 2026, “Forging the Party-Led People’s Army Into an Even Stronger Force,” signed with the pen name Jie Xinping, which the publication identifies as a byline signifying an important news commentary by the PLA Daily, and notes that it appeared the same day as the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection plenum. Less than two weeks later, Zhang and Liu, both veterans of the Sino-Vietnamese border conflicts, were under investigation, and Zhang was labelled a “root source of pernicious influence” to be uprooted. Whether a reader accepts every inference, the essay demonstrates what Solo Wing offers that faster commentary does not: a documented chain from signal to event, assembled from the Party’s own public words.

The Party-Army Relationship at the Centre of the Analysis

Running through all of the essays is a single analytical insistence: the PLA is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party, and its primary missions differ from those of other national militaries. That premise shapes the publication’s treatment of corruption. Where much English-language coverage treats each fallen general as a discrete scandal, Solo Wing treats the cases as evidence about how the Party disciplines, rotates and ultimately subordinates its military. The essays revisit earlier episodes, including the campaign that effectively unpersoned former general Liu Yazhou, whose work was removed in a comprehensive cleanup of “pernicious information” after his fall, and the longer history reaching back to the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, which the publication presents as a turning point both for United States-China relations and for the PLA’s development.

This historical depth is part of the newsletter’s appeal to specialist readers. A personnel change is never only a personnel change; it is located in the history of the Rocket Force’s creation, in the promotion bottlenecks created by reform, and in the Party’s language of rectification drawn from its own revolutionary past. The essays use positive and negative historical examples, combat heroes and their descendants, and the propaganda surrounding them, exactly as the PLA Daily itself does, to show how the institution narrates its own transformation.

Place Among English-Language China Newsletters

Solo Wing belongs to a distinctive cohort of independent, Substack-based China publications that grew as traditional foreign correspondence from inside China contracted. Within that cohort it occupies the deep-specialist end of the spectrum. Pekingnology translates and contextualises elite political discourse; Ginger River Review surveys Chinese-language conversation; Vermilion China writes for national-security professionals from an openly adversarial American perspective. Solo Wing’s niche is narrower and more technical: the internal politics of the PLA high command, reconstructed at essay length. Its recommendation by Vermilion China matters because Vermilion’s readership of security professionals is precisely the audience that needs reliable open-source personnel analysis and has few places to find it in English.

The publication also illustrates a broader shift in how China expertise is produced. The skills on display, fluent reading of Chinese military media, knowledge of PLA institutional history, and patience with fragmentary evidence, were once concentrated in government intelligence services and a handful of academic centres. Solo Wing shows an independent writer deploying those skills in public, with sources shown, for any reader willing to follow a long argument. That transparency is both its limitation and its strength: everything rests on public material, but the public material is handled with a rigour that lets other specialists check, cite and build on the work.

Readership, Format and How to Read It

Solo Wing publishes infrequently by newsletter standards, because each instalment is a substantial study rather than a roundup. The archive is best read as a connected series: the methodology essay first, then the self-revolution analysis, then the high-command study, then the later account of the purge reaching the vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission. The essays cross-reference one another explicitly, with later pieces presenting themselves as sequels that apply the framework to new cases. A separate follow-up on the implications for Taiwan, the United States and beyond was promised within the argument of the most recent essay, underlining that the series is conceived as a continuing investigation rather than a set of one-off commentaries.

For general readers, the value of Solo Wing is an education in how to read China’s military politics without either credulity or cynicism: official announcements matter, silences matter, and neither speaks for itself. For professional readers in defence, diplomacy and academia, it provides sourced chronologies of the most consequential upheaval inside the PLA in decades. In a media environment where the PLA’s internal affairs are both critically important and deliberately opaque, that combination has made Solo Wing a small publication with an outsized reputation, and one of the clearest examples of the independent newsletter model at its most serious.