Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The purge China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has inflicted on the military elite was plain to see at a recent legislative meeting. A year earlier, state television footage showed around 40 generals in the room. This time, there were only a handful.

Yet Mr. Xi indicated that an upheaval that rivaled those of the Mao era was not over. Stony-faced, he warned the remaining officers to beware of disloyalty.

“The military,” he said, “must never have anyone who harbors a divided heart toward the party.”

It was a rare public reference by Mr. Xi to one of the worst political crises of his 13 years in power: He had lost faith in the military leadership that he had spent a decade remolding.

“When Xi uses the words ‘divided heart,’ they are heavy with meaning,” said Chien-wen Kou, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. The phrase is found in ancient Chinese treatises that counsel rulers against treacherous generals, including a volume Mr. Xi has kept on his bookshelf.

“Even his most trusted and important confidants have fallen,” Professor Kou said. “Who else can gain his trust?”

The crisis threatens one of Mr. Xi’s great feats: the transformation of the Chinese military into a formidable force with new aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles and an expanding nuclear arsenal. And it comes as China’s rivalry with the United States has intensified, and as the Trump administration has put American firepower, and its limits, on vivid display in Venezuela and Iran.

China’s war readiness may be disrupted for years by the very cleanup that Mr. Xi has said is necessary to purify and strengthen the ranks. What once looked like a limited crackdown on corruption became a sweeping dismissal of dozens of top officers, and culminated in the downfall early this year of Zhang Youxia, China’s top uniformed commander, who had appeared to be a confidant of Mr. Xi’s.

The final break between them came, by some accounts, when Mr. Xi sought to promote the general leading the cleanup to a position rivaling General Zhang’s. General Zhang objected. Months later, he was out.

The gravity of the campaign was on stark display again this past week, when a military court sentenced two former defense ministers to death, suspended for two years, for bribery. They will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison.

“This is Xi Jinping’s military,” said Daniel Mattingly, an associate professor at Yale University who studies China’s politics and military. “Why does he break the thing that he built?

“It’s not what people would have expected of Xi, even five years ago. Something profound changed,” he said.

The corruption Mr. Xi has been hunting is real. But earlier internal speeches by Mr. Xi, not previously reported in detail, reveal another factor: a leader who saw in any sign of disobedience the seed of a political threat to his rule. He became convinced, analysts say, that the commanders he had chosen to modernize the military could no longer be trusted, their loyalty and effectiveness eroded by graft and cronyism.

Analysts say the upheaval has also exposed the tensions between Mr. Xi’s two imperatives — preparing for combat and enforcing loyalty. Ultimately, Mr. Xi ousted a battle-experienced general who helped remake his military and replaced him with an inquisitor, who is now, alongside Mr. Xi, the sole other remaining member of China’s top military council.

“Xi Jinping’s rule is slowly entering its late stage,” Professor Kou said. “His political calculations change in this stage, his anxieties become increasingly about members of his own inner circle.”

Seizing Control of the Gun

Early on, Mr. Xi appeared determined to avoid the fate of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who was widely seen to have failed to establish his authority over China’s military commanders.

Mr. Hu’s weakness was exposed in 2011 during a visit to Beijing by Robert Gates, then the U.S. secretary of defense. Mr. Gates asked Mr. Hu about the test flight of a Chinese stealth fighter jet, news of which had emerged that morning on Chinese websites.

Mr. Hu seemed to have no knowledge of it. “The civilian leadership seemed surprised by the test,” Mr. Gates told reporters later.

Mr. Hu’s directives to army commanders were “more like suggestions they would consider,” said John Culver, a former C.I.A. analyst now at the Brookings Institution. “Basically you had a system that was no longer responsive to the party.”

After coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi launched investigations against commanders who had grown wealthy, and overweening, under Mr. Hu, including some previously deemed untouchable because of their status.

In 2014, Mr. Xi summoned hundreds of senior officers to Gutian, a town in eastern China where, according to party histories, Mao Zedong in 1929 established the fundamental principle that defines the Chinese state today: The party commands the gun.

Mr. Xi used that historical backdrop to warn that the Communist Party’s control of the armed forces had eroded to a dangerous degree.

At Gutian, Mr. Xi laid out the problems he had inherited. Faith in the party’s values had decayed. Corruption, cronyism and insubordination was brazen. He cited training exercises so fake that soldiers used shovels and sticks instead of guns.

The Rot

To Mr. Xi, the rot was exemplified by Gen. Xu Caihou, who was a retired vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, a position that had put him near the top of the People’s Liberation Army. General Xu had been placed under investigation, accused of taking huge bribes, including for arranging promotions for officers.

“Xu Caihou always solemnly professed undying loyalty and love toward the party,” Mr. Xi said, according to a previously unreported version of a speech he made in Gutian that circulated inside the military. “But really, deep in his soul he had long ago fallen away from the party and into corruption and depravity.”

Mr. Xi was also alarmed by events abroad. He cited cautionary stories of leaders in the Middle East and the Soviet Union who were toppled after their militaries abandoned them in the face of insurrections.

Mr. Xi came to the job with a reverence for the People’s Liberation Army. His father was a revolutionary leader who had fought under Mao. In his early career, Mr. Xi worked as a secretary to the minister of defense. Mr. Xi believed that to instill loyalty in the military to the Communist Party and to him, he had to revive “political work” — the indoctrination, vetting and monitoring that made officers and troops trustworthy.

To drive home the new spirit of discipline that he demanded in Gutian, Mr. Xi was shown eating coarse rice and pumpkin soup, the humble, storied meal of the early Red Army.

“Absolute loyalty to the party rests on the word ‘absolute’,” Mr. Xi said. “It is a loyalty that is singular, total, unconditional and free from any impurities or fakery.”

The Chairman Is in Charge

From his first years in power, Mr. Xi also began entrenching a “chairman responsibility system,” an overhaul that tightened his control over the military by giving him intelligence and control deep into its ranks. He declared his confidence in his own ability to spot the right commanders for promotion.

“The key to building a strong military lies in picking the right people,” he said in an internal speech in 2016, describing how he vetted and spoke to prospects for promotion. “Senior and mid-ranking officers are the backbone for building and running the military, and as chairman of the Central Military Commission, I should personally handle this.”

He also replaced decades-old military regions with new theater commands and he dissolved central People’s Liberation Army departments that he saw as barriers to effective control. His goal was to give China the ability to combine land, air and sea forces to project power abroad, while ensuring that this modernized force stayed unflinchingly loyal.

Gen. Zhang Youxia was among the commanders entrusted with executing Mr. Xi’s vision. General Zhang was a gruff, charismatic officer who had distinguished himself on the frontline of China’s yearslong border war with Vietnam from 1979. He was the son of a revolutionary general who had fought alongside Mr. Xi’s father.

Mr. Xi had earlier promoted him to the Central Military Commission and made him head of the military’s general armaments department. The department was in charge of acquiring new weapons, which are vital to Mr. Xi’s modernization plans, but had also become a mire of corruption, fed by its control over funds and contracts.

“He came from a privileged Communist Party background, and it showed,” said Drew Thompson, who was working at the Pentagon and met General Zhang in 2012 when he took part in a Chinese military delegation on a visit to the United States. “I think that combination of his background, his combat experience, his self-confidence, his comfort with weapon systems and his openness to change made him attractive to Xi.”

By 2018, Mr. Xi appeared satisfied that his overhaul was paying off. While he acknowledged to the Central Military Commission that problems remained, he said the changes were a “historic transformation” that had “saved the military.”

When Mr. Xi won a third term as leader in 2022, he unexpectedly retained General Zhang in the military commission. At 72, the commander had been expected to step down. Mr. Xi instead made him China’s top general, tasked with pursuing Mr. Xi’s goal of a breakthrough in military capabilities by 2027.

China faced an increasingly perilous world, Mr. Xi said two weeks later during a visit to the Joint Operations Command Center. “Direct all our energies to combat readiness,” he said.

Last Man Standing

But just over half a year later, in 2023, the veneer of stability cracked. Mr. Xi abruptly replaced the Rocket Force’s top commander and his deputy — an extraordinary move in the arm of the military that controls nuclear and conventional missiles. The purge was never publicly explained. Then China’s defense minister was dismissed without explanation.

Suddenly, Mr. Xi’s transformation of the People’s Liberation Army looked plagued by the same problems of corruption and disobedience that he claimed to have excised.

This time, Mr. Xi brought his commanders to Yan’an, the hallowed base of Mao’s revolution, where Mr. Xi called for a deepening campaign of “political rectification.” In the two years that followed, dozens of high-ranking officers were removed or disappeared from public view.

As the campaign widened, so did the power of Gen. Zhang Shengmin, the commander steering the investigations. He had risen through the ranks despite having little experience in military operations. In the Rocket Force, he was a political commissar, enforcing party loyalty. He was known for his love of Chinese brush calligraphy.

He was later promoted to a newly created agency that investigates graft and disloyalty in the military. His ascent reflected the importance Mr. Xi gave to ideological control and political loyalty, even as he also called for battlefield readiness.

“In Xi’s analysis, failures of readiness stemming from corruption are merely an outgrowth of ideological impurity,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior fellow at the National Defense University in Washington who studies China’s military. “The rot was perhaps deeper than Xi imagined in 2023, and so he needed to take more drastic steps.”

Gen. Zhang Shengmin’s powers were most likely enhanced by pervasive surveillance technologies that gave investigators more tools to spy into the lives, and financial flows, of officers and their families, said Mr. Culver, the researcher at Brookings.

By late 2025, the purges were reshaping not just the ranks but the balance of power among remaining commanders. Analysts suggested that as the investigations deepened, there was growing turbulence inside the military elite, including between commanders focused on warfighting goals and officers tasked with enforcing political loyalty.

“Xi is trapped in a red versus expert contradiction,” said Mr. Thompson, the former Pentagon official, referring to “red” as loyalty to the party.

With China’s next leadership transition due at a Communist Party congress late next year, in this reading, Mr. Xi appeared more sensitive to perceived threats to his authority. His top commander, Gen. Zhang Youxia, seemed more dominant, with many potential rivals toppled. But he was not untouched: The investigations had also brought down other generals linked to him, potentially implicating him.

And the chief investigator, Gen. Zhang Shengmin, was rising.

The final straw came when Mr. Xi moved to promote Gen. Zhang Shengmin to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, said Christopher K. Johnson, a former U.S. government intelligence officer who is now president of China Strategies Group, a consultancy firm.

Gen. Zhang Youxia, backed by his second-in-command, Gen. Liu Zhenli, objected to that proposal because placing an investigator in such a powerful position risked painting the People’s Liberation Army as an unserious combat force, Mr. Johnson said.

Modern Chinese history offers examples of commanders who overestimated how far they could push their leaders. General Zhang appears to have done the same. “Zhang Youxia thought, ‘I’ve got the credentials to say this,’ and it turns out he didn’t,” Mr. Johnson said.

When he and his deputy were removed early this year, the official military newspaper accused them of having “gravely trampled on” the chairman responsibility system, which Mr. Xi had built up to cement his control over the military.

Mr. Xi is not stopping there. In April, he launched a program of “ideological rectification” and “revolutionary forging” within the military — an indoctrination drive, in other words. Mr. Xi addressed the assembled senior officers, described as the first batch of attendees in Beijing, suggesting that the campaign to instill loyalty would roll on.

Television footage of the meeting showed rows of officers diligently taking notes as Mr. Xi spoke. Sitting next to him was Gen. Zhang Shengmin, the enforcer.

Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues.

More in Asia Pacific

• 

  Jiang Huaipeng/Xinhua, via Associated Press

• 

  Roslan Rahman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Caroline Chia/Reuters

• 

  Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times

• 

  Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

• 

• 

  Orhan Qereman/Reuters

Editors’ Picks

• 

  Chris McGrath/Getty Images

• 

  Ron Galella Collection, via Getty Images

• 

  Nada Hayek

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Life was different in the 1950s. Homes cost less than a quarter of what they do now. Living room TV screens weren't much bigger than a modern laptop. Construction was starting for the Glen Canyon Dam. Humans had yet to travel to space.

Someone who grew up back then can tell you something else: Winters were colder and longer.

Over the past seven decades — the span of the average human life — the number of freezing days has shrunk by weeks in most places across the United States.

Minnesota: Dog sledding, ice fishing, pond hockey

“If you're going to live here, you can either shut yourself in for six months, or you can find a way to thrive. And a lot of people do that,” said Kenny Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist at the Minnesota State Climatology Office.

But winters in the Midwestern state are not what they used to be. On average, they are getting warmer.

It doesn’t mean every winter is warmer than the last, Blumenfeld said, adding that there are ups and downs from natural events like El Niño, but for a state that relies so heavily on winter, the inconsistency can still have consequences.

“It's kind of like [an] unnerving sense where we can't depend on winter,” Blumenfeld said.

Warmer winters have disrupted many events, big and small. In 2025, the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon, a 300-mile race, was postponed for two months because the lack of snow and ice had made the course unsafe. In 2024, the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships, in Minneapolis were canceled because warm weather made the lake ice unplayable. In neighboring Wisconsin, the American Birkebeiner ski race also has been shortened and canceled in recent years.

Minnesota’s lakes have lost an average of 10 to 22 days of ice cover in the past century, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. 

Though the season is still long enough to go ice fishing, the timing of the freeze is also important. For example, if it's not icy by the time winter break starts, some people might cancel reservations at cabins, Blumenfeld said.

'One-two punch' on snowpacks

Our analysis shows that in cities that had fewer freezing days, the coldest temperature of the season has increased by an average 5.7 degrees since 1956.

And when temperatures get warmer, that’s bad news for snowpacks.

“The warmer your atmosphere is, the more likely you’re going to get closer to that melting point, and you’re going to start seeing more of that winter precipitation falling as rain instead of snow,” said Elizabeth Burakowski, a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. “That has a one-two punch on a snowpack.”

When snow falls on snow, it accumulates. But when rain falls on snow, it can accelerate melting. White snow is bright and reflective, but as it melts, it exposes darker ground underneath. This absorbs more of the sun’s energy, warming and melting the snowpack in what is known as the albedo feedback loop.

Towns and cities across the country rely on winter activities like skiing, snowboarding and snowmobiling to support their economies. Cold, snowy days are a basic requirement.

Even considering the cold chill in the East at the start of the winter, the contiguous United States had its second-warmest winter in 131 years of recordkeeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In January, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz told investors that season-to-date skier visits were down 20% compared with last year. In the Rockies, 11% of terrain was open in December.

The vast majority of resorts use snowmaking, which sustains about 1 in 6 skiable acres, to run their operations, according to a report from the National Ski Areas Association.

Though it can help during years when not enough snow falls, temperatures still need to be cold enough – a couple of degrees below freezing if the humidity is low, but ideally colder.

Colorado researchers and consultants had projected that shorter winter recreation seasons could lead to the loss of millions to tens of millions of visits annually by 2050 in the state and around the country.

Less water, more fires

Communities across the West are preparing for water restrictions this year – including those that control how often people can water their lawns, how often their sheets are washed at hotels, and whether they are served water when they eat at a restaurant.

And the effects of drought can be felt long after winter is over. A recent study found that an earlier spring snowmelt contributes to a longer fire season with more area burned, and that lower snowpack accumulation can lead to more severe fires in the West.

More ticks and mosquitoes

As the frozen season shrinks, some insects and animals are thriving – much to human dismay. The range of bark beetles has exploded, allowing them to ravage more forests.

“Because of warming, we’re getting fewer frost days which, would provide these killing temperatures for these kinds of pathogen species, so they are able to survive in these areas where historically they weren’t able to occur,” said John Kimball, an ecology professor at the University of Montana.

Ticks, which carry Lyme disease, have been marching north and west. A 2019 paper noted that most ticks are active from “the time that the snow melts in the spring until the reappearance of the snow cover in the fall.”

Increased temperatures lengthen the season when ticks are active, increase their survival rate and expand their habitat.

Lyme disease can cause rashes, fever, facial paralysis, and muscle and joint aches, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some mosquitoes also benefit from warmer winters.

“They don’t regulate their own body temperature, so whatever temperature it is outside is the temperature that the mosquitoes’ body is, and its metabolism depends on that temperature,” said Erin Mordecai, a Stanford associate professor of biology.

In the U.S., West Nile virus is now the most common mosquito disease, but it wasn’t always like this. It was first discovered in Uganda in 1937 and only at the turn of the century it got to New York. According to the CDC, it’s been reported in every state since then.

The virus can cause flu-like symptoms, but severe cases can end up with hospitalizations and death.

For an upcoming paper, Mordecai and her team looked at temperature, mosquito surveillance and human case data in New York for the quarter century after the West Nile virus first appeared there.

“You kind of get to this point in the springtime, where it goes from below 16.7 (degrees C) to above, and when that point is happening has been starting earlier and ending later in the year,” Mordecai said.

The researchers found that warmer temperatures have expanded the transmission season by 20 days, a trend that was more likely to occur because of climate change.

A sweet and fickle harvest

"I always say, if you ever wanted to see God say 'Hold my beer and watch this,' you try to make maple syrup," said said Blackman’s sister Jennifer Reisenbichler, sugarmaker and co-owner of LM Sugarbush in Salem, Indiana. “This is the hardest job I've ever had, if you can call it a job, because no matter what you do, you really can't control the outcome of each season."

In parts of New England, local governments gather with residents on Town Meeting Day in early March to vote on things like town budgets. Historically, it also marked the time of year when farmers would tap maple trees for sap, but over the decades as winters have warmed, that has been shifting earlier.

“If you wait until Town Meeting Day tap, you’re probably going to lose some of the season – you're not going to capture all the sap that you could,” said Steven Roberge, who works at the forestry extension of the University of New Hampshire.

Now, tapping starts on Presidents’ Day or Valentine’ Day.

To produce sap, maples need to go through a daily freeze-thaw cycle, which is why snow is crucial to the forest. It acts as insulation to protect the tree roots from getting too cold. It also moderates warm temperatures, because if it gets too warm, it can end production sooner.

“You can imagine being in New England during colonial times and prior with Indigenous people... Sugar was probably really important,” Roberge said, adding that up until the early 1900s, most of the production was for maple sugar, not syrup, because that was easier to store.

Though the season sometimes gets compressed from two months of normal sap flow into four or six weeks, advances in technology have helped the industry keep up.

Rather than just letting sap drip into a bucket, farmers now use tubing systems with vacuums to speed up the process.

Maple sap has about 2% sugar content. It’s boiled to remove water until it hits about 67% to form syrup. Reverse osmosis, the same technology used to desalinate seawater, removes some of the water from sap and shortens the boiling process.

Research is being done on alternative syrups such as those from sycamores and birch trees – but those don’t taste the same.

Roberge remembers growing up in northern New Hampshire, where every second-grade class would tour a friend’s family sugar house to experience the iconic activity.

“If something would happen to sugar maples, it would be devastating for a lot of people financially," he said. "But I think just from a cultural standpoint, it would be a huge loss here in the Northeast.”

Thinking about how North Carolina, which has a different climate from his home state's, can produce maple syrup makes him optimistic.

“Despite the headlines of climate change, I think there’s always going to be the weather in New Hampshire that will be able to harvest sap,” Roberge said. “But it just won’t be the same as it was 100 years ago.”

Search for your county

Explore the map below to see how many freezing days we experience now compared with 1956.

How we did it

We used a daily temperature dataset from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called nClimGrid-Daily. It provides estimates for square areas about 5 kilometers wide (roughly 3 miles). For every U.S. city or town with a population over 100,000, we used the data from the grid cell closest to its center. We then identified each day that the low temperature reached 32 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. We grouped these freezing days by “water year,” which runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30 of the following year (think of it as the fiscal year used in climate and water research).

For each city and year (1956-2025), we measured several indicators: the total number of freezing days, the first and last freezing day of the season, the longest stretch of consecutive freezing days, and the coldest temperature recorded. To understand how these measures have changed over time, we ran linear regressions for all cities that had sufficient data, which we defined as at least one freezing day in at least half the years – mirroring methods used by Climate Central and other researchers.

This approach helps distinguish long-term changes from natural year‑to‑year variability. We also tested whether the trends were statistically significant. We repeated a similar analysis at the county level. Counties that do not experience freezes every year were included to allow for broader exploration of the data. You can read a full description of our methods and find our code on GitHub. 

 Contributing: Sophie Hartley and Grace Hollars, The Indianapolis Star; Jennifer Borresen,  Alberto Cuadra,  Trevor Hughes,  Karina Zaiets, and Shawn J. Sullivan, USA TODAY. 

 Additional photography: Scott Olson, Getty Images; Forrest Brown, Cheney Orr and Anney Yang. 

During the course of this investigation, in March 2026, the first study connecting data centers to heat islands was published (Marinoni et al., “The data heat island effect”, arXiv). This “preprint” (a preliminary version released before going through peer review) reports an average increase of 2°C around the analyzed data centers.

The study drew methodological criticism from independent science communicator Andy Masley, the senior researcher for Omdia, Vlad Galabov and University of Bristol researcher Chris Preist, all of whom coincided on a single point: The study does not separate the heat produced by the servers from that which accumulates from simply replacing vegetation with roofs and pavement. Masley also pointed out that the paper does not compare other types of commercial buildings and that the resolution of the MODIS sensor used in the study (1 km per pixel) prevents one from distinguishing the data center from the surrounding area.

Amenaza Roboto’s analysis used Landsat, with a resolution 33 times greater, controlling for all of these factors. According to the literature reviewed, it is the first study of its kind to isolate both components.

The global data center industry consumes more energy than many entire countries. Unlike other industrial infrastructure, a data center converts virtually all of the electricity it consumes into heat and dissipates it from a single source, continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Uruguay has positioned itself as a regional hub for this type of infrastructure. Antel operates three data centers—Pando, Pocitos and Lezama. It will equip a fourth server room at the Pando location and build two new centers in Aguada and at a yet-undetermined location. Google is building its own center. According to sources familiar with the industry, three additional private installations are projected to be built. Supporters like to point out that these projects bring economic investment, jobs and development of digital infrastructure.

When discussing the environmental impact of data centers, public debate usually focuses on the consumption of water and energy. The thermal effect on the environment—the heat that these places release into the surrounding communities—does not appear in the conversation. The data demonstrates that this impact does exist, is measurable and yet no one is keeping track of it.

Now there is a way of measuring this impact and a baseline for what comes next. The heat behind the cloud is no longer invisible—and it’s detectable from 700 kilometers high.