I'm not saying that those guys weren't corrupt, but that's a classic authoritarian pattern. Purging anybody who might potentially in the future be a threat to your rule is step two in any authoritarian playbook. Were they perchance replaced with unambitious yes men?

To be clear that was 5 of the top 7 in the military not the CCP as a whole. Leaves just Xi and the anti corruption officer.

But yes agreed. It’s very hard to parse what is going on from the outside.

My very uninformed read is that the people who were purged seemed already loyal allies to Xi but had more clout to disagree with him, while the new guys know they are replaceable. The PLA is notoriously corrupt as well so hard to say which of those purges were political control vs corruption based.

I kinda doubt the new guys are unambiguous though you need to be ambitious and risk taking to rise like that in the CCP.

Russia is even tougher on corrupt oligarchs

No, Russia is tough on oligarchs that split from Putin. There is no non-corrupt oligarch.

I think they are meaning "the measure seems meaningless as it would imply Russia is even tougher on corruption" rather than "Russian leadership cares deeply about corruption".

It's a risky play to try to communicate over the internet to a bunch of us literalist nerds :p.

Yes and that's also exactly how Xi deals with illoyal people in China - just accuse them of "corruption". It's the authoritarian playbook.