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After months of intense speculation and official silence, China has finally acknowledged that two former defense ministers who disappeared from public view last year were under investigation on corruption charges.
Their dramatic downfall exposes alleged deep-rooted deception at key arms of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s military modernization push despite a decade-long anti-corruption campaign, raising questions about China’s fighting posture at a time of rising geopolitical tensions.
Li Shangfu, who was fired as defense minister in October last year after just seven months in the position, and Wei Fenghe, who served as defense minister from 2018 to 2023, have been investigated and expelled from the Communist party, and both cases have been handed over to military prosecutors for prosecution, state media reported on Thursday.
The two men are the biggest topples so far in a major purge of China’s defense industry, with more than a dozen senior generals and officials from the country’s military-industrial complex having been ousted since last summer.
The turmoil among the top brass of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks to make China’s military stronger, more combat-ready and more aggressive in asserting its disputed claims in the region.
At the height of their careers, former defense ministers Li and Wei often spoke in tough terms before the world’s top military officials. At successive regional security forums, the generals warned that the Chinese military would fight “at all costs” if anyone tried to “separate” Taiwan’s autonomy from China. They also implicitly criticized the United States and vowed to resist its “hegemony” in the South China Sea dispute.
Both men were promoted under Xi but their dismissals come despite China’s leaders waging an anti-corruption campaign for more than a decade, analysts say, highlighting the difficulty of combating corruption at the highest levels of the military.
President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has had some success, but a lack of proper civilian oversight and an independent legal system means the PLA has to rely on internal investigators for oversight, said James Char, a research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. “That’s difficult, so corruption will undoubtedly continue,” he said.
AP/Reuters
Former defence minister Li Shangfu and his predecessor Wei Fenghe were expelled from the Communist party amid corruption allegations.
China has been pouring billions of dollars into buying and upgrading equipment as part of President Xi’s ambitions to transform the People’s Liberation Army into a “world-class” fighting force. Xi has also developed an elite rocket force that oversees a rapidly expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Most of the generals who were dismissed or disappeared without cause last year, including Li and Wei, were linked to the rocket force or military equipment.
Prior to becoming defense minister, Li headed the PLA’s equipment development department for five years. A former engineer, he spent decades launching rockets and satellites in southwest China before being promoted to the PLA headquarters and put in charge of military equipment procurement.
Wei, 70, was the first commander of the Rocket Force. In late 2015, Xi elevated the force from the People’s Liberation Army’s former missile unit, the Second Artillery Corps, to a full military force, where Wei served for decades. Wei’s two successors at the Rocket Force were also purged.
The allegations against Li, published by 24 members of the party’s Politburo, clearly point to corruption in arms procurement.
According to state-run CCTV, Li was accused of accepting bribes and misusing his power, as well as “severely polluting the political environment and industrial practices in the military equipment sector”.
Joel Wutnow, a senior fellow at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University, said the carefully chosen language indicated complicity between the state-owned companies that make the weapons and the People’s Liberation Army’s procurement system.
“We know there is collusion, but it’s not clear that the key weapons are actually substandard or unreliable, and the Chinese Communist Party would not admit it,” Wutnow said. “If proven, that would be even more serious for Xi, because it would raise questions not just about ethics, but about the actual military equipment.”
Analyst Char said the PLA’s procurement system has long been problematic.
In 2018, a study written by China’s Naval Engineering University, Naval Acquisition Center and Central Military Commission Inspection Office analyzed bid-rigging practices in the PLA’s equipment procurement and called for improvements to the bidding system.
“These issues in procurement and acquisition raise questions about the quality of the equipment the PLA previously purchased. How well will they actually perform in the field? I think that’s quite debatable,” Schaal said.
As a sign that China’s top military leaders are concerned about the quality of their equipment, General He Weidong, vice chairman of the military’s oversight body, Central Military Commission (CMC), vowed in March to crack down on “fake combat capabilities” within the military, Mr. Cha said.
“His comments were subsequently embargoed, which I think says a lot about the actual combat capabilities of this equipment,” Char said.
Jason Lee/Reuters/File
Military vehicles carrying DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles pass through Tiananmen Square during a military parade marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in 2019.
Li and Wei are the most senior military officials to be ousted in six years by President Xi’s relentless anti-corruption campaign.
Since coming to power in 2012, China’s leaders have made rooting out corruption and disloyalty a hallmark of their rule, ousting powerful generals once thought untouchable.
During the first few years of his first term, Xi Jinping killed two of the military’s most senior officials, Xu Caihou, a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Guo Boxiong. Xu later died of cancer and Guo was sentenced to life in prison for corruption.
Wutnow said that in some ways the recent corruption scandal involving the two former defense ministers is “even worse for President Xi Jinping” than the Xu and Guo affair a decade ago.
“You could say that Xi Jinping was doing an internal cleanup at the time,” he said, noting that Xu and Guo had been appointed to the Central Military Commission under former President Jiang Zemin, but Wei and Li were promoted under Xi.
“The cases of Wei and Li show that President Xi’s own vetting process and his much-vaunted anti-corruption campaign of the past decade have not been successful in preventing corruption at the top of the system,” Wutnow said.
“I think this shows once again that Xi Jinping has lost confidence in his own appointees.”
Wei was promoted to general just over a week after Xi took control of the party, while Li was promoted to lieutenant general and then general again just three years later.
The Politburo statement said Li and Guo’s actions had “betrayed the trust and responsibility” placed in them by the highest party and military leadership. CCTV reported that Li was accused of “betraying the party’s founding aspirations and party principles” and Guo of “breaking down his convictions and losing his loyalty.”
“Xi Jinping must feel personally betrayed by this high-level corruption,” wrote Bill Bishop, China watcher and author of the Cynosure newsletter.
But Xi is determined to root out corruption and disloyalty. Last month, he called for deeper political reform of the People’s Liberation Army at a political work conference for senior military officials in Yan’an, a holy place in the party’s history for the Chinese Communist revolution.
“The barrel of the gun must always be in the hands of those who are loyal to the Party and trustworthy,” Xi told the PLA elites. “Rigor is clearly necessary to improve combat effectiveness. There must be no room for corrupt elements to hide in the military.”
Char, the Singapore-based PLA watcher, said Xi’s cleanup of the military and its procurement system bodes well for China’s fighting capabilities in the long term.
“The issue is being revised from time to time, and it will be constantly under review as to how Xi Jinping can actually modernize the PLA and realize his dream of modernizing the PLA by 2035.”
