The Washington Post-Why Chinas Communist Party expelled two former defense ministers

2024-06-28T05:07:19.926Z

China’s expulsion of two former defense ministers from the Chinese Communist Party this week signaled a sharp escalation in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s years-long effort to root out corruption and ensure total loyalty in the armed forces.

The announcement accused Wei Fenghe, defense minister from 2018 to 2023, and his successor, Li Shangfu, who was removed after only seven months in the job, of bribery as well as a crime considered far worse in China: political disloyalty.

The strongly worded statement, released by state broadcaster CCTV late Thursday, was a message to the rest of the People’s Liberation Army to clean up their act and get on board with Xi’s agenda, experts on Chinese politics said.

In a symbolic attempt to rekindle revolutionary zeal, Xi last week gathered top military brass in Yan’an, in rural Shaanxi province, the base for the Communist Party troops who fought Japanese invaders then overthrew the Nationalists in the Chinese civil war, which ended in 1949.

Xi told them there was “no place for corrupt elements in the military.” “The root cause of these problems lies in a lack of ideals and beliefs,” he said.

Earlier in June, he signed off on new audit regulations for the military.

Like similar rectification campaigns by Communist China’s founding leader Mao Zedong in the 1940s, Xi is warning troops that “you might as well admit what you did before I find it,” said Alex Payette, chief executive of Cercius Group, a Montreal-based consultancy focused on elite Chinese politics.

The removals were “a sign of what’s coming,” Payette said. “This was the first shot.”

What are the two former ministers accused of?

After nearly a year of official silence and much speculation over the fate of China’s last two defense ministers, Thursday’s announcement confirmed that Wei and Li were both under investigation for corruption.

Wei had suffered a “collapse of faith,” a meeting of the 24-member Politburo ruled. Li was accused of “departing from principles of party character,” and both had “severely polluted the political environment” of the military, the official readout said.

The downfall of Li and Wei is part of a broader purge of generals and executives in China’s military industrial complex. Many of those who have been dismissed or disappeared were connected to procurement of weapons or to the rocket force, which oversees China’s expanding arsenal of nuclear and ballistic missiles.

Both departments were heavily involved in sweeping — and expensive — hardware upgrades in recent years.

Li was in charge of the Equipment Development Department for five years before becoming defense minister while Wei commanded the rocket force from 2015 to 2018.

“Xi must be feeling personally betrayed by this high-level corruption,” wrote Bill Bishop, author of Sinocism, an influential newsletter about China.

What is Xi trying to achieve?

Since taking office more than a decade ago, Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao, has repeatedly attempted to tackle endemic corruption in the military.

Two former members of the Central Military Commission — China’s most powerful national defense organization, which oversees all armed forces — were investigated and then jailed on corruption charges within Xi’s first two years in power. This established his grip over the nation’s forces to a degree never achieved by his immediate predecessors.

His broader goal is to create a world-class and battle-ready fighting force capable of matching the United States military. China may have the world’s largest standing army, with more than 2 million men and women in uniform, but its troops are untested. Even after massive expansion of its navy, air and rocket forces, Chinese military experts often say that more advanced weaponry is needed to reach parity with the United States.

Xi has also repeatedly overhauled command in his quest to stamp out corruption and modernize the military, but those efforts haven’t always worked as planned.

In 2015, Xi founded the Strategic Support Force to coordinate between different branches of the military. Li was its deputy commander from 2016 to 2017.

But in April this year, six months after Li’s sudden disappearance as defense minister, Xi scrapped the unit and instead launched a new Information Support Force alongside aerospace and cyberspace branches. This reflected what Xi called the critical importance of information technologies in “winning modern warfare battles.”

Why is it so hard to tackle graft?

Unlike democracies such as the United States, where the military reports to civilian leaders, the People’s Liberation Army is the armed wing of the Communist Party. For Xi, as for Mao, “the party commands the gun.”

That means there is little outside supervision and even fewer checks on the power of senior officers.

Problems of lax supervision are inherent in party-controlled military systems, said Lin Ying-yu, an expert on the Chinese military at Tamkang University in Taiwan. “Xi Jinping is in charge of promotions and Xi Jinping is also in charge of arrests,” Lin said. “Within the military structure of the PLA, the overall system lacks oversight and monitoring.”

Entrenched patronage structures and low salaries make bribery for promotions common, something both Li and Wei were both accused of involvement in.

What does this mean for Chinese military strategy?

Experts on the Chinese military say Xi is likely to continue to pursue his ambitions to build a modern and capable fighting force, despite the escalating corruption campaign.

While the expulsions of two former defense ministers from the party is highly unusual, its impact is limited by the way power is structured: In China, high-level decision-making and military strategy are set by Xi and other more senior members of the Central Military Commission, while the defense minister is focused on military diplomacy.

Dong Jun, a career-long naval officer who replaced Li as defense minister in December, is expected to be formally made a member of the Central Military Commission at a meeting of top officials next month.

In public appearances, Dong — like Li and Wei before him — has trumpeted Beijing’s talking points about the United States being a foreign aggressor in Asia and has bluntly defended Chinese sovereignty claims in the South China Sea and over the island democracy of Taiwan.

But the combination of the Yan’an meeting and new audit rules suggest a far-reaching campaign is still underway.

Xi’s remarks indicate that he believes “there is dire need for extensive rectification” and that disloyalty is “a fundamental issue that’s still lingering,” Payette said.

Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.