China’s defence minister Li Shangfu has disappeared as signs of trouble within the military establishment deepen. Li has been put under investigation, according to sources who spoke to Financial Times. He isn’t the only one from China’s military establishment who has disappeared or put under investigation, indicating an institutional purge may be underway. Wall Street Journal has now confirmed, citing sources in Beijing, that Li Shangfu was taken away last week by authorities for questioning.
Apart from Li, there are about five to seven very senior current and former military officials who have either been removed or haven’t been seen in public over the last few months. President Xi Jinping has emphasised the need to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party’s hand over the military – giving some clues of internal trouble.
Li Shangfu isn’t a senior defence official in China’s military bureaucracy, but his removal would confirm some of the recent systematic issues within the PLA.
On Friday, the Financial Times reported that three US officials and two other officials briefed on the intelligence concluded that Li may have already been removed from his position as the defence minister.
Li is the third high-level serving official to disappear from the public eye after former foreign minister Qin Gang — abruptly removed from his position after just six months in office — and Gen. Li Yuchao from the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) elite Rocket Force.
Even Li Yuchao’s deputy, General Liu Guangbin, has disappeared from public view and may be under investigation. Besides these officials, former defence minister Wei Fenghe hasn’t been seen in public for months, and some have argued he may also be under investigation. Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen in public for three weeks after cancelling a series of meetings without any explanation.
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The purging
Last week, Li pulled out of a meeting with Vietnamese defence leaders, which was scheduled to take place on 7 and 8 September. Vietnamese officials have said Beijing told them that Li had to skip the meeting because of a “health condition”.
Health reasons were also cited when former foreign minister Qin Gang disappeared in June.
Li was last seen in Beijing on 29 August during the 3rd China-Africa Peace and Security Forum, where he delivered a keynote address.
Li has previously served as a deputy commander in the General Armaments Department of the PLA, which is in charge of the weapons and military equipment procurement. The General Armaments Department is considered one of the most corrupt of the PLA, said Dennis Wilder, former CIA analyst.
The defence minister was sanctioned by the US under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in 2018 for his involvement in the purchase of 10 SU-35 combat aircraft and equipment related to the S-400 surface-to-air missile system from Russia.
China has accused the US for not lifting sanctions against Li after the US Secretary of Defence Llyod Austin’s request to meet with Li was turned down by Beijing.
The latest purge of the defence official shows that Xi Jinping faces an insurmountable challenge to reform the PLA despite carrying out an anti-corruption campaign over his last two terms. The recent turmoil in the Rocket Force’s top leadership confirms that there are problems across various branches of the PLA that Xi is unable to fix.
The US ambassador to Japan has shared tell-tale signs of Li’s disappearance over the past week.
“As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” 1st: Defense Minister Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen or heard from in 3 weeks. 2nd: He was a no-show for his trip to Vietnam. Now: He’s absent from his scheduled meeting with the Singaporean Chief of Navy because he was placed on house arrest???…Might be getting crowded in there,” said Rahm Emanuel, the US Ambassador to Japan.
If Emanuel is correct, then Li has skipped his meeting with Singaporean officials planned for this week, which would just confirm that he may have been removed.
On 8 September, US Ambassador Emanuel had earlier said on X, previously Twitter, that Xi’s cabinet lineup resembles the story from Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None.
Ambassador Emanuel seems to know something that we don’t. It provides insight into how the US may be highly active inside China to provide such accurate assessments about Li’s whereabouts.
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CCP’s heavy hand on PLA
There are also signs of trouble within China’s leading defence contractor North Industries Group Corporation Limited (NORINCO)
NORINCO posted on their WeChat account that some individuals have registered a fake subsidiary of China’s defence company and engaged in business on behalf of the company
Such cases tell you that China’s burgeoning state-owned defence contractor industry is suffering from systematic problems of corruption and other types of illegal activities.
In the recent months, Xi Jinping has made repeated pronouncements about improving military governance by strengthening the hand of the CCP, which seems to have gone weak.
“We have embarked on a new journey to ‘build a world-class army’. Military governance is a profound change that the Party has promoted in the critical period of strengthening the military, based on reality and facing the future, to effectively solve the contradictions and problems in the field of national defence and military modernization,” Xi had said during the seventh collective study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in July.
Li’s disappearance may not come as a blow to the PLA as the more senior Vice Chairmans Zhang Youxia, and He Weidong would be able to carry out the routine work. However, PLA continues to exercise its new brigade formations – which mimic the US Army – both in the Eastern Ladakh theatre and the Fujian theatre across Taiwan. These modernisation efforts would likely face setbacks as the shake-up across the military bureaucracy continues.
Xi Jinping wants to forge a world-class military while the PLA’s old systematic problems bear down on modernisation efforts. Li’s future may not be entirely clear, but the trouble in the PLA only proves that China’s defence modernisation, which Xi has spent significant effort pursuing since 2015, hasn’t been going very well.
From what we know about Xi, he has mastered the art of purging ‘cliques’ by removing officials on the margins who may conspire to form factions. Xi may not immediately suffer from these purges and more disappearances of senior officials are likely to follow.
The author is a columnist and a freelance journalist. He was previously a China media journalist at the BBC World Service. He tweets @aadilbrar. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)