New Delhi: China’s sweeping purge of senior military leaders has entered a new and more punitive phase. After a 22-month judicial process, two former defence ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, were Thursday sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, according to China’s state news agency Xinhua.
Under Chinese law, a two-year reprieve means the sentences are expected to be commuted to life imprisonment without parole if they demonstrate good behaviour, effectively ensuring the ministers spend the remainder of their lives behind bars.
Wei was convicted of accepting bribes, while Li was found guilty of both accepting and offering bribes, the authorities said. Both men were expelled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and dismissed from the military in 2025 before being handed over to military prosecutors.
Li Shangfu served as China’s defence minister for only seven months in 2023 before disappearing from public view and later being removed from office. His predecessor, Wei Fenghe, held the post for five years.
The punishments are widely expected to serve as a warning to senior officers across the armed forces that rank, influence and political ties offer no guarantee of protection amid President Xi Jinping’s widening military purge, The Guardian reported.
Although the title of defence minister carries diplomatic prominence, the position holds relatively little operational authority in China’s political system, where control of the military rests with the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. Both men, however, previously occupied influential posts that oversaw weapons procurement, military modernisation and major defence budgets, giving them access to sensitive programmes and vast financial resources.
Before becoming defence minister, Li Shangfu led the military’s equipment procurement department from 2017 to 2022, overseeing acquisitions tied to China’s rapidly expanding defence modernisation efforts. Wei Fenghe previously commanded the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, the branch responsible for managing China’s nuclear missile arsenal.
One of the officers brought in to replace the purged Rocket Force leadership was Wang Houbin—now himself among the nine senior officials expelled from the Communist Party.
The purge has extended beyond the military into civilian leadership. Foreign minister Qin Gang disappeared from public view in 2023 before being removed from office. Liu Jianchao, who had been widely viewed as a potential successor, has also not been seen publicly since July.
Xi’s purge streak
The armed forces crackdown has seen more than a hundred senior military officers purged since 2022, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank.
This includes people who have disappeared from public view with no explanation, The Guardian reported.
The purges intensified sharply in 2025, with 15 general officers officially removed with nine expelled from the CCP and six dismissed from their posts. There was also a rise in the number of senior officers believed to be under investigation or potentially purged. Based on their unexplained absence from major events, CSIS said that at least 46 general officers disappeared from public view in 2025. For example, at the CCP’s fourth plenum in October 2025, 14 generals and five lieutenant generals were absent, in addition to those who had been expelled.
In the same year, the Chinese Communist Party’s disciplinary authorities opened more than one million investigations, nearly seven times the number recorded when Xi Jinping first came to power.
In 2025, CCP expelled nine top generals in one of its largest public crackdowns on the military in decades.
In January, Xi abruptly removed senior generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli from the 7-member Central Military Commission. Zhang Youxia was second only to Xi Jinping and viewed as his closest confidante. The general was removed allegedly over “grave violations of discipline and the law, according to a defence ministry statement.
The 75-year-old Zhang was the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, the party body that controls the armed forces. Xi is the head of the military body.
Zhang was the last of the six commanders appointed by Xi to the CMC in 2022 to be removed. With two of the top ranking officials now under investigation, the CMC is left with only one member apart from Xi himself—General Zhang Shengmin, who oversees Xi’s military purges. Zhang Shengmin was promoted to the commission only last year.
Then, in early April, Ma Xingrui, the party secretary of Xinjiang, was placed under investigation. His removal marked the first time since Mao Zedong’s era that three sitting Politburo members had been removed during a single five-year party term.
“What began as an anti-corruption push has evolved into an extensive apparatus for managing cadres, enforcing political priorities, and supervising policy implementation. Xi’s discipline campaign should thus be understood as a sweeping effort to transform the CCP itself”, a May 2026 Foreign Affairs article noted.
In the past year, the Communist Party has publicly removed at least nine top generals, many of them members of the party’s powerful Central Committee and among the highest-ranking officers in the Chinese military establishment.
Among the most prominent was He Weidong in March 2025, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and the second-highest ranking officer in China after Xi himself, who chairs the commission. He had not appeared in public since March. His removal made him the first sitting member of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s top decision-making body, to be purged in years.
Others expelled included Miao Hua, who oversaw ideological and political control within the military; He Hongjun, executive deputy director of the CMC’s political work department; Wang Xiubin, executive deputy director of the CMC’s joint operations command centre; Lin Xiangyang, Eastern Theatre commander; Qin Shutong, the Army’s political commissar; Yuan Huazhi, the Navy’s political commissar; Wang Houbin, Rocket Forces commander and Wang Chunning, the Armed Police Force commander.
In a statement, China’s defence ministry accused the men of “seriously violating party discipline” and engaging in “extremely serious” financial crimes involving enormous sums of money. The ministry described the campaign as a major achievement in the party’s anti-corruption drive.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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