Why are several Chinese top officials under investigation?

In recent months, a Chinese corruption drama is unfolding. President Xi Jinping has launched several corruption investigations against top military officials, including two former defence ministers.

The most recent target of Xi’s corruption purge is Admiral Miao Hua, a member of the Central Military Commission (CMC), which is the Chinese army’s most powerful body equivalent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military.

On Thursday, during a press conference, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Wu Qian announced that Miaou was now under investigation for “serious violations of discipline”, which usually refers to graft-related issues in Chinese political language.

The announcement follows a Financial Times article, which claimed that the country’s defence minister is also under investigation. But Beijing rejects the allegation, saying that the report has “evil motives” expressing “strong dissatisfaction over such smears.”

“Xi seems not to trust his generals to carry out his aims for the PLA (People’s Liberation Army). Miao was in charge of political matters and Xi does not seem to be satisfied that he has sufficiently introduced the sort of political discipline he wants,” says Charles Parton, the EU’s former First Councillor on China.

“There was a military political work conference earlier in the year, which shows the importance Xi puts on ideology in the PLA,” Parton tells TRT World. Parton is one of the world’s leading experts on the country’s political structure and Xi Thought, which is the most modern interpretation of Chinese Marxism.

The PLA, the world’s largest army, is the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party, which single-handedly leads the world’s second biggest economy. The PLA has four major units: the Ground Force, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force.

Too many bad apples!

Among all these military units, Xi gives much importance to the Rocket Force, which is responsible for the development and protection of the country’s ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. In recent months, the two top officials, who headed the Rocket Force, were dismissed by Xi.

Wei Fenghe, one of the two former defence ministers, who were also put under investigation on corruption accusations, was the commander of the Rocket Force before he became the country’s top secretary on military affairs.

“Xi bucked tradition in 2018 by naming Wei, from the PLA Rocket Forces, to the post instead of an army general,” said Christopher Johnson, a former top CIA China analyst, who is now the head of the risk consultancy China Strategies Group.

But after five years of his defence ministry tenure, he was dismissed. His successor, General Li Shangfu, who also worked for the Rocket Force prior to his stint at the defence ministry, faced the same fate as he had been able to keep his post for only seven months. Last month, Xi appointed Dong Jun to replace Li, but according to the Financial Times, he is also under investigation now.

If the investigation story is true, then Xi might “wonder” which “corner of the PLA is not corrupt”, Johnson told the newspaper.

According to CNN, “more than a dozen high-level military officers and aerospace executives in the military-industrial complex” have been fired in the last six months.

“Corruption in the PLA is going to take Xi a long time to excise. The generals will have had to bribe their way to earlier promotions when they were junior or middle ranking officials. They will have borrowed money to afford the bribes and that money must be repaid and that cannot be done from a PLA officer's salary,” Parton says.

Xi’s future designs

But experts also see that Xi’s purge of top military and political officials have something to do with the ambitious and ideologically-oriented Chinese president’s future plans for the Pacific region, particularly Taiwan, and the wider world.

According to US officials, Beijing set a goal to take over Taiwan, which was founded by the anti-communist Chinese leadership after Mao Zedong’s communist revolution took power in the Asian state in 1949. The goal’s deadline is 2027, both US and Taiwan officials claim.

Parton says that “there is almost certainly a political angle” to current and past corruption investigations. “Perhaps he is unhappy with the pace of getting the army into a condition where it is capable of carrying out his military intentions,” says the former top British diplomat, referring to Taiwan and other potential objectives.

Despite Xi’s ideological determination, it would be difficult to get rid of corruption from the country’s top military brass, according to leading China observers.

“With the reforms in 2015, Xi has attempted to stabilise what is considered an inherently unstable and delicate symbiotic relationship between the Party and the military in one of the world’s last remaining modern Communist-Leninist governance structures,“ wrote Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

But Xi’s anti-graft crusade has “not succeeded in rooting out corruption at a systematic level” due to “deep, endemic issues in party-army relations”, which goes back to the communist revolution’s founding figure Mao’s time, according to Morris.