Ten years after taking office, does Xi Jinping really control the People's Liberation Army (PLA)? The replacement, at the end of July, of the two generals who head the missile force and the disappearance, since August 29, of Defense Minister Li Shangfu raise such questions.
And yet, for the past decade, the Chinese media have constantly repeated that Xi holds three positions: He is the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the president of the republic and also the chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). This body governs the PLA far more than the Ministry of Defense, which plays a more representative role on the international stage. In the Chinese system, the army depends on the Communist Party, not the state. Although Li Shangfu is one of the seven members of the CMC, he is not even one of its two vice presidents.
When Xi came to power in October 2012, the PLA was a mess. "In the 1990s and 2000s, times of enormous social and economic change in China, the PLA drifted in a more independent and politicized direction. Corruption and malfeasance – facilitated through the operation of bars, brothels and transport companies; misappropriation of funds and resources; and selling promotions – was widespread in the ranks and even reached the very top," wrote Bates Gill, director of the China Analysis Center at the Asia Society Policy Institute and author of Daring to Struggle: China's Global Ambitions under Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2022).
As early as 2014, Xi arrested two generals, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, vice chairmen of the CMC, which he had headed for two years. In all, some 13,000 military personnel have been disciplined over the past 10 years, including more than 70 general officers and a dozen generals. At the same time, Xi is radically restructuring the army to break up powerful factions and put the CMC back at the heart of the system. At the same time as allocating more resources to the army, he is reducing its workforce by 300,000 so that the active force is maintained at 2 million men. All these challenges to established privileges have not won him only friends within the army.
But this summer's events seem to suggest that the restructuring is far from over. According to Washington, an investigation has been launched against Li Shangfu on suspicion of corruption. Before becoming a minister, Li, an engineer by training, was one of the fathers of China's space program. In 2017, he was appointed head of the CMC's equipment development department, a kind of overarching director of army procurement. For overseeing the acquisition of Russian equipment in this capacity, he was sanctioned by the United States.
You have 49.21% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.