Thread by @LyleJMorris

The other shoe has dropped.

CMC member and director of the political work department, Admiral Miao Hua, has been "suspended from duty," suspected of "serious violation of discipline."

A 🧵 on what we know and implications for party-army relations.
eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114…

Since the 6-member CMC was announced at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, 2 have been placed under investigation: Li Shangfu and Miao Hua. This alone constitutes a major failure for Xi's most trusted PLA leaders, who are thoroughly vetted beforehand.

Quietly, over the past two years, Xi Jinping has launched one of the largest purges of senior leaders in the PLA in recent memory, removing at least fourteen senior military leaders.

The target of the purge appears to be China’s rocket and equipment development forces, but now also appears to be targeting the PLA Navy.

These include the last three ministers of defense (Wei Fenghe, Li Shangfu and Dong Jun); Li Yuchao and Xu Zhongbo – the commander and political commissar of the PLARF; former PLARF commander Zhou Yaning, head of the PLARF armaments department Lu Hong; former PLARF deputy Li Chuanguang; and Gen. Ding Laihang, the former Commander of the PLA Air Force until September 2021.

There are also rumors that former PLAN political commissar Qin Shengxiang and current political commissar Yuan Huazhi are under investigation. renminbao.com/rmb/articles/2…

SOE executives involved in arms procurement, along with engineers and scientists, have come under scrutiny as well.
In December, 2023, the CPPCC revoked the memberships of three senior leaders of Chinese military-industrial state-owned enterprises (SOEs): Liu Shiquan, chair of weapons manufacturer China North Industries Group, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp chair Wu Yansheng, and China Aerospace Science & Industry Corp executive Wang Changqing.

In the same month, Hu Wenming, a former chairman of China Shipbuilding Industry Co., who oversaw the country’s aircraft carrier development program, was sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment on corruption charges more than three years after Communist Party inspectors first opened a probe against him.

Finally, on October 11, 2024, Xiao Longxu, the former chief engineer of the rocket force’s top research institute and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was removed as a representative of the CPPCC.

Taken together, this is by far the largest shake-up of PLA leadership and SOEs involved in military procurement in recent memory. It suggests deep anxiety and disfunction within the ranks of China’s military, and a failure of trust between Xi and the military.

With the reforms in 2015, Xi has attempted to stabilize 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.

While such initiatives may expose more cases of graft, however, they have not succeeded in rooting out corruption at a systematic level. This is because deep, endemic issues in party-army relations predate Xi, and indeed have existing since the Mao Zedong era, whereby kickbacks and buying and selling of promotions have been standard practice for decades..

In other words, corruption in China’s military is not a case of a “few bad apples.” It is part of “doing business” in the PLA to a much greater extent than most other military organizations around the world, where the rule of law and checks and balances can serve to expose major acts of nepotism and corruption.

Despite Xi’s best efforts, corruption in the PLA will endure and bedevil Xi and his successor for the foreseeable future. /END

Here is what I wrote on the CMC lineup from Oct. 2022. A lot has changed since then. asiasociety.org/policy-institu…