Two of China’s highest-ranking military officers have been kicked out of the Communist Party and the armed forces on corruption grounds, the nation’s defense ministry announced on 17th October, the highest-ranking officials to be expelled in a 2023 anti-graft campaign.
China’s second most senior general, He Weidong, and navy admiral Miao Hua, the former top political commissar in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, are the latest high-ranking military officers to be targeted in an anti-corruption campaign in the People’s Liberation Army.
His ouster is the first of a sitting general on the Central Military Commission since the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. He has been out of sight since March, but the probe of his activities was not previously announced by Chinese authorities.
President Xi’s ‘cleaning house,’ says analyst
He, Miao, and seven other top military leaders listed in the statement “seriously broke Party discipline and are suspected of serious duty-related crimes involving a vast amount of money,” defense ministry spokesman Zhang Xiaogang said.
Their acts were “of serious nature, with extremely harmful effects,” the statement said, describing it as a “good achievement in the Party and military’s anti-corruption campaign.”
The dismissal of He, 68, has consequences that go beyond the military, as he was also a member of the 24-member Politburo, the second-highest rung of the Communist Party ruling bureaucracy.
One of the commission’s two vice-chairmen, the general is the People’s Liberation Army’s third-most powerful commander and has been regarded as one of President Xi Jinping’s closest allies, the army’s commander-in-chief.
The move was announced mere days before the Communist Party’s Central Committee, a small elite of 200-plus top officials, will meet in Beijing for its Fourth Plenum. Further personnel decisions, including expelling and replacing Central Committee members, will likely be finalized at the session.
“Xi is clearing the house for certain. The official ousting of He and Miao means he will be able to appoint fresh members of the Central Military Commission – effectively half empty since March – at the Plenum,” said Wen-Ti Sung, fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.
Miao was previously stripped of his position in the Central Military Commission in June after he was placed under investigation for “serious violations of discipline” in November.
The other listed officials are He Hongjun, once a senior officer in the PLA Political Work Department, Wang Xiubin of the Central Military Commission’s Joint Operations Command Centre, former Eastern Theatre Command commander Lin Xiangyang, and two ex-political commissars of the PLA Army and Navy. Many of these officials had been out of public sight for some months, it has been observed.
The former People’s Armed Police commander Wang Chunning, also listed in the statement, was expelled from the national legislature last month, along with three other PLA generals.
He and Xi
The purge of He is a negative indication for a man with a long history of operational experience and close connections to Xi.
His connection with the president dates back to their concurrent service in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces in the late 1990s. Xi served as governor of the province and deputy party secretary from 1995 to 2002.
He became a member of the military commission after serving as commander of the PLA’s Eastern Theatre in Fujian province, which faces Taiwan and would be the crucial area in any war over the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing as its territory.
In 2022, He was put directly on the vice-chair of the military commission, bypassing the typical intermediate step of being a member of the 205-member Central Committee.
The Pentagon has said He played a key role in planning live-fire drills around Taiwan after Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the US House of Representatives, angered China by visiting Taipei in August 2022. The exercises were the most aggressive moves Beijing has made against the island in recent years.
