China investigates top military official as Xi expands purge of PLA generals

By Steven Jiang and Nectar Gan, CNN

Beijing (CNN) — China has suspended a top military official and placed him under investigation for corruption, the Defense Ministry said, as leader Xi Jinping expands a sweeping purge in the upper echelons of the world's largest military.

Admiral Miao Hua, a member of the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC), China's top military body headed by Xi, is under investigation for serious violations of discipline, a euphemism for corruption, said Thursday Ministry of Defense spokesperson Wu Qian at a press conference.

Miao, 69, heads the CMC's political work department. He is widely considered a close protégé of Xi, having served as a political officer in the military in the coastal province of Fujian when Xi was a local official there in the 1990s and early 2000s.

News of Miao's suspension and investigation comes a day after the Financial Times reported that Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun had been investigated for corruption, citing current U.S. officials and elders.

The Defense Ministry spokesperson dismissed the report as a complete fabrication.

These rumor mongers have bad intentions. China expresses its deep dissatisfaction with such smears, he said.

Xi has led a broad crackdown on corruption within China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) since last year, focusing on the Rocket Force, an elite branch overseeing the country's nuclear and conventional missiles.

The purge led to the fall of several high-ranking generals, including former Defense Minister Li Shangfu and his predecessor Wei Fenghe, who were excluded from the party in June following allegations of corruption.

The current unrest in the military's upper echelons comes as Xi seeks to make China's armed forces stronger, more combat-ready and more aggressive in asserting his disputed territorial claims in the region. As part of Xi's ambition to transform the PLA into a world-class fighting force, China has invested billions of dollars in purchasing and upgrading equipment.

Since last summer, more than a dozen high-level military officers and aerospace executives across the military-industrial complex have been removed from public office.

Most of the purged generals were linked to Rocket Force or military outfits, including Li and Wei, the former defense ministers.

Last summer, Li disappeared from public view after just a few months on the job and a few weeks after a surprise shakeup of Rocket Force leadership. He was deleted from his post in October, without any explanation, and replaced by Dong, the current Minister of Defense.

In China, the defense minister plays a largely ceremonial role, serving as the public face of military diplomacy with other countries. And unlike his predecessors, Dong was not appointed to the CMC, which constitutes a major break with the tradition of recent decades.

Miao, the latest senior military official under investigation, is considered a political patron of Dong, who is also an admiral and once served as commander-in-chief of the PLA Navy.

Originally from Fujian, Xi's power base, Miao rose through the ranks in the military's political departments. In 2014, two years after Xi came to power, Miao received a major promotion to become political commissar of the PLA Navy, overlapping Dong's time as deputy chief of naval staff. In 2017, Miao was again promoted to director of the CMC's political work department.

Xi has made rooting out corruption and disloyalty a hallmark of his tenure since coming to power in 2012, and the purges suggest the campaign is far from over within the military.

Corruption in the Chinese military is not the province of a few bad apples. This is part of the PLA's business activities to a much greater extent than in most other military organizations in the world, where the rule of law and checks and balances can be used to expose major acts of nepotism and corruption. said Lyle Morris, foreign policy and national security researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute, on

Despite Xi's best efforts, corruption within the PLA will persist and plague Xi and his successor for the foreseeable future.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. company. Discovery. All rights reserved.