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PRC Purge Expanding? [1]
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Date: 2023-08-02
Last week China’s Foreign Minister (and presumed protege of Xi Jinping), Qin Gang, who hadn’t been seen in public for nearly a month, was abruptly replaced by the long serving previous FM, Wang Yi. This may turn out to be a relatively good thing for both China and her neighbors, since Wang was fairly widely respected as a professional diplomat, unlike Qin who was one of the main proponents of China’s more recent turn to aggressively belligerent Wolf Warrior diplomacy.
But today, the Washington Post has a report out of an apparent purge now under way in China's military leadership, where the heads of the PLA’s Rocket Force (both military and political, with control over all of China’s nuclear weapons) were just as suddenly replaced by outsiders — and who did not come up through the ranks of the PLARF as previous leaders had:
Xi appointed Wang Houbin, the former deputy commander of the navy, as the new head of the PLA Rocket Force, replacing Li Yuchao, who had been commander since January last year. Xu Xisheng, from China’s air force, was made political commissar, an equally senior position in charge of enforcing party directives. Li’s deputy, Liu Guangbin, had also been absent from public view for months, prompting speculation that they were being targeted under Xi’s decade-long campaign to root out graft and inefficiencies in the military. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has overseen a crackdown on corruption across the Chinese military, resulting in the purge of senior commanders like Fang Fenghui, former chief of the joint staff of the People’s Liberation Army, who accompanied Xi on his first in-person meeting with President Donald Trump in 2017. He was sentenced to life in prison for corruption in 2019. ... The ouster of the top two leaders of the force that controls the country’s nuclear arsenal and their replacement with officers from different services is “startling,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at National Defense University. The rocket force is the most sensitive branch of the PLA, and “for someone with zero experience in the service” to replace the commander is “virtually unprecedented,” he said. ... “This is a devastating public humiliation for the rocket force,” said Decker Eveleth, the author of a recent report on the PLA Rocket Force and graduate research assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “[It] signals to everyone that Xi is not confident about the Rocket Force’s ability to police their own. If the PLARF cannot be trusted with the massive amounts of money Beijing is handing them to expand their force, Beijing might begin to think that money could be better used elsewhere.”
More speculation as to what may be going on from Newsweek:
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