By Shannon Tiezzi
Is Xi Jinping willing to bring his anti-corruption drive to bear on the People’s Liberation Army?
South China Morning Post reported details this week on an official government raid of the home of Lt. Gen. Gu Junshan, one of the highest-ranking PLA officers to ever be investigated for graft. Gu, who used to be the deputy chief of the PLA’s General Logistics Department, reportedly had quite a collection of treasures at his home in Henan Province, including “a pure gold statue of Mao Zedong, a gold wash basin, a model boat made of gold and crates of Maotai liquor.”
For all the recent fervor in the United States over China’s military modernization programs, corruption within the ranks could be weakening these efforts behind the scenes. According to Xinhua, China’s official defense budget for 2013 was $114.3 billion, a 10.7 percent increase over 2012. Western analysts such as Andrew S. Erickson and Adam P. Liff have noted that it is incredibly difficult to tell exactly what this money is being used for. “China still does not release even basic information that would provide insight into intra-PLA spending priorities, including a budget breakdown by service, the total amount spent on weapons imports, or the procurement costs of specific weapons and platforms,” they told the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2013.
It’s worth wondering, though, if the Chinese government itself keeps a careful eye on where all this money goes. Given the amounts of money Chinese civilian officials have been convicted of embezzling—over $28 million in the case of former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun—if there are similar levels of corruption in the PLA, a significant chunk of China’s defense budget (both reported and unreported) might be used not to develop new weapons systems, but to pad officers’ pockets. There haven’t been nearly as many public reports on corruption in the PLA, but the occasional investigation does suggest the scale of the problem. In 2005, the last military official to be toppled by corruption charges, Adm. Wang Shouye, was rumored to have stolen almost $20 million.
Read the full story at The Diplomat