By Shannon Tiezzi
Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has the PLA under the microscope.
China’s Minister of National Defense held its first press conference of 2015 on Thursday. Aside from a brief detour to talk about Chinese naval deployments in the Indian Ocean (which my colleague Franz covered earlier today), the bulk of the questions and answers focused on a very different theme: corruption. Defense ministry spokesman Col. Yang Yujun fielded three separate questions on anti-corruption efforts within the PLA, giving lengthy responses each time.
PLA corruption has been an issue of pressing concern for some time now, but especially since Xi Jinping assumed power. Xi has identified corruption in general as an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party, but military corruption is a threat not only to the CCP but to the country as a whole. As General Liu Yuan put it in an April 2012 speech, “no country can defeat China … only our own corruption can destroy us and cause our armed forces to be defeated without fighting.” For this reason, as I’ve argued previously, anti-corruption within the PLA is an important (but often overlooked) aspect of China’s military modernization drive.
The anti-corruption drive within the PLA has already claimed two high-profile “tigers”: General Xu Caihou, a former vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, and General Gu Junshan, a former deputy chief of the PLA General Logistics Department. As Zi Yang noted back in November 2014, however, in general, the anti-corruption drive was not moving forward as vigorously within military ranks as it was within the civilian realm.
Read the full story at The Diplomat