A Chinese general has hanged himself in his Beijing home after becoming the latest top official ensnared in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) sweeping anti-corruption campaign, state media said yesterday.
Zhang Yang (張陽), the director of the Central Military Commission’s political department, was being investigated over connections to two corruption-tainted former senior military officers when he committed suicide on Thursday last week, Xinhua news agency reported.
The probe into Zhang followed Xi’s pledge last month during the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 19th National Congress to intensify graft crackdowns, which have already brought down 1.5 million party officials of various levels — including top military brass — since 2012.
Xinhua cited a commission statement that said Zhang “gravely violated disciplinary protocols and broke the law, was suspected of bribery as well as taking bribes, and holding valuable assets whose origins are unclear.”
A post on a social media account managed by the People’s Liberation Army Daily, the military’s newspaper, accused Zhang of “escaping responsibility” via suicide.
“The once-high-and-mighty general has ended his life in this disgraceful way,” the post said, calling Zhang a “two-faced” person who “shouted loyalty from his mouth, while committing corruption behind his back.”
“The army holds the barrel of a gun — we cannot allow any corrupt elements to hide behind it,” it said.
Zhang was linked to Guo Boxiong (郭伯雄) and Xu Caihou (徐才厚), top army officials who were expelled from the CCP.
Guo, a vice chairman of the commission, became the most senior Chinese People’s Liberation Army official to be convicted of corruption in half of century when he was sentenced to life imprisonment last year.
Xu, also a vice chairman, died of cancer in 2015 while under investigation for graft.
Critics of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, which has promised to take down both high-level “tigers” and low-level “flies,” claim it is a front for removing the Chinese president’s political enemies.
In the past, graft-fighting efforts have relied heavily on a shadowy, extralegal internal justice system known as shuanggui, but Xi announced during last month’s congress that the tool would be phased out and replaced with a new legal mechanism.
Chinese courts have a near-perfect conviction rate of 99.92 percent.
Xi has sought to enhance his control over the 2 million-strong military, the world’s largest, reshuffling its leadership and vowing to make it “world class” by 2050.
The military was ordered earlier this month to pledge to be “absolutely loyal, honest and reliable to Xi” in a new guideline released by the military leadership.
Though China’s military budget remains three times smaller than that of the US, its spending has grown steadily for 30 years on the construction of fighter jets, ships and high-tech weaponry.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS