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.
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