Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military.
The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Zhang Youxia (張又俠), who was a Politburo member and long seen as an ally of Xi.
Li had been suspected of receiving “huge sums of money” in bribes as well as bribing others, and an investigation found he “did not fulfill political responsibilities” and “sought personal benefits for himself and others.”
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An investigation launched into Wei in 2023 found that he had accepted “a huge amount of money and valuables” in bribes, and “helped others gain improper benefits in personnel arrangements,” Xinhua reported in 2024, adding that his actions were “extremely serious in nature, with a highly detrimental impact and tremendous harm.”
A death sentence with reprieve in China is typically commuted to life imprisonment if the offender commits no crimes during the period of reprieve.
After the commutation, Wei and Li would be imprisoned for life without the possibility of further commutation or parole, Xinhua said.
Commutations for minister-level convictions in China are not unusual. Former Chinese minister of justice Fu Zhenghua (傅政華) in 2022 was sentenced to death, with the sentence later commuted to life in prison. The same happened with former Chinese minister of railways Liu Zhijun (劉志軍), who was convicted in 2013.
The PLA in its official newspaper called on Chinese Communist Party members and its military cadres to heed the lessons from the two cases, warning against harboring “divided loyalties toward the party.”
“Party members and cadres in the military, particularly senior officers, must take corrupt officials such as Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, who have been investigated and punished, as cautionary examples,” the PLA Daily said in a commentary published yesterday.
The military said Wei and Li had caused great damage to the party’s cause, national defense and military construction, as well as the image of senior leaders.
“That Wei and Li have been ‘commuted to life imprisonment without parole or commutation’ underlines the severity of their offenses, given that such sentences are typically reserved for serious crimes,” said James Char (蔡志祥), an academic at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
Foreign diplomats and analysts are watching the ongoing corruption purges closely.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, earlier this year said that the purges were leaving serious deficiencies in the military’s command structure and were likely to have hampered the readiness of China’s rapidly modernizing armed forces.
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