The routine list of the deputies in the imminent National People’s Assembly o Parliament has revealed 19 casualties, nine of them in the Army. The measure further reduces the military leadership after an intense campaign against the corruption led by the president, Xi Jinping, who warned a decade ago that “tigers and flies” would fall. There is no official explanation yet for these casualties, but their concentration in such a battered group reduces the margin for doubt.
Among the missing this Li Qiaoming, commander of the Ground Forces, Shen Jinlong, former commander of the Navy, Yu Zhingfu, commissioner of the Air Force, and several lieutenants and generals. The echoes of Zhang Youxia’s dismissal last month have not yet died down. His fall showed that no uniformed man is safe. Zhang, 75, was about to retire when the official press spoke of “serious violations of party discipline,” the euphemistic formula for corruption in the Chinese judicial tradition.
Zhang was the highest-ranking general investigated, member of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and number two of the Commission Military Centralthe body that directs the largest Army in the world. But above his medals and titles he had enjoyed for decades the friendship of Xi, who had trusted him to modernize and clean up the Army. His departure stripped the commission, usually made up of six members and Xi at the top, and which now barely has one.
Unprecedented purge
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American think tank, recently put numbers to the campaign. In the last three years 36 generals and lieutenant generals have been officially purged and another 65 senior officials have “disappeared” from the establishment. The unprecedented cleanHowever, it had started in 2013, so the number of victims is much higher. The dismissal of 56 deputy commanders of the five theaters into which the People’s Liberation Army has reduced the staff trained to direct them by 33%. Only the highest-ranking generals deserve the headlines of the foreign press, but the campaign reaches the entire hierarchical scale.
That empty It not only prevents pluralism and debate in decision-making. Also, according to the think tank, it limits military operations when Japan, the traditional enemy in the region, retires its admirable pacifist constitution and skyrockets its defense budget. Serious deficiencies in the power structure do not seem like an imminent problem if we take into account that China has not gone to war in almost half a century.
Xi inherited an Army eaten away by corruptionwith numerous linked businesses and auctions of senior officials, and demanded the exemplariness. First he got rid of those who were already there and in recent years he has acted against those appointed during his mandates in a crescendo that culminated with that Shakespearean dismissal of Zhang. His replacements know that only the blind loyalty Xi can save them.
About him cese de Zhang Hypotheses have been piled up that only certify ignorance. There are only two certainties: that he lost Xi’s trust and that the emptying of the Army leadership underlines the nuclear role of the party. Only the Army has dared in recent decades to discuss the party leaders and next year a key congress. In it, it is very likely that Xi will seek a fourth term, unprecedented since Maoist times, and he wants the ranks to be tight. Before, next week, China will celebrate the National Popular Assemblyr, from which the main political lines for next year will come, also in the Army.
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