By Laurie Chen
BEIJING (Reuters) -Chinese military official Zhang Shengmin, 67, was promoted to become the country’s number two general at a key Communist Party meeting on Thursday, Xinhua reported, after a military corruption purge snared dozens of top brass.
The statement was released on the last day of a closed-door meeting of the 300-plus member Communist Party Central Committee in Beijing. The meeting, known as the Fourth Plenum, also discussed a five-year economic development plan to achieve technological self-reliance amid an intensifying rivalry with the United States.
The elite Central Committee also replaced 11 members at the meeting, marking its highest personnel turnover since 2017, with eight generals having been expelled for corruption last week.
Since coming into power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has spearheaded a sweeping anti-corruption campaign against government and party officials.
ZHANG IS A TRUSTED LOYALIST
Analysts say the promotion of Zhang reflects the exceptional degree of trust placed in him by Xi.
Zhang, who oversees anti-corruption work in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is now second-ranked vice chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC), China’s top military command body. He replaces disgraced general He Weidong who was purged last week.
“There is no one better to succeed as the military’s new political and personnel chief than its reigning discipline tsar,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.
Before joining the CMC in 2017, Zhang served for many years in the Second Artillery Force, now the PLA Rocket Force. He also served in the CMC’s General Logistics Department.
Both were key targets of Xi’s anti-corruption drive in the military, but Zhang emerged unscathed while colleagues around him fell.
“His personal loyalty to Xi had been thoroughly vetted during the last two years of purges against the Second Artillery Force, a major corruption hotbed,” said Sung.
Zhang also hails from Xi’s ancestral province of Shaanxi, where the leader has deep family and political networks. This likely ensured an extra layer of trust in Zhang, added Sung.
Zhang concurrently serves as deputy secretary of China’s top anti-corruption body, wielding an unusually high degree of power within the civilian Communist Party system.
He has no operational battle experience.
The formerly seven-member CMC headed by Xi has lost three members since 2023 in a string of anti-corruption probes.
XI ASSERTS HIS DOMINANCE OVER MILITARY
Eight of the nine generals expelled from the party last week were also Central Committee members, and some of their investigations had not previously been disclosed.
“By purging these officers before the plenum altogether and all at once, Xi is sending a clear shot across the bow to the military high command ahead and asserting his dominance,” said Jon Czin, a People’s Liberation Army expert at the Brookings Institution.
Most of the purged generals had served in the former Nanjing Military Region, made up of key strategic provinces on China’s east coast facing Taiwan. Some also overlapped in the former 31st Group Army, a strategically important unit focusing on Taiwan-related operations.
A commentary last Saturday in the official People’s Liberation Army Daily newspaper condemned the nine generals in unusually stark language, saying their “faith collapsed and their loyalty failed, gravely betraying the trust of the Party Central Committee and the Central Military Commission.”
Only 82% of Central Committee members attended this plenum, Xinhua reported, marking the lowest attendance level in decades, according to official data.
(Reporting by Laurie ChenEditing by Ros Russell, Kim Coghill and Keith Weir)
