Xi Jinping puts China’s military focus back on toeing Communist Party line
Photo: Collected
Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the country’s top brass to renew their efforts to eliminate corruption, calling on them to reassert the Communist Party’s absolute leadership over the armed forces.
In a two-day meeting in Beijing that ended on Friday, Xi said that ensuring party discipline within the ranks was the “political guarantee” the military needed to meet its centenary goal, state news agency Xinhua reported on Friday.
By 2027, 100 years after its founding, the People’s Liberation Army aims to be a more efficient and combat-ready force and make greater use of advanced technology in warfare. The PLA will observe its 96th anniversary on August 1.
The meeting included most members of the Central Military Commission – China’s top military decision-making body – as well as the heads of the CMC’s departments and bodies, leaders of theatre commands and top personnel from each service branch.
It was the third gathering of its kind since Xi became CMC chairman in 2012, with the first taking place in 2013 and the second in 2018.
Xi also used those meetings to underscore the need for party loyalty from the military, a condition the party sees as a matter of regime survival.
Xi has written and spoken about the “cautionary tale” of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party losing command of its armed forces, leading to the collapse of the Cold War bloc.
The president underlined that message at the latest gathering by referring to an address he gave to hundreds of senior military officials in the small town of Gutian, Fujian province, in 2014.
During that meeting, he invoked former Chinese leader Mao Zedong when he said the party must “command the gun”.
Gutian was chosen because it was where Mao established the system of political commissars, a network of party officers who ensured the military remained loyal.
Also addressing the meeting on Friday, CMC vice-chairman General He Weidong said the military needed to “unswervingly and continuously enforce tight discipline, combat corruption, and constantly improve the quality of the party’s leadership and party-building work”.
On Saturday, PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the military, published an editorial on the meeting reinforcing the party’s leadership over the military.
“History tells us that whenever the party’s leadership and party-building are well established and strong, the revolutionary cause will progress smoothly with victories,” it said. “Otherwise, it will see setbacks, suffer losses or even fail.”
It said over the past 10 years of Xi’s leadership, the president had taken it on himself “to resolve significant issues and all sorts of problems and chaos in the military”.
In that time, Xi, as CMC chairman, had established himself in a dominant role of party supervision with his “commission chairman responsibility system”.
While the editorial did not define that system, the newspaper did say in 2014 that it meant all major issues about national defence and military development must be decided and finalised by the chairman.
Chinese state media also published a commentary on Thursday, reviewing Xi’s anti-corruption campaign in the PLA, including the investigations into generals Guo Boxiong, Xu Caihou, Fang Fenghui and Zhang Yang, disgraced former members of the CMC.
It came in the same week that the CMC secretariat issued its own call for an early-warning system to prevent corruption risks in the military.
The CMC did not release the full document but The PLA Daily said the system would involve monitoring to prevent misuse and overreach of power.
The document laid out requirements to “systematically” detect the early signs of graft in unspecified “core areas”, the newspaper reported. Party committees would have the main responsibility to ensure a clean military, while disciplinary committees would be in charge of oversight.
Li Nan, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute, said the meeting offered little detail about new ways the party planned to tackle corruption.
He said the existing system of relying on political commissars to ensure loyalty to the party had been “compromised” because they were part of the military chain of command. Some of the “big tigers” who fell because of corruption charges, such as Xu Caihou, belonged to the political work system.
These commissars had an incentive to cover up corruption to not disclose their failure to keep discipline in check, he said.
“As long as you are internalised, you can’t do your work. Sure, they’re doing their work better, but as long as they’re part of the PLA, they can’t fully supervise,” Li said.
