China defence minister placed under investigation for corruption, FT reports
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Mr Dong Jun is the third consecutive serving or former Chinese defence minister to be investigated for alleged corruption.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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BEIJING – China Defence Minister Dong Jun has been placed under investigation as part of a wide-ranging anti-corruption probe that has reached the top ranks of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Financial Times (FT) reported on Nov 27.
Mr Dong is the third consecutive serving or former Chinese defence minister to be investigated for alleged corruption, FT reported, citing current and former US officials.
When asked about the FT report at a daily press briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said it was “chasing shadows”.
China’s Defence Ministry did not immediately reply to Reuters’ request for comment.
China’s military has undergone a sweeping anti-corruption purge since 2023, with nine PLA generals and at least four aerospace defence industry executives removed from the national legislative body to date.
Mr Dong, a former PLA Navy chief, was appointed defence minister in December 2023. His predecessor, Li Shangfu, was removed seven months into the job.
Mr Dong attended a gathering of military leaders from around the world last week in Laos,
As defence minister, Mr Dong is responsible for China’s military diplomacy with other nations. He oversaw a recent thaw in US-China military-to-military ties, with both nations holding theatre-level commander talks for the first time in September.
But he was not promoted to the six-member Central Military Commission (CMC), China’s highest-level military body, during a major Communist Party plenum earlier in 2024, where personnel reshuffles would normally be announced.
China’s defence minister has traditionally been a member of both the CMC, which is headed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the State Council, China’s Cabinet-level executive body.
Mr Dong was not appointed to the State Council either during a government reshuffle in March.
“Frankly nothing would surprise me any more,” said Mr Dennis Wilder, a professor at Georgetown University and former US intelligence analyst.
“The history with these investigations in the PLA is that once the string of corruption is pulled many other threads are revealed and the sweater unravels.”
“It’s certainly a blow... because one would imagine they will be super careful to have someone very clean in this role,” Assistant Professor Dylan Loh of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) told AFP.
“Graft probes are very commonly targeted at the military because of the long historical ties between the business world and the PLA.”
Mr Dong’s two immediate predecessors, Li and Wei Fenghe, were expelled from the Communist Party in June for “serious violations of discipline”, a euphemism for corruption.
A Communist Party statement at the time said the pair “betrayed the trust of the party and the Central Military Commission, seriously polluted the political environment of the military, and caused great damage to... the image of its senior leaders”.
The pair were also found to have received huge sums of money in bribes and “sought personnel benefits” for others, the statement said.
Reuters exclusively reported in 2024 that Li was under investigation for suspected corruption in military procurement.
Wei disappeared from public view after he was replaced in March 2023 during a planned Cabinet reshuffle. He was head of the strategic PLA Rocket Force from 2015 to 2017.
Beijing has deepened a crackdown on alleged graft in the armed forces over the past year, with President Xi in November ordering the military to stamp out corruption and strengthen its “war-preparedness”.
The intensity of the anti-graft drive in the army has been partially driven by fears that it may affect China’s ability to wage a future war, Bloomberg reported, citing US officials in 2024.
“If the corruption probe into Dong Jun is true, then it is normal that people will question if it will erode morale and if it will affect the PLA’s warfighting capabilities,” said NTU’s Prof Loh.
The country’s secretive Rocket Force – which oversees China’s vast arsenal of strategic missiles, both conventional and nuclear – has come under particularly intense scrutiny.
In July, a top Chinese official in the Rocket Force, Sun Jinming, was placed under investigation for corruption.
Sun was kicked out of the ruling Communist Party and placed under investigation for “grave violations of party discipline and laws”, state news agency Xinhua said at the time, using a common euphemism for graft.
At least two other high-ranking officers connected to the Rocket Force, a relatively new unit of the Chinese military, have also been removed for graft. REUTERS, AFP
