Xi Takes Military Purge to a New Level

China's second-highest ranking general and eight other senior officials have been expelled from the ruling Communist Party and the military on suspicion of serious misconduct linked to corruption, the country's defense ministry said Friday. He Weidong, who was the vice-chair of the powerful Central Military Commission, is the most senior official targeted so far in an ongoing anti-graft drive against Chinese military leaders, the AP reports. The general was No. 3 in China's military hierarchy, behind Xi Jinping and another general, reports the New York Times.

• The nine officials are suspected of extremely serious crimes involving exceptionally large sums of money, Defense Ministry spokesperson Zhang Xiaogang said in a statement posted online. Their cases have been investigated and referred to military prosecutors for review and prosecution, Zhang said.

• Government anti-corruption drives have become a signature policy of Xi since he came to power in 2012. Thousands of officials have been purged, including high-profile political rivals.
• He, who was elevated to the Central Military Commission in 2022, has not been seen in public for months—often the first indication an official is in trouble. The announcement Friday was the first confirmation of what had happened to him. The general was also one of the 24 members of the Politburo, the second-highest Communist Party body after the 7-member Politburo Standing Committee.
• The general was formerly head of the Eastern Theater Command, which holds primary responsibility for operations against Taiwan should hostilities break out. The eight other dismissed officials include the director of the Central Military Commission's political work department, Miao Hua, who was put under investigation last November. The commission, chaired by Xi, is the top military body in China.

• The announcement came just days before the party holds a major meeting in Beijing to map out the country's goals for the next five years. Eight of the nine military leaders removed Friday were members of the party's Central Committee, the 205-member body that meets next week.
• Expelling them from the Communist Party clears the way for appointing replacements on the committee, said Neil Thomas, a Chinese politics expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute. "This move is a political show of force and a practical step to elevate non-voting alternates into full members of the Central Committee," he said.
• The Times notes that in an assessment of the purges, Atlantic Council analyst Mark Parker Young, former deputy national intelligence officer for East Asia, said Xi's "willingness to sacrifice institutional cohesion and capacity in the PLA suggests he still does not anticipate fighting a war in the near-term."