China has handed suspended death sentences to two former defence ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, after closed-door bribery trials. Both men were promoted by Xi Jinping; both ran the People’s Liberation Army’s procurement and command apparatus; both were stripped of their seats on the Central Committee in late 2024 and have not been seen in public since. The court found them guilty of accepting tens of millions of dollars in bribes connected to weapons procurement and senior personnel decisions, with the sentences commutable to life imprisonment after two years if they show good behaviour. State media presented the verdicts as evidence that “no one is above the law” in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. Almost nothing else about the cases — names of co-defendants, scope of the bribery network, fate of the rocket force officers swept up alongside them — has been made public.
The received wisdom
The standard reading from the foreign ministry briefing rooms is that this is China doing what authoritarian states are supposed to do well: cleaning out a graft-riddled defence sector that had become a liability for the country’s military modernisation. Western analysts who follow PLA procurement have long suspected that some of the more lurid stories about Chinese missile silos filled with water rather than fuel were not exaggerations but symptoms of pervasive procurement fraud. On this account, Xi is doing his country a service. Tough cases. Tough sentences. Move on. The internationalist version of this view treats it as marginally good news for global stability — a less corrupt, more capable PLA is, paradoxically, less likely to be the kind of brittle force that miscalculates into a war it cannot win. The market-friendly version treats it as another sign that Xi has consolidated enough authority to do unpopular things. None of these is foolish.
A different read
The trouble with the cleaning-house reading is that the men in the dock were not Hu Jintao holdovers smuggled in from a previous era. Wei Fenghe was Xi’s first commander of the PLA Rocket Force and his defence minister from 2018 to 2023. Li Shangfu was Xi’s hand-picked successor in that post, sanctioned by the United States in 2018 over Russia weapons purchases, vetted personally by the chairman of the Central Military Commission, who is also Xi. To say that these were Xi’s men is to understate the case: they are the men whose careers are the surest evidence of his judgement. When their fall is presented as a victory for the system, the obvious counter-question is whether the system that produced them was working in the first place.
History suggests this kind of purge does not end with two sentences. Stalin’s pre-war military purges began with marshals; Mao’s Cultural Revolution swallowed the men who had built the People’s Liberation Army; even the Brezhnev-era Soviet leadership periodically rotated out of fashion the generals it had recently celebrated. The pattern in opaque autocracies is that anti-corruption campaigns become indistinguishable from political ones, because the same intelligence files used to convict can be used to coerce. The fact that Beijing has just felt the need to rotate the top of the rocket force, the equipment department, and the defence ministry in a single eighteen-month stretch implies either that Xi was unusually unlucky in his appointees, which is hardly flattering, or that the purges are doing political work that the bribery charges cannot quite explain.
There is a colder geopolitical inference. A regime confident in its military does not announce, through tightly controlled state organs, that two of its three most recent defence chiefs took millions in bribes connected to “senior personnel decisions.” It does so when it needs to discipline the survivors. Coming alongside reports that a key bridge linking North Korea and Russia is nearly complete, and that Russia’s Victory Day parade was conspicuously thin on hardware because so much is in Ukraine, the Beijing message reads as a warning to its own commanders not to imagine they have leverage. Andrew Sullivan used to argue that the great risk in late-stage personalist rule is not the leader’s strength but the rot in the layer beneath him, and the willingness of that leader to keep cutting it back. The further Xi’s circle of trust contracts, the more difficult it becomes to delegate the decisions a great-power military requires — including, eventually, the decision not to go to war. Conservatives who cheered Western anti-corruption rhetoric during the Cold War should remember that the show trial is not the same thing as the rule of law, and that a state which can sentence its own former ministers in a closed courtroom can do other things, too, in courtrooms abroad.
What to watch
Three signals will distinguish housekeeping from something larger. First, whether the next round of named defendants includes serving Central Military Commission members; if so, this is a continuing campaign, not a closing one. Second, whether China’s posture on the Strait of Hormuz and on Taiwan tightens or relaxes — purges historically precede caution before they precede adventure. Third, whether public sightings of senior PLA officers thin out further in the run-up to autumn plenums, the traditional season for unwanted rotations.
— J