A Chinese military court on Thursday sentenced former defense ministers Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu to death after convicting them of corruption offenses. However, the sentence was issued with a two-year reprieve, and if they commit no further offenses during that period, it will be commuted to life in prison with no possibility of reduction or parole, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The two served consecutively in the post. Wei Fenghe was defense minister from 2018 to 2023, and Li Shangfu replaced him in March of that year. Li disappeared from public view about two months after his appointment and was removed from office in October that year without an official explanation. In June 2024, both men were expelled from the Communist Party over "serious disciplinary violations," the official wording commonly used for corruption offenses.
According to the report, Wei was convicted of taking bribes, while Li was convicted of both taking and giving bribes.
Their convictions come as part of an unprecedented wave of purges in China's defense establishment, presented domestically as part of the fight against corruption. The US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a February report that since 2022, "more than 100 senior officers from across China's armed forces have been removed or disappeared," which the institute described as an "unprecedented purge."
Of the seven members of the Central Military Commission, the top defense decision-making body in the Chinese system, who served in 2022, only two remain in their posts, including Xi himself.
In January, it was reported that Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and considered China's most senior military officer, and Gen. Liu Zhenli, chief of the Joint Staff Department, were also suspected of corruption. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Zhang was suspected of leaking key technical data about China's nuclear weapons program to the US.
Western intelligence assessments say Xi, one of the most powerful figures in Chinese politics since Mao Zedong, has ordered his military to be ready to carry out an operation to conquer Taiwan by 2027. According to an assessment by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the purges are creating "serious gaps in the command structure" and could damage the Chinese military's operational capability in the short term, potentially delaying the point at which Xi can rely on his army to carry out complex military moves.
