Two former Chinese defense ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, have both been sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for corruption charges, reported the official Xinhua news agency on Thursday, highlighting the seriousness of the purge within the military.
The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad anti-corruption campaign ordered by President Xi Jinping since he came to power in 2012. The purges reached the Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons and conventional missiles, in 2023.
Earlier this year, tensions escalated further resulting in the dismissal of the highest-ranking official in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Zhang Youxia, a Politburo member and long-time ally of Xi.
According to previous Xinhua reports, Li was suspected of receiving “huge sums of money” in bribes and corrupting others. An investigation revealed that he “had not fulfilled his political responsibilities” and “sought personal gain for himself and others.”
An inquiry opened in 2023 into Wei found that he had accepted “a considerable sum of money and valuable items” in bribes and “assisted others in obtaining undue benefits in personnel arrangements,” Xinhua reported in 2024, adding that his actions were “extremely serious, with a very negative impact and enormous harm.”
In China, a death sentence with a reprieve is usually commuted to life imprisonment if the convict commits no crimes during the reprieve period. After the sentence is commuted, Wei and Li will be imprisoned for life without the possibility of further commutation or parole, Xinhua stated.
Sentence commutations for ministerial convictions are not uncommon in China. Fu Zhenghua, former Minister of Justice, was sentenced to death in 2022, with the sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. The same happened to Liu Zhijun, former Minister of Railways, sentenced in 2013.
The People’s Liberation Army, in its official journal, urged party members and military cadres to learn from these two cases and warned them against fostering a “shared loyalty to the Party,” referring to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Members of the party and military, particularly senior officers, are instructed to take as examples corrupt officials like Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, who were investigated and punished, according to the PLA Daily in a commentary published on Friday.
The army declared that Wei and Li had caused considerable harm to the party’s cause, national defense, military construction, and the image of senior leaders.
James Char, a specialist in Chinese security based in Singapore, stated that the death sentence with a reprieve was the most severe penalty imposed on a member of the Central Military Commission, the highest military leadership body of the Communist Party, in recent history.
“The fact that Wei and Li were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or sentence commutation underscores the seriousness of their offenses, as such penalties are typically reserved for serious crimes,” Char, a scholar at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said.
