Gen. He Weidong, one of China’s highest-ranking military officers, missed the latest in a string of important meetings on Friday. The general has not been seen in public since March 11.
He, 67, climbed steadily through the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during his 45-year military career, accumulating influence in the Chinese Communist Party as he went. He commanded both the Eastern and Western Theaters before becoming a member of the all-powerful Politburo in 2022.
He is currently second vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the top leadership body of the PLA. This makes him the second highest-ranking military officer in China, behind only CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia. The nominal “chairman” of the CMC is dictator Xi Jinping, who is purportedly a personal friend of He.
Xi’s trust in He was apparent from the unusual manner in which He became second vice chair of the CMC. Xi appointed him during the 2022 Chinese Communist Party Congress, the same event at which Xi claimed a third term as supreme leader. There were dozens of candidates for the vice chairmanship, and many of them arguably had seniority or better qualifications over He, but Xi tapped him without considering anyone else for the job.
Xi has seen a few other of his “personal friends” off to prisons and re-education camps, and that might be what happened to He Weidong. The general’s last appearance in public was at the March 11 closing of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s most important political assembly.
He went on to miss several major CMC events, including a symposium on March 14, an important working conference on April 8-9, a nationally televised tree-planting ceremony that most other CMC leaders attended, and a major Politburo study session presided over by Xi Jinping on Friday.
The Financial Times (FT) on April 10 cited “five people familiar with the matter” who said He was quietly dismissed from his post sometime in March, the first CMC vice-chair in uniform to be sacked since 1967.
According to these sources, allegations of corruption were He’s undoing. One of the sources said the general was under interrogation by the authorities.
Xi’s anti-corruption purges have claimed several other high-ranking military officers during the past two years, along with two defense ministers, Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe. A third defense minister, Dong Jun, was investigated for corruption last year, but was evidently cleared of the charges.
The CMC has seven members and, if He has been fired or jailed, three of its seats are currently empty. Defense Minister Dong Jun has not been promoted to the CMC, so the chair held by his predecessor Li Shangfu has never been filled. Another member, Political Work Department chief Miao Hua, was placed under investigation in November for “serious violations of discipline,” which usually means corruption.
“The fact that Xi Jinping can purge a CMC vice-chair shows how serious he is about stamping out corruption in the military. Xi wants to turn the PLA into an effective fighting force beyond China’s borders but also into a complete servant to his domestic agenda,” China expert Neil Thomas of the Asia Society Policy Institute told the Financial Times.
PLA expert James Char of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore offered an alternative explanation to CNN — Gen. He might have been quietly dispatched to oversee military exercises around Taiwan, which ramped up around the time of the tree-planting ceremony that He missed.
Those exercises fall under the purview of the Eastern Theater Command, which He commanded from 2019 to 2022. He was the general in charge when China conducted some of its most aggressive drills around Taiwan to date, after former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island in August 2022.
A third possibility is that He went dark because he is assisting with anti-corruption investigations and/or political purges of other high-ranking officials.
“Recurring purges of the senior-most PLA leaders indicate that Xi Jinping distrusts his officer corps. The constant removal of so many senior officers, as well as the extent of corruption running to the very top undoubtedly has an effect on the PLA’s morale, and likely also its military capabilities,” RSIS senior fellow Drew Thompson told CNN.
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