Reports indicate that China has purged two senior executives at the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) as part of dictator Xi Jinping’s endless “anti-corruption campaign.”
The profiles of both executives vanished from AVIC’s website on Saturday night without explanation.
One of the purged executives, deputy general manager Yang Wei, was the lead engineer on China’s J-20 stealth fighter project. The other was general manager Hao Zhaoping.
Yang, an accomplished and respected engineer, had a profile on the website of the national research institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious science and technology institution in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). That profile was also deleted without explanation.
Yang is a prodigy who began his university education at the age of 15, graduated at 22, and has spent much of his career working on the stealth fighter project. Hao joined AVIC as a rocket expert in the 1990s and was promoted to general manager three years ago.
“In recent months, both Yang and Hao have been missing from leadership meetings of AVIC – a key player in Beijing’s drive for military modernisation and technological self-reliance,” the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Sunday.
The Mandarin Chinese edition of Voice of America (VOA) noted that Hao and Yang’s sudden disappearance has “aroused widespread concern from the outside world.”
AVIC chairman Tan Ruisong was abruptly removed from his post in March 2023 and was later named in a corruption investigation. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Chinese Communist Party vaguely accused Tan of “severe violations of Party discipline and national laws.” Violating Party discipline is generally interpreted as a euphemism for corruption.
Like Han and Yang, Tan began his career as an engineer in the 90s and worked his way up to management. The Communist Party later said he was removed as chairman because of his age, but he was only 62 at the time, only slightly above the minimum retirement age of 60.
AVIC is one of the largest defense contractors in China and one of the top ten contractors in the world by annual revenue. The Chengdu J-20 fighter, a fifth-generation twin-engine warplane intended to compete with the American F-22, is one of AVIC’s top projects for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). China began deploying J-20s to its most likely conflict hotspots, the East and South China Seas, in 2022.
Taiwanese security expert Shen Ming told VOA that Yang and Hao might have been purged because they were not delivering advanced weapon systems quickly enough, and the J-20 has been something of a disappointment when measured against the F-22. Vague charges of corruption would give Xi an efficient way to dispose of subpar defense executives without publicly admitting that China’s vaunted stealth fighter is not living up to his expectations.
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