BEIJING: China’s President Xi Jinping promoted two military officers to the rank of general on Friday while tapping one of them as the new head of the military’s top disciplinary and anti-corruption body, as Xi works to rebuild his depleted top military command.
Zhang Shuguang, a veteran People’s Liberation Army (PLA) anti-graft officer, and Wang Gang, commander of the PLA Air Force, were promoted by Xi during a ceremony in Beijing to the highest rank for officers on active duty in China, state media reports showed.
Zhang Shuguang, now head of the Central Military Commission’s (CMC) powerful discipline inspection commission, replaces Zhang Shengmin as the military’s top anti-graft watchdog. Zhang Shengmin has held the post since 2017, even after being promoted to the CMC’s vice chairman in 2025.
Under a years-long anti-corruption campaign initiated by the Chinese leader, scores of senior officials and top generals have been investigated, removed and purged. Two former defence ministers were handed suspended death sentences in May.
That crackdown has also reduced China’s once seven-member supreme military command body to just two people: Xi himself as the chairman and vice chairman Zhang Shengmin.
After purging nearly the entirety of his top military command over corruption, Xi sent senior PLA officers to an intensive ten-week political retraining course earlier this year.
“All thoughts and actions of seeking private gain and corruption are fundamentally incompatible with the party’s nature and purpose,” he told the officers in April at the start of the rare and unusual programme.
The senior officers studied Xi’s works, revisited their communist party oath, and worked late into the night to reflect on their own failings, a PLA-run newspaper said last week.
With a determination to “turn the knife’s blade on oneself,” the officers were guided to “lay bare their faults with a spirit of thorough self-revolution, and to identify and examine instances of contamination by pernicious influence and manifestations of mutation,” the newspaper said.
“Xi’s view appears to be that tighter political control will make the PLA a more effective warfighting force and therefore a more credible instrument of coercion over Taiwan and in the South China Sea,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow at the New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute.
“Purging senior commanders may hurt readiness in the near term, but Xi seems willing to accept that risk as he believes it will produce a more disciplined and more capable military over time,” he said.
The current CMC lineup was named in October 2022 and is expected to be replaced or renewed after the Communist Party’s next five-yearly congress, which is likely to take place in autumn 2027.
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