Chinese Defense Minister’s Disappearance Indicates Power Struggle, Raises Questions About CCP’s Leadership: Experts

(L-R) Chinese State Councilor Qin Gang, State Councilor and Secretary-General of the State Council Wu Zhenglong, and State Councilor Li Shangfu swear an oath after they were 'elected' during the fifth plenary session of China's rubber-stamp legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC), at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 12, 2023. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu has been missing for over two weeks. Experts told The Epoch Times that whatever may be the reason, the increasing trend of unexplained disappearances of top officials puts the leadership under heightened scrutiny and raises serious doubts about its credibility, and increases security threats for neighboring countries.

“The disappearance of China’s defense minister, the latest in a string of upheavals in the country’s top ranks, is stoking uncertainty about President Xi Jinping’s rule as an internal security clampdown trumps international engagement,” Nishakant Ojha, a New Delhi-based defense analyst who has formerly served in various Indian foreign missions, told The Epoch Times in an email.

While news agencies have quoted insider sources that Gen. Li is under investigation for corruption charges, his disappearance has been likened to former Foreign Minister Qin Gang, whose absence remains a mystery.

“I’m not aware of the situation,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning in a regular press briefing on Sept. 15 when asked about Gen. Li’s whereabouts.

‘Dictatorial Paranoia’

The disappearance happened immediately after Gen. Li visited Russia and Belarus, and speculations have increasingly been raised as to whether the incident is linked to the purge in the top ranks of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) elite Rocket Force, which is responsible for conventional and nuclear missiles. The purge in the Rocket Force was reportedly linked to corruption.

Mr. Ojha believes that the growing unpredictability could affect other countries’ confidence in the leadership of the world’s second-largest economy.

Gen. Li, 65, was scheduled to meet Vietnamese defense leaders on matters of defense cooperation on Sept. 7–8 but pulled out abruptly. Reuters quoted two Hanoi officials who said Beijing told Vietnam that Gen. Li had a “health condition.”

China's Minister of National Defence Li Shangfu delivers a speech during the 20th Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore on June 4, 2023. Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images

The outlet on Sept. 15 quoted a regional security official and three people in direct contact with the Chinese military who said that Gen. Li has been placed under investigation for alleged corruption related to the procurement of military equipment. The Epoch Times couldn’t independently verify these claims.

Gen. Li’s disappearance has become a hotspot of paradoxes that experts say only represents Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s egregious situation.

“The ironic paradox of the current military purge is that just eight years ago, in 2015, Xi forcefully revamped the entire PLA in his own image,” German sinologist Frank Lehberger told The Epoch Times in an email. “Starting July 2023, however, he seems to have found out that almost all major military leaders whom he so carefully chose and vetted just seven years ago have become unreliable, disloyal, treasonous, or otherwise unacceptable for some reason, which may certainly also include a typical form of dictatorial paranoia.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. establishment also believes that Gen. Li’s disappearance is linked to corruption in procurement.

In July, the Chinese defense ministry’s procurement department sought public tips for corruption in its ranks beginning in October 2017, just a month after Gen. Li was appointed director of the Equipment Development Department of the Central Military Commission.

‘Very Dangerous’ for Neighboring Countries

With such political uncertainty hinting at power struggle and turmoil, experts are concerned about the fresh challenges it poses to China’s immediate neighbors and the world.

A highly placed source in New Delhi, who spoke to The Epoch Times on the conditions of anonymity, said the purge appears to be happening due to some power struggle within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“Very dangerous for neighbors as military action can be used to improve political power. India should be very alert,” the source said.

Mr. Ojha believes that this political uncertainty, a declining economy, and increasing unemployment are not good overall for countries still relying on China because the CCP represents a single-party authoritarian system.

Unfinished apartment buildings in Xinzheng City in Zhengzhou, China's central Henan Province, on June 20, 2023. Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images

Nicole Tsai, a spokeswoman for the New Federal State of China, a New York-based pro-democracy group, told The Epoch Times in an email that the U.S. Border Patrol reported a more than 800 percent increase of Chinese nationals crossing the southern border to enter the United States illegally.

Ms. Tsai had described it as an “exodus of more Chinese people leaving China for the West” because the state of affairs is adding to their worries, and they no longer find hope for a future in the CCP-led China.

Ironic Corruption Charges

Most media outlets have been linking Gen. Li’s disappearance to corruption-related charges. However, experts said this is ironic because the communist system is inundated with corruption, and the real cause could be internal strife within the CCP.

“First, there probably isn’t a single Chinese official at these levels who isn’t guilty of corruption. And even if there are a few ‘clean’ ones, as Beria (the Soviet secret police chief) said: ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,'” Grant Newsham, a senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies and retired U.S. Marine colonel, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Lavrentiy Beria was an influential secret police chief of Joseph Stalin. Mr. Newsham believes that “corruption” has been turned by Chinese leader Xi Jinping into a modern version of the Maoist-era “counter-revolutionary activities.”

“[Corruption is the] go-to or catch-all charge for getting rid of people and making it look like they were guilty of something,” Mr. Newsham wrote. “So I think it’s unlikely that it was because of ‘corruption’ that he got caught, and Xi is just cleaning out a corrupt official.”

Mr. Lehberger called the corruption charges a “flimsy Chinese excuse” because such news isn’t new, and since July, China has been witnessing a major political purge of the PLA and other segments of the CCP elite.

“In addition, the entire Chinese society has been thrown by Xi on purpose into a paranoid frenzy, looking for mostly non-existent ‘foreign spies’ in every town and rural backwater,” wrote Mr. Lehberger in an email.

In July, China revised its anti-espionage law to broaden its list of activities it regards as spying and announced that it would reward people who report spies.

CCP police officers, accompanied by police dogs, conduct security scans at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on March 10, 2022. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The regime’s Ministry of National Security on July 31 launched its first social media account on WeChat and, in its first message on Aug. 1, it stated, “Counterintelligence and anti-espionage require the mobilization of the whole society!”

The next day, it published another message, “Punish espionage in accordance with the law and respect and protect human rights.”

Mr. Ojha said it’s understood that Beijing had intelligence inputs about many in its government and the PLA being on the payroll of foreign intelligence agencies, such as those of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia.

Last month, a Chinese citizen surnamed Zeng, who worked for a military-industrial group, was uncovered as what Beijing termed an “agent” of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited in Italy. The Chinese tabloid Global Times said in a report in early August that the “U.S.-led West” is increasing its “infiltration efforts” to instigate “color revolutions.”

Color revolutions are nonviolent protests, such as the one that accompanied government changes in former communist nations in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s.

Moreover, Mr. Lehberger said the purge isn’t limited to China’s defense agencies because it’s being witnessed in the medical profession, which he compared to Russia when it was under Soviet rule.

“By order of Xi [the health care industry has] been subject to a wave of denunciations, targeting real and imagined ‘corrupt doctors.’ This ironically reminds [me of] Stalin’s own purge of Soviet medical professionals shortly before his death by stroke in 1953,” said Mr. Lehberger.

Hundreds of Soviet doctors were imprisoned or shot in 1953, including the best doctors in Moscow, after Stalin accused them of plotting to kill senior communist leaders.

“This purge inside the CCP and PLA, however, goes on in a relatively stealthy low-key mode, in [the] form of unexplained disappearances from public view, sudden deaths and ‘vacation due to health reasons,’ definitely not in the style of 1930s Stalinist purges, with lavishly orchestrated and propagated show-trials,” said Mr. Lehberger.

Communist Power Struggle

Experts say the real cause of Gen. Li’s disappearance and other purges is linked to a power struggle within the CCP that directly threatens Mr. Xi’s paramount power.

“On August 15, Chinese secretive Ministry of State Security publicly confirmed on its WeChat account that Xi had previously (at least once around 2016) been the target of a coup or assassination attempt by an enemy faction,” Mr. Lehberger wrote in an email.

Taiwan news outlet United Daily News reported on Aug. 15 that a retired teacher from Yunnan had plans to create “death squads” to subvert the CCP.

“China’s Ministry of State Security disclosed today that a retired cadre from a school in Yunnan who had a long history of engaging in ’reactionary discourse‘ contacted foreign organizations to plan to purchase weapons in 2016, and recruited ’death squads’ in China to conspire to violently overthrow Xi Jinping’s regime, but who was arrested immediately,” the report said.

Mr. Lehberger said these corroborated reports indicate “insubordination” within the CCP and that Mr. Xi’s autocratic rule is under threat, and so are his “megalomaniac plans of gaining domination over Asia and later the wider world.”

The German sinologist explained that Chinese defense ministers are mainly meant for defense diplomacy and international cooperation and aren’t that important in the Chinese political system since they aren’t even part of the Politburo of the CCP.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping reviews troops from a car at a garrison of the People's Liberation Army in Hong Kong on June 30, 2017. Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

“The low decision-making power of Chinese defense ministers is underlined by the fact that they are not even members of the all-powerful CCP Politburo, which, however, includes two powerful PLA generals from inside the CMC as members,” he said.

In these circumstances, multiple causes could contribute to Mr. Xi’s paranoia and the eventual disappearance of Gen. Li. Mr. Newsham suspects it’s linked to the CCP leader’s worries resulting from a power struggle in a single-party totalitarian system.

“He might see opposition forming in some quarters—as he’s no doubt got plenty of enemies owing to his purging of rivals over the years,” wrote Newsham in an email.

“Or perhaps he wants to get ‘his team’ of totally pliant toadies and incompetents in place—who pose no threat to him and will follow orders—before he makes a move somewhere? Say, against Taiwan, India, Mongolia, Japan, etc.”

Mr. Ojha wondered if these pressing internal worries caused Mr. Xi to skip the recent Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Jakarta and the G20 in New Delhi.

“As Xi, China’s commander-in-chief, has focused inward, he caused concern among foreign diplomats this month by missing a Group of 20 summit in India, the first time he has skipped the global leaders’ gathering in his decade in power, which does not give a very strong strategic Diplomacy sign,” wrote Mr. Ojha.

The Indian expert said that China’s national imperative has always been to ensure that the CCP remains in power while everything else is subservient to that.

However, he said the widespread purge witnessed in China’s foreign, defense, and other institutions conveys to the world that the Chinese regime will be in a “bad and miserable shape in the coming time.”