Facts considered very serious. Former Chinese defense ministers Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu were both given two-year suspended death sentences on corruption charges, the official Xinhua news agency reported Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge within the military.
The armed forces were one of the main targets of a sweeping anti-corruption campaign ordered by President Xi Jinping after he came to power in 2012. The purges reached the Elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023.
Earlier this year, tensions further escalated, leading to the dismissal of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) highest-ranking officer, Zhang Youxia, a member of the Politburo and long considered an 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 “did not fulfill his political responsibilities” and that he “sought personal benefits for himself and others.”
A sum of money and items as bribes
An investigation into Wei in 2023 found that he had accepted “a considerable amount of money and valuables” in bribes and “helped others obtain undue advantages in personnel arrangements,” Xinhua reported in 2024, adding that his actions were “extremely serious, with a very harmful impact and enormous harm.”
In China, a suspended death sentence is generally commuted to life imprisonment if the convicted person does not commit any crimes during the suspended period. After the sentence is commuted, Wei and Li will be imprisoned for life without the possibility of commutation or subsequent parole, Xinhua said.
Sentence commutations for ministerial convictions are not uncommon in China. Fu Zhenghua, former justice minister, was sentenced to death in 2022, his sentence later commuted to life in prison. The same was true for Liu Zhijun, former Minister of Railways, convicted in 2013.
The People’s Liberation Army, in its official newspaper, called on party members and its military cadres to learn lessons from these two cases, warning them against the risk of nurturing “shared loyalty to the Party”, in reference to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
The harshest sentence in recent history
“Party members and military cadres, especially senior officers, should take as an example corrupt officials such as Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, who were investigated and punished,” the People’s Liberation Army Daily said in a commentary published Friday.
The military said Wei and Li had caused great harm to the party’s cause, national defense and military construction, and the image of senior leaders.
James Char, a Singapore-based Chinese security expert, said the suspended death sentence was the harshest sentence handed down to a member of the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party’s top military leadership body, in recent history.
“The fact that Wei and Li were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole or commutation of their sentences underlines the seriousness of their offenses, given that such sentences are generally reserved for serious crimes,†said Char, academic at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
