Investigation is part of a broader probe into military corruption that unseated Dong’s two predecessors.
China has launched an investigation of Defence Minister Dong Jun due to suspicion of corruption, according to reports.
Citing current and former US officials familiar with the situation, British newspaper The Financial Times said on Wednesday that Dong is the latest official to be caught up in a broad crackdown on corruption in the country’s military.
For the meantime, the report is unconfirmed. When asked about the FT report at a news briefing, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning said it was “chasing shadows”.
China’s military has undergone a sweeping anticorruption purge since last year, with at least nine People’s Liberation Army (PLA) generals and several defence industry executives removed from the national legislative body to date.
Dong would be the third Chinese defence minister in a row to fall under investigation for corruption, unnamed US officials told the FT.
‘The trust of the party’
Dong, a former PLA Navy chief, was appointed defence minister in December 2023.
He is responsible for China’s military diplomacy with other nations. He oversaw a recent thaw in US-China military ties, with both nations holding theatre-level commander talks for the first time in September.
Dong’s predecessor, Li Shangfu, was removed after seven months into the job, and then expelled from the Communist Party, for offences that included bribery, according to state media. He has not been seen in public since.
Li’s predecessor, Wei Fenghe, was also kicked out of the party and passed on to prosecutors for alleged corruption.
A Communist Party statement at the time said the pair “betrayed the trust of the party and the Central Military Commission, seriously polluted the political environment of the military, and caused great damage to … the image of its senior leaders”.
They were found to have received huge sums of money in bribes and to have “sought personnel benefits” for others, the statement said.
According to experts, this is a blow to the party and the role.
“It’s certainly a blow … because one would imagine they will be super careful to have someone very clean in this role,” Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told the AFP news agency.
“Graft probes are very commonly targeted at the military because of the long historical ties between the business world and the PLA,” he said.
At least two other high-ranking officers connected to the Rocket Force, a relatively new unit of the Chinese military, have also been removed for corruption.
Victor Shih, an expert on China’s elite politics, told AFP that Dong “likely had authority over tens of billions in procurement per year” during his time in the navy.
“The problem is that competition for top positions is so fierce that there might be some mutual recriminations between officers, which would lead to endless cycles of arrests, new appointments and recriminations,” he said.
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