PLA purged in roll call for Chinese Communist Party congress

Sweeping change is under way at the top of China’s People’s Liberation Army.

PLA members at the Zhurihe base in Inner Mongolia.

Change is under way at the top of China’s People’s Liberation Army, while the once all-powerful Communist Youth League ­faction is being hollowed out.

Such clues as to the shape of the future China are emerging as the names of delegates to the 19th congress of the Chinese Communist Party are released.

Many who have wielded massive influence in past years have disappeared from the lists of those participating in the five-yearly meeting that starts on October 18.

Any person with aspiration to power — or even office — at the higher levels in China must be a delegate.

The Brookings Institution’s Cheng Li, who pioneered research into factions within the CCP, has reviewed in detail for China-US Focus the military representation at the congress, discovering that an extraordinary 90 per cent of the 303 PLA and People’s Armed Police delegates will be new.

The army is directly accountable to the party, not to the state machinery of China.

And only those who attend the congress can be considered for membership of the party’s new Central Committee. This means that only seven of the 41 military representatives on the committee, at the most, will be reappointed.

This points, he said, to “an unprecedentedly large-scale turnover” of the military leadership, with the congress proving — as with most important areas of ­Chinese national life — a watershed event.

“A number of high-ranking generals, who allegedly obtained their positions through bribery and patron-client relationships” with PLA leaders already purged “will surely be replaced”, said Dr Li, director of the China Centre at Brookings. “Waiting in the wings for promotion are a bevy of ‘young guards’, who are more professionally prepared for modern joint military operations than the existing senior leadership in the PLA.”

He said that this PLA reshuffle — directed by President Xi ­Jinping, who is chairman of the Central Military Commission and commander in chief of the Joint Operations Command Centre — is more extensive even than those that followed the purges of Liu Shaoqi in 1966 and Lin Biao in 1971.

General Fang Fenghui, head of the army’s Joint Staff Department, and General Zhang Yang, director of its Political Department — both recently replaced — have also been dropped from the congress delegation and are understood to be under investi­gation for corruption.

Their deputies and associates have also been removed from the congress team.

Dr Li anticipates that their successors, respectively Li Zuocheng and Miao Hua, and the new commanders of the army, navy and air force, respectively Han Weiguo, Shen Jinlong and Ding Laihang, will leapfrog straight on to the central committee at the ­congress.

All of this group of five new top leaders joined the PLA at a young age — between 14 and 17 — received rapid promotion in the last five years under Mr Xi, and, says Dr Li, “are well acquainted with new trends in modern warfare” including the shift “from a Soviet-style, army-centric system toward a Western-style joint command”.

The 90 million member Youth League or Tuanpai, which under the previous national leadership team of president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao dominated the Communist Party, has now been sidelined — even though their faction allied with the rising star, Mr Xi, during the last national congress in 2012 to counter the massive continuing influence of former president Jiang Zemin and his “Shanghai faction”.

Qin Yizhi, who was the Youth League’s director, viewed at the age of 51 as an emerging heavyweight party leader, failed to gain election to this congress — shocking news for the faction. Last week, Mr Qin was demoted to deputy director.

The signs that the Tuanpai had hit a wall were manifest last year, when a team from the feared Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the shock troops of Mr Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, raided its central committee headquarters.

The last great hope of the ­Tuanpai is Hu Chunhua, party secretary of Guangdong province, a Politburo member who might have been expected to be promoted at the congress to the Politburo’s Standing Committee. The odds may now have turned against him.