Chinese defence minister suspected to have ‘disappeared’

Li Shangfu is believed to be under investigation, only months after Beijing purged its Foreign Minister Qin Gang.

Richard Marles meets Li Shangfu in Singapore in June

China’s Defence Minister Li Shangfu is believed to be under investigation, an extraordinary development in Chinese elite politics that comes only months after Beijing purged foreign minister Qin Gang.

General Li, 65, has not been seen in public for almost a month, amid rising speculation that he has become the latest senior member of President Xi Jinping’s foreign policy and security team to be “disappeared”.

America’s Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said publicly on Friday what many US officials have suspected with growing confidence for weeks.

“As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’,” Mr Emanuel wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, a remarkably blunt post by a top US official.

“1st: Defence Minister Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen or heard from in 3 weeks. 2nd: He was a no-show for his trip to Vietnam. Now: He’s absent from his scheduled meeting with the Singaporean Chief of Navy because he was placed on house arrest???...Might be getting crowded in there.”

Mr Emanuel, a long-time Democratic Party operative who is close to President Joe Biden, had earlier said China’s government was “now resembling Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None”.

Beijing has not commented on the disappearance of the public face of the People’s Liberation Army, which comes less than three months after the abrupt sacking of Mr Qin and the dismissal of two top generals in charge of overseeing China’s rapidly expanding arsenal of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.

All of the senior officials were appointed to their posts by Mr Xi, some only months before they were removed without explanation.

“What a mess,” said Bill Bishop, author of the Sinocism newsletter which tracks Chinese elite politics. “The start of the third term of the Xi era looks a bit wobbly.”

General Li was only promoted to be the international face of the PLA in March. He made his first international trip in that role to the Shangri-La security conference in Singapore, where he met with counterparts from around the region, including Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles.

Mr Qin had been due to visit Australia in July for a preparatory meeting with Foreign Minister Penny Wong before Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s trip to China at the end of the year. His still unexplained removal underlined one of the difficulties Canberra faces in dealing with Mr Xi’s administration: a near total absence of verifiable information about the power struggles consuming its elite politics.

General Li had been scheduled to attend an annual gathering last week on defence co-operation hosted by Vietnam on its border with China, but the meeting was postponed days before it was to take place. Beijing told Hanoi that the minister had a “health condition,” two Vietnamese officials told Reuters.

Before being appointed defence minister, General Li served as the head of the PLA’s main department for procuring and developing weapons, a position with a long history of having the “worst corruption” inside the Chinese military, according to former US officials.

Throughout his more than 10 years in power, Mr Xi has overseen a rolling investigation into corruption across the Chinese political system. In the early years of his leadership, many suspected that those investigations were used to purge rivals.

The latest wave has ensnared people who had been promoted because of their close ties to Mr Xi.

Mr Qin was rapidly promoted to be China’s ambassador to the US in 2021 before being made foreign minister last December. Before those top postings, he had served as a trusted adviser to Mr Xi when the Chinese leader travelled abroad.

There has been speculation Mr Qin had been having an affair with a Chinese television presenter and fathered a son with her in America, although that has never been confirmed. The presenter had posted pictures of a baby boy on Chinese social media on the day Mr Qin was made a state councillor and again this March on Mr Qin’s birthday, both times congratulating an unnamed father.

“Papa went off on a mission. He is too busy to celebrate the birthday. All we can do is wish him a happy birthday from afar,” she wrote, on the day Mr Qin was accompanying Mr Xi on a trip to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The former Xi favourite was stripped of his posting in July, making him China’s shortest ever serving foreign minister. He has not been seen in public since June.