Chun Han Wong
Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu in Singapore earlier this year.
Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu was taken away last week by authorities for questioning, according to a person close to decision making in Beijing, while U.S. officials say he is being removed from his post.
Li hasn’t made a public appearance since late August. The U.S. officials cited unspecified intelligence as the basis for their assessment that he has been relieved of his duties.
China’s Ministry of Defense didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment submitted through the State Council Information Office, which handles media inquiries on behalf of the government.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, asked at a routine briefing on Friday to comment on whether Li was under investigation, said she wasn’t aware of the situation.
One U.S. official said the trouble surrounding Li pointed to deep-seated issues that Beijing continues to grapple with years into leader Xi Jinping’s campaign to shake up China’s military, known as the People’s Liberation Army, with anticorruption purges and structural reforms.
“Some of the PLA’s enduring problems may be too big for Xi to solve, and they have a real impact on the PLA’s ability to achieve what he wants them to,” a U.S. official said. “We know that corruption in the PLA runs deep enough for this to be a factor. And we know it’s had a profound effect on what they’re able to do, and how they do it.”
The 65-year-old Li’s unexplained absence mirrors the recent disappearances of other senior officials. In July, Beijing abruptly removed Qin Gang as foreign minister after he vanished without explanation a month earlier. Days later, Xi named a new commander for China’s strategic-missile force, ousting a general who hadn’t been seen in public for months.
Beijing reappointed top diplomat Wang Yi to replace Qin Gang as foreign minister during an emergency session in July, without addressing Qin’s mysterious absence. Chinese leader Xi Jinping had handpicked Qin seven months earlier. Photo: Florence Lo/Pool Reuters/Associated Press
As defense minister, Li largely handles military diplomacy and doesn’t hold command responsibilities over combat operations.
The mystery around Li and other vanished officials has prompted new questions about China’s governance under Xi, whose Communist Party has doubled down on secrecy and stifled outsiders’ efforts to access information on the world’s second-largest economy.
Li’s absence has caught the attention of foreign diplomats and China experts, some of whom publicly pondered the fate of senior Chinese officials who have disappeared in recent months.
The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, wrote in a Sept. 8 post on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, that Xi’s administration was beginning to resemble an Agatha Christie novel.
“First, Foreign Minister Qin Gang goes missing, then the Rocket Force commanders go missing, and now Defense Minister Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen in public for two weeks,” Emanuel wrote, adding a hashtag, “#MysteryInBeijingBuilding.”
On Friday, Emanuel followed up with another post about Li’s disappearance.
“As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’” he wrote.
A purge of Li would make him the first incumbent member of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, a Xi-chaired council that commands the armed forces, to be taken down in recent years. In 2017, Fang Fenghui, a CMC member and the chief of the commission’s Joint Staff Department at the time, disappeared from public view before being expelled from the party the following year and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 for corruption.
Li last appeared in public on Aug. 29, when he gave a speech at a China-Africa security conference in Beijing.
Li had been expected to attend and address China’s coming Xiangshan Forum, an international security conference in Beijing that gathers defense chiefs and military brass. This year’s edition, which would be the first full-scale, in-person forum since the Covid-19 pandemic, is scheduled to take place in late October, according to people familiar with the matter.
A son of a revolutionary fighter, Li followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a Communist Party member in 1980 and joining the PLA two years later, according to official biographies and state media reports. He is an engineer by training and spent three decades working at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China, eventually becoming the facility’s director and overseeing the early launches of lunar exploration missions under the Chang’e program.
In 2017, Li became head of the Equipment Development Department under the Central Military Commission. Washington has imposed sanctions on Li since 2018, due to his role overseeing China’s purchase of combat aircraft and missile equipment from Russia.
Li was named a member of the seven-man Central Military Commission in October 2022. Then in March, he became China’s defense minister and received the title of state councilor, a senior government rank.
In late July, about a month before Li’s last public appearance, the Equipment Development Department issued a notice saying it was cracking down on regulatory and disciplinary violations in equipment procurement and tender processes, and called for public tipoffs on improper activities dating back to October 2017.
Li was head of the department from 2017 to 2022.
Party authorities haven’t announced any change to Li’s status as one of 205 full members of the party’s Central Committee. As of Friday, the websites of China’s Ministry of National Defense and the State Council continued to list Li as defense minister and state councilor.
On July 25, China’s legislature removed Qin as foreign minister at a hastily convened session and replaced him with Wang Yi, the party’s top foreign-affairs official, who previously served as foreign minister from 2013 to December 2022.
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