[FT] When Xi Jinping presided over the lavish commissioning of China’s newest aircraft carrier this month, three officers expected to be crucial to the naval chain of command were strangely absent.
State television footage showed no sign of navy commander Admiral Hu Zhongming or Admiral Wu Yanan, commander of the southern theatre that includes the island of Hainan where the commissioning took place. The regional command’s political commissar Admiral Wang Wenquan was also missing.
The absences came amid a new wave of removals of People’s Liberation Army officers by Xi that shows the president’s purge is embroiling large numbers of figures with vital command roles, fuelling speculation over the impact on how the military trains and whether it is ready to fight.
"They are trying to keep up appearances, but it is definitely having an effect on the PLA’s frontline operations," said a US official briefed on the matter, adding that experts who did not perceive such an impact were probably suffering from an "an intelligence gap".
The absence in Hainan of the three admirals came just weeks after Beijing announced the firing of 10 other senior PLA officers, including He Weidong, formerly the military’s third in command, who was quietly purged in April.
Admirals Hu and Wu were among 27 senior PLA officers who were missing from a crucial gathering of the Communist party’s central committee last month, absences that accounted for 64 per cent of its members with a military background. Most of those missing are thought to be under investigation or have already been confirmed as having lost their jobs or party membership.
The heads of all but one of the PLA’s five regional commands are currently unaccounted for, are under investigation or have been fired. The navy and the ground force have followed the rocket force in having their commanders targeted. The heads of several specialised departments under the Central Military Commission, the top command organ led by Xi, have disappeared from public view. And scores of political commissars have been ousted or are under some form of party investigation.
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