China and anti-corruption
This past weekend China has weighed in on how serious it is taking anti-corruption. China’s third-highest ranking general, General He Weidong and eight other senior officials have been expelled from the ruling Communist Party and the military on suspicion of serious misconduct linked to corruption. This story has been reported very widely by a large number of media outlets, including The New York Times This is another large scale crackdown since Chairman Xi Jinping’s administration began to focus on high level fraud since 2023, yet the New York Times noted that “[s]ome experts have said that the recent graft investigations and the ensuing disruption in the military command may have undermined Mr. Xi’s confidence that the People’s Liberation Army was ready for major combat.” This has been part of a background in which there has been significant corruption in government for many years and presently the Ministry of National Defense provided no details about the misdeeds that General He and the other commanders were accused of, but they stated that the charges involved corruption.
Why do we care about this? The reason we should care about these cases is not so much the mechanisms that the Chinese government has used, but how this manifests itself within the country. As we know, censorship and limited access to social media is common in China. What anti-corruption crackdowns in such environments, is one more aspect of governmental control, under the guise of protecting the citizens, yet the intent is intimidation and control. What we should do is continue to monitor what this means and if it is one more element of control, versus genuine interest in anti-corruption.
Links:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/world/asia/china-military-general-he-corruption.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/17/china/china-communist-party-expels-military-leaders-intl-hnk
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy7528ekzro
https://www.newsweek.com/china-expels-top-military-generals-from-communist-party-10894472