Episode Notes:

China’s defense minister, Li Shangfu, has been conspicuously absent from public view since August. We’re joined by Sheena Chestnut Greitens to learn where he is and what he's up to.

Sheena is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin,  and director of the University of Texas' Asia Policy Program. She is currently on leave as a visiting associate research professor of Indo-Pacific security at the United States Army War College.

[:50] Latest on Li Shangfu

[3:46] Role of Corruption

[7:51] Diplomatic Fallout

Episode Transcript

Nicholas Danforth: My name is Nicholas Danforth and I'm an editor at War on the Rocks. You are listening to The WarCast. The members-only podcast for what you need to know, now.

China's defense minister, Li Shangfu has been conspicuously absent from public view since August. Here to tell us where he is and what he might be up to, we're joined today by Sheena Chestnut Greitens. Sheena is associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin and director of UT's Asia Policy Program. She is currently on leave, is visiting associate research professor of Indo-Pacific Security at the United States Army War College. With that, welcome to The WarCast.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Thank you. Glad to be with you.

Nicholas Danforth: So tell us what do we know about where China's defense minister is?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, so first of all, I think we should acknowledge that the disappearance of the defense minister has caught even some very seasoned China watchers off guard, especially because it followed so quickly on the heels of a similar disappearance of China's foreign minister Qin Gang. And to have two senior officials who are China's representation to the world and who were scheduled to be in a range of bilateral meetings and multilateral summits, disappear without explanation, is really indicative of a very high level of churn at the senior levels of the party and raises some really interesting questions about what's going on in Chinese elite politics and with Xi Jinping's leadership and decision-making.

Nicholas Danforth: So I want to get to both of those questions, but first, just at an even more basic level, what if any explanation has been given? What do people actually know about or what do people assume, based on what little they know about what's actually happening here?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So the interesting thing is the way the Chinese political system works is that there's often no explanation given at first, and I remember when the head of Interpol, who was a Chinese vice minister of public security, the police ministry went missing in the mid 2010s. Even Interpol had to say, well, we don't know, we're asking the relevant Chinese authorities. And so there's often this period of radio silence from the Chinese political system when these senior folks are taken in for investigation. In the case of both Qin Gang and Li Shangfu, they appear to be under investigation for corruption. And there was a report this morning that Qin Gang's was investigated for things related to an affair and possibly a child born in the United States that the party believed actually compromised China's national security and his ability to represent China in the United States.

Li Shangfu is a little bit different in that the allegations are corruption, as far as we know, that's what the public reporting right now says. And it appears to possibly be linked to an equipment and procurement department that he was the head of. And if you remember a few weeks ago, there was an announcement that the senior leadership of China's rocket forces, the forces overseeing the nuclear and the missile programs had also been purged and removed. And so it's possible that these two investigations are linked because some of those folks sat in the same department and had some overlap. And so procurement is an area where corruption tends to be particularly rife in the PLA system. And so our best guess is that that is what Li Shungfu is being investigated for, but he actually was handpicked by Xi Jinping to take the defense minister role. So to have someone rise and fall with that kind of abruptness is fairly jarring.

Nicholas Danforth: So then again, I mean based on what you've observed in similar cases and the speculation that you've got here, is a decision like this basically, is it a political decision that's justified by corruption or is this actually a result of Xi Jinping deciding that his defense minister was unacceptably corrupt and that that's genuinely the reason, in Xi Jinping's mind, that he's being purged?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Well, I think we have to remember that Xi Jinping views corruption as a threat to national security. A lot of his anti-corruption drive very early on was targeted at the military. Some of the first senior people he removed were two former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. I mentioned he took out the Vice Minister of Interpol, he took out Zhou Yongkang who ran the sort of the internal, oversaw the internal security apparatus. And the reason why Xi Jinping views corruption as a threat to regime security, is that it creates conflicting loyalties, and ideological discipline and loyalty to the party are paramount in his mind for keeping the CCP regime and his personal leadership secure. So anytime somebody has an incentive to line their own pockets rather than to do what he and the party leadership is directing, he actually views that as a threat to national security. And so in his mind, these two things are deeply connected and I think that's why we've seen the severity of the anti-corruption campaign when it gets turned on the military and the internal security apparatus.

Nicholas Danforth: Well, and on another front, I wonder too, I mean we've published a number of articles about what lessons both China and Taiwan might be taking from the war in Ukraine. Is there also a sense that having looked at Russia's performance in Ukraine, people in Beijing might be concluding that corruption is also just a very straight-up, military preparedness problem that weakens the country in that way?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the interesting things here is that to the extent Xi Jinping is spending time worrying about whether or not the senior military leadership or that the civilians who oversee the military for the party are loyal, to the extent he's worrying about are they lining their own pockets or are they doing what I want them to do, he's got to then ask the same questions in an operational context about, for example, a Taiwan contingency. The other interesting question that I think this raises is what kind of information Xi Jinping is getting at what point as he makes personnel decisions, because either he knew something about this and decided to appoint Li Shangfu and then changed his mind very quickly, or he didn't know some of this and it was brought to his attention after the appointment was made. And both of those suggest some problems with the information flow to the top of the Chinese political system, which I will add is very common in authoritarian political systems, very common in the kind of hyper-personalized one that Xi Jinping has been constructing.

The problem is that we see that the pathologies of that in operations like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where those information problems appear to have really hampered Russia's military performance. And so Xi Jinping has got this, I think, conundrum where he's worried about the party's loyalty on corruption grounds. But he also, I think if I was him and I'm obviously not, should be concerned about how to get accurate information, but to get accurate information, you have to have people who are willing to, as the phrase goes, speak truth to power and not just tow the party line and tell Xi Jinping what loyalty would suggest that they should tell him. So there's actually this really interesting trade off between appointing a bunch of yes men who he can trust to be loyal and appointing people who even if they're not corrupt, that still doesn't resolve some of the information problems he's got. But the takeaway from all of this is that the sort of churn on personnel here really I think calls into question what information he's getting when, and why this wasn't taken into account before these appointments were made.

Nicholas Danforth: And does that create any kind of public perception problems for him, either with the Chinese people, with other members of his bureaucracy, with other, the diplomatic staffs of other countries he has to deal with?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Gosh, it's so hard to measure that question when it comes to the Chinese public and members of the Chinese elite because people tend to falsify their preferences when they're asked questions. And there's some really good political science work trying to figure out how to measure what people actually think in a context in which everybody has an incentive to say the right things publicly, even if they believe different things privately. But I don't know that we know the answer on that. I certainly do think logically it raises some of these questions about, on what basis is he making these senior appointments that sends signals down through the rest of the party state about what gets you promoted or gets you in trouble. And if those signals aren't clear or are messy, that can really create problems at the lower levels for governance that he might not even fully end up observing.

So when it comes to the outside world, we're in a period right now where China is already closing off sources of information, making it harder for foreigners and outside observers, outside interlocutors to understand what is going on in China and where is this political system likely headed? Where is its foreign policy going? And when formal sources of information get cut off or curtailed, interlocutors tend to rely more on personal relationships. And so the fact that Qin Gang at least had been the ambassador in Washington, people had talked with him, they had had meetings with him. Then if you couple these abrupt personnel replacements and in some cases temporary vacuums, in these really key positions of China interfacing with the outside world, you couple that with the decrease in all these other sources of information about how the Chinese political system makes decisions and where it might be headed.

I think the outside perception is that China is increasingly unpredictable and at a time when China is trying to make a pitch that its governance model is superior, that it can lead, especially the global south, I'm not sure that this is helpful for the pitch that they're making about the appeal of the way China does things and its ability to serve as an example and a leader to much of the international community. Jury's still out on that, right? That'll be up to the leaders and publics in those other countries, but I think it raises some pretty serious questions.

Nicholas Danforth: Thank you so much for joining us on The WarCast.