China has reshuffled its military top brass in a move analysts said yesterday was probably aimed at ensuring President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) remains commander-in-chief of the military after a 10-yearly leadership change.
At a top Chinese Communist Party meeting on Sunday, Hu oversaw the promotion of generals Fan Changlong (范長龍) and Xu Qiliang (許其亮) as vice chairmen of the powerful 12-member Central Military Commission (CMC), Xinhua news agency said.
Hu, the CMC chairman, is set to step down as head of the ruling party at a congress starting this week and will retire as national president in March next year as part of the leadership change.
Photo: Reuters
However, Willy Lam (林和立), a China politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: “Hu Jintao would want to serve another five years [as CMC chief], particularly given the fact that he has to watch over his political proteges ... and protect his political legacy.”
“As long as he is the CMC chief, he will still be the power behind the throne,” Lam said.
According to Lu Siqing (盧四清) head of the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, which seeks to advance political reform in China, both promoted generals have close ties to Hu.
Xu is the first air force general to become a vice chairman of the committee, and his ascension also reflects the importance China places on quickly developing its air capability.
China’s 2.3 million-strong military forces include nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles and a recently commissioned second-hand aircraft carrier purchased from Ukraine.
The two incoming CMC vice chairmen will be tasked with pushing forward the modernization of the military and overseeing the increasingly powerful arsenal.
Unlike most modern states the military is directly run by the ruling party, not by the government, an arrangement that stems from the revolution that brought the party to power in 1949.
Mao Zedong (毛澤東) — who said that “power comes from the barrel of the gun” — used the People’s Liberation Army not only to advance revolution, but also to protect the party’s political power, Lam said.
Hu took over control of the party from former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) in 2002 but, as part of China’s opaque and secretive political process, only succeeded him as CMC chairman in 2004.
There was also a possibility that Hu would only retain the CMC chairmanship for an extra two years, Lam said, long enough to let him influence the naming of the future heir to Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平), his own successor as party head and president.
He could also protect his protege, Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang (李克強), who is set to take the place of outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), and seek to place other key allies in top posts at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, Lam said.
Xi was effectively chosen as China’s next core leader in 2007 in a selection process heavily influenced by Jiang, who had already stepped down.
In a statement, Lu said: “Hu Jintao will seek to continue on as chairman of the Central Military Commission for another five years until 2017.”
“This is due to worries over Xi Jinping among a lot of people in the higher levels of the military,” he said.
Xi was named a CMC vice chairman in 2010 in a rocky approval process that reportedly took more than a year to complete.
“If Hu Jintao retains his seat for another year or so, this certainly maintains the previous political practice,” Kenneth Jarrett, a China-based director for the APCO Worldwide consultancy, told reporters.
“But I would say it’s not good for China in the sense that you have a divided leadership, where you have Hu Jintao who will have the allegiance of the military at the very top even though he has given up all of his other positions,” he said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS