Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu has been missing from the public eye for one month as of Friday, his unexplained absence following reports that Communist Party officials suspected him of corruption involving military contracts.
He has not appeared for multiple key engagements.
Li is the second high-ranking Chinese official to abruptly disappear recently. In June, now-former Foreign Minister Qin Gang made his last public appearance, with no explanation for why he had canceled a string of public engagements. Exactly a month later, the Chinese government announced that it had removed Qin from his post and replaced him with his predecessor, current Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Qin has yet to be seen in public since.
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang speaks during a press conference with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry, at the foreign ministry headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Jan. 15, 2023. (Amr Nabil/AP)
Li was last seen in public on August 29 delivering a speech at the China-Africa Peace and Security Forum held in Beijing to help promote Communist Party military involvement on the African continent. On that occasion, Li vowed that his country was “ready to firmly stand with the African people” and China would soon “enhance military cooperation with Africa in various fields including joint exercises, peacekeeping and escorting, military education as well as professional training.”
Shortly before that speech, Li had embarked on brief visits to Russia and Belarus to extend the Communist Party’s support for those two countries in light of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Belarus’s communist dictator Alexander Lukashenko vocally supports.
Chinese state media coverage of his last public engagements did not offer any indication that Li had run afoul of his job responsibilities or upset dictator Xi Jinping. Li is still the defense minister and is listed in that capacity on the ministry’s official website at press time. While anonymous alleged United States officials have claimed in Western media reports that Beijing stripped Li of his official authority, the Chinese government has yet to publicly confirm those reports.
As the Nikkei Asian Review observed on Friday, Li missed two high-level engagements since his last public appearance – a meeting with Vietnamese officials in early September, and a meeting with the head of the navy of Singapore shortly thereafter, with minimal explanation. The Chinese government claimed his absence from the Vietnamese official meeting was due to a “health condition.”
Li ascended to the top position in the Defense Ministry in March, one of several hand-picked ministers considered among Xi Jinping’s favorites. Qin similarly took over the Foreign Ministry in January and lasted seven months on the job, the shortest tenure of any foreign minister in history. Both appointments were a surprise: Qin’s because of his limited experience and young age, and Li’s because he was under American sanctions for purchases of Russian military equipment in 2018. The appointment of an official already under sanctions was widely interpreted as a message from Xi to Washington that he did not intend to put any effort into easing the growing tensions between the two geopolitical rivals, prompted by widespread illegal Chinese activities such as human rights atrocities, intellectual property theft, espionage, and illegal seizures of the sovereign territory of other nations.
Chinese officials similarly dismissed Qin’s disappearance from Foreign Ministry events as due to health woes before his abrupt and still-unexplained firing. Rather than limiting interest, however, the assurances that Qin was ill fueled sensational rumors on Chinese social media that Qin had been embroiled in an extramarital relationship with a journalist and she bore a child out of wedlock. The journalist in question, PhoenixTV’s Fu Xiaotian, also mysteriously disappeared; she has not produced television content or posted on social media since Qin disappeared. An interview she held with Qin Gang before he disappeared has been set to “private” on PhoenixTV’s YouTube account.
Anonymous people circulated rumors through the Wall Street Journal this month that Qin lost his job indeed as a result of “lifestyle issues” – an extramarital affair – and because the baby in question is an American.
The Chinese government, which rapidly and severely censors content unfavorable to itself on social media, allowed the disparaging rumors to circulate widely on Weibo and similar websites.
Weibo, the most prominent Chinese regime-controlled social media site, has not allowed similar conversations regarding Li. Comments on his vanishing have been limited, and those not deleted only vaguely hint to Li outraging the Communist Party in some way.
“Anyone who [has been] publicly claimed [as having] health issues will never be healthy again in the future,” one such comment read, according to a translation by the Financial Times.
Reuters reported in mid-September that Li had become embroiled in a corruption investigation involving military contracts. The news agency cited unnamed individuals in its report and offered no details as to what sort of corrupt activity Li was suspected of engaging in.
“The investigation into Li relates to procurement of military equipment, according to a regional security official and three people in direct contact with the Chinese military,” Reuters claimed, adding that eight other people tied to him are under the same investigation.
“The probe into Li, who was appointed as defense minister in March, and the eight officials is being carried out by the military’s powerful disciplinary inspection commission,” the report continued, citing two anonymous “people in direct contact with the [Chinese] military.”
The Associated Press reported on Thursday that the Chinese Defense Ministry accepted a question on Li’s absence that day, but a spokesman only offered, “I’m not aware of the situation you mentioned.”