President Xi Jinping has promoted two military officers to the rank of general while tapping one of them as the new head of the military’s top disciplinary and anti- corruption body, as Xi works to rebuild his depleted top military command.
Zhang Shuguang, a veteran People’s Liberation Army (PLA) anti-graft officer, and Wang Gang, commander of the PLA Air Force, were promoted by Xi on Friday during a ceremony in Beijing to the highest rank for officers on active duty in China, state media reports showed.
Shuguang, now head of the Central Military Commission’s (CMC) powerful discipline inspection commission, replaces Zhang Shengmin as the military’s top anti-graft watchdog. Shengmin has held the post since 2017, even after being promoted to the CMC’s vice-chairman in 2025.
Under a years-long anti-corruption campaign initiated by the Chinese leader, scores of senior officials and top generals have been investigated, removed and purged. Two former defence ministers were handed suspended death sentences in May.
That crackdown has also reduced China’s once seven-member supreme military command body to just two people: Xi himself as the chairman and Shengmin as vice-chairman.
After purging nearly the entirety of his top military command for corruption, Xi sent senior PLA officers to an intensive 10-week political retraining course earlier this year.
“All thoughts and actions of seeking private gain and corruption are fundamentally incompatible with the party’s nature and purpose,” he told the officers in April at the start of the rare and unusual programme.
The senior officers studied Xi’s works, revisited their communist party oath, and worked late into the night to reflect on their own failings. — Reuters
