Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu Is Missing (image: twitter.com/Kuzzat Altay)
Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu has been missing for over two weeks, and it is speculated that he is under investigation. He is the second high-level official missing after China’s former foreign minister, Qin Gang.
The US government believes that the minister has been placed under investigation to corruption charges in his previous position in the military department. They also add that Shangfu has been removed from his current position as defence minister, as the Financial Times reports. Similarly, Gang was also absent from the public sphere for one month before he was stripped of his roles in July.
Li, 65, was seen last in public on August 29, when he gave a speech to the peace and security forum with African nations. In mid-August, he made his last overseas trip, and on the trip to Moscow and Minsk as part of the security conference, he met Russian officials and Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president.
News agency Reuters quoting Vietnamese defence officials said that the Chinese General has cancelled a meeting scheduled for September 7-8 at the last minute because of a “health condition.”
Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, writes on X (formerly Twitter) that the Chinese Minister must have been placed under house arrest.
When asked the foreign ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, whether Li was under investigation, she replied that she was “not aware of the relevant information,” Reuters reported.
Appointed in March, Li held the position of one of the five State Councilors constituted by Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, to form China’s leadership cabinet this year.
The analysts and diplomats are concerned with the lack of transparency in China’s leadership, particularly the status of Chinese foreign policy. As China’s whole system has become more and more opaque and as powers become personalized under Xi Jinping, that makes it harder for outside interlocutors to know where China’s foreign policy is going to go,” Sheena Chestnut Greitens, director of the Asia Policy Program at the University of Texas, Austin, told The Washington Post.
