Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Hostesses posed outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday as the Communist Party Congress closed.
BEIJING — An insider critique of corruption in China’s military, circulating just as new leadership is about to take over the armed forces, warns that graft and wide-scale abuses pose as much of a threat to the nation’s security as the United States.
Col. Liu Mingfu, the author of the book, “Why the Liberation Army Can Win,” is not a lone voice.
Earlier this year, a powerful army official gave an emotional speech describing corruption as a “do-or-die struggle,” and days later, according to widely published accounts, a prominent general, Gu Junshan, a deputy director of the logistics department, was arrested on suspicion of corruption. He now awaits trial. The general is reported to have made huge profits on illicit land deals and given more than 400 houses intended for retired officers to friends.
Those excesses may be mere trifles compared with the depth of the overall corruption, the speech by Gen. Liu Yuan, an associate of the new party leader, Xi Jinping, suggested.
For Mr. Xi, who boasts a military pedigree from his father — a guerrilla leader who helped bring Mao Zedong to power in 1949 — China’s fast modernizing army will be a bulwark of his standing at home and influence abroad.
But the depth of graft and brazen profiteering in the People’s Liberation Army poses a delicate problem for the new leader, one that Colonel Liu and others have warned could undermine the status of the Communist Party.
As part of the nation’s once-a-decade handover of power, Mr. Xi is also expected to assume the chairmanship of the 12-member Central Military Commission immediately. Hu Jintao, the departing party leader, is expected to break precedent and not retain his position atop the body, which oversees the armed forces, for an extended period after his retirement, unlike previous leaders.
Recent territorial disputes with Japan and Southeast Asian neighbors have raised nationalist sentiment in China, and the popular desire for a strong military could make it politically dangerous for Mr. Xi to embark on a campaign that unmasks squandering of public funds.
In his opening speech to the 18th Party Congress, Mr. Hu said China would aim to become “a maritime power.” It was one of the few references in the address about foreign affairs, and one that suggested the government would continue the double-digit increases in expenditures for the military.
But along with the modernization and bigger budgets has come more corruption, a problem that pervades China’s ruling party and its government.
For the first time in the history of the People’s Liberation Army, Chinese analysts say, the land-based army has had to give up its dominance of the military commission.
The former commander of the air force, Xu Qiliang, will be a vice chairman, giving the air force new weight in big decisions, they said. An army general, Fan Changlong, the former commander of the Jinan Military Region, will also be a vice chairman.
These two men will run the day-to-day operations of the military, Chinese analysts said.
In his book, Colonel Liu, a former professor at China’s National Defense University, wrote that the army had not been tested in decades and had grown complacent. “As a military that has not fought a war for 30 years, the People’s Liberation Army has reached a stage in which its biggest danger and No. 1 foe is corruption,” he wrote.
Colonel Liu first became prominent in 2010 with the publication of his book “The China Dream,” an ultranationalist tract arguing that China should build the world’s strongest military and move swiftly to supplant the United States as the global “champion.”
In his new work, the colonel drew a parallel with 1894, when China’s forces were swiftly defeated by a rapidly modernizing Japan, even though the Chinese were equipped with expensive ships from Europe. Historians often attribute the defeat to corruption.
Another retired army officer, and a member of the aristocratic class known as the princelings, said that corruption existed throughout the military but that the new commission would probably refrain from a sustained campaign against it.
Changing of the Guard: Corruption in China Military Poses Test
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Changing of the Guard: Corruption in China Military Poses Test
