A security official in the region and three people with direct contact with the Chinese army said that the investigation into Li related to the purchase of military equipment. Reuters was unable to obtain details about the purchases under scrutiny.
Eight senior officials from China’s army procurement unit, which Li led from 2017 to 2022, are also under investigation, two of the people in contact with the military said.
They added that the investigation into Lee, who was appointed defense minister in March, and the eight officials was being conducted by the powerful Army Discipline Inspection Commission.
Reuters’ detailed examination of the accusations against Li and the timing of the investigation is based on interviews with sources who regularly communicate with senior Chinese politicians and defense leaders, as well as with officials in the region with great knowledge of Chinese policy.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told reporters she was not aware of the situation. According to Reuters, neither the State Council nor the Ministry of Defense have yet responded to requests for comment. Lee could not yet be reached.
- The US government believes Lee is under investigation, the Financial Times reported, citing US officials. The Wall Street Journal quoted a source close to the decision-making process in Beijing as saying that he was taken in last week for interrogation.
The US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the two reports that US intelligence officials believe Lee is under investigation for corruption.
US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel asked in a post on the X platform whether Lee was under house arrest.
The US Embassy in Tokyo said it had no additional comment yet.
Li was last seen in Beijing on August 29 giving a speech at a security forum with African countries. He also visited Russia and Belarus earlier that month.
A person in direct contact with the military and two foreign security officials familiar with the matter said that the investigation began into the minister shortly after his return from that trip.
A Vietnamese official said that by September 3, the Chinese Ministry of Defense had canceled Li’s visit to Vietnam to attend an annual defense meeting between the two countries that was scheduled to be held on September 7-8. Two Vietnamese officials said that Beijing informed officials in Hanoi when it postponed the event that Ly had a “health problem.”
Lee’s failure to attend that meeting, as well as his failure to attend talks with a senior Singaporean military official in China the same week, raised questions among diplomats in the region and social media users about his whereabouts.
The investigation into Li follows China’s unexplained decision to replace Foreign Minister Qin Gang in July after a long absence from the public eye and change the leadership of the Missile Force, an elite force of the People’s Liberation Army responsible for China’s conventional and nuclear missiles. Chinese officials initially attributed Chen’s absence also to health reasons.
These moves raised questions from analysts and diplomats about the sudden leadership changes in China at a time when the country’s economy is slowly recovering from the strict closure to confront the pandemic and in light of further deterioration of relations with the United States due to a number of issues.
Observers of Chinese political affairs believe that President Xi Jinping carefully chose both Lee and Chen, which makes the absence of each of them after less than a year in office very noticeable. The two men were two of China’s five members of the State Council, a position higher than that of minister.
“Purge” with military purchases
- In July, the Army Procurement Unit took the unusual step of issuing a notice that it was looking to “clean up” the bidding process. It called on citizens to report violations dating back to October 2017, when Lee was head of the unit, which he ran until October 2022.
- When reporters last month asked a Defense Ministry spokesman for comment on the whereabouts of two other former senior military commanders who have not recently appeared in public and whether they were under investigation, he said the military had “zero tolerance for corruption,” without denying that they might be under investigation.
- The spokesman added, “We must always… investigate every case, punish every case of corruption, and firmly win the difficult, long-term battle against corruption.”
- In 2016, Lee was appointed deputy commander of the military’s then-new Strategic Support Force, an elite body charged with accelerating the development of space and cyberwarfare capabilities. Then, the following year, he was assigned to head the military procurement unit.
- The United States imposed sanctions on Lee in 2018 over his arms purchase from Rosoboronexport, Russia’s largest arms exporter.
- A Pentagon spokesman said Secretary Lloyd Austin sought talks with Lee during a defense conference in Singapore in June, but did not go beyond pleasantries.
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