On May 7, a Chinese military court handed down a historic verdict against former defense ministers and Central Military Commission (CMC) members Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu—nearly three years after investigations began. It issued both men suspended death sentences, which are to be commuted to life imprisonment after two years, carrying a permanent bar on parole and further commutation. While suspended death sentences are common in high-level corruption cases (and many recipients are eventually released, despite the formal life sentence that follows), explicit denial of parole and commutation is an exceptionally sharp move. The ruling made Wei and Li the most senior officials holding subnational rank, just below the Politburo, ever sentenced to permanent life imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China.
The next morning, the official People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily ran a front-page commentary on the verdicts. In pointed language, harkening back to Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong’s axiom that armed forces answered to party authority rather than to individual commanders, it accused both men of “harboring disloyalty to the party” and warned that “the army holds the gun, and there must be no one in it who is disloyal.” A few weeks earlier, at a training session for high-ranking military officials, Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed that the military’s anti-corruption campaign was “far from over.” The harsh verdicts against Wei and Li effectively create new norms for punishment of military leaders, setting a precedent that may be deployed against dozens of other officers.
On May 7, a Chinese military court handed down a historic verdict against former defense ministers and Central Military Commission (CMC) members Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu—nearly three years after investigations began. It issued both men suspended death sentences, which are to be commuted to life imprisonment after two years, carrying a permanent bar on parole and further commutation. While suspended death sentences are common in high-level corruption cases (and many recipients are eventually released, despite the formal life sentence that follows), explicit denial of parole and commutation is an exceptionally sharp move. The ruling made Wei and Li the most senior officials holding subnational rank, just below the Politburo, ever sentenced to permanent life imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China.
The next morning, the official People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily ran a front-page commentary on the verdicts. In pointed language, harkening back to Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong’s axiom that armed forces answered to party authority rather than to individual commanders, it accused both men of “harboring disloyalty to the party” and warned that “the army holds the gun, and there must be no one in it who is disloyal.” A few weeks earlier, at a training session for high-ranking military officials, Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed that the military’s anti-corruption campaign was “far from over.” The harsh verdicts against Wei and Li effectively create new norms for punishment of military leaders, setting a precedent that may be deployed against dozens of other officers.
Most outside readings have treated this sequence as the closing chapter of the long-running Rocket Force corruption case, a sweeping 2023 purge that decimated the leadership of China’s strategic missile forces, military procurement apparatus, and defense sector at large. Some analysts have framed the harshness of the sentences as evidence of Xi’s constant “self-revolution.” Others have taken it as the residue of Xi’s lost trust in his own generals. Neither reading is wrong on its own terms. But both fail to explain why Xi’s apparatus chose, on this particular week, to attach a particular set of words to a particular set of verdicts. Nor do they explain why it chose to release those verdicts now, in the middle of a still-larger purge.
These choices were all deliberate. Read alongside the sequence of formal indictments Xi has issued on his fallen lieutenants over the past two years, the May 7 sentences and May 8 commentary form an unmistakable escalating ladder of political language. The most plausible interpretation, then, is that the verdicts are not a closing chapter at all. They are instead a floor-setting exercise—and quite possibly a pressure campaign—to establish an elevated legal and rhetorical baseline for the cases of other officials who are not yet convicted or even formally charged. Wei’s and Li’s sentences might signal a new era of Xi’s purges, if Xi can pull it off.
In effect, Xi has repurposed Mao’s principle that the party should control the gun. Since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party charter has enshrined the CMC Chairman Responsibility System, which routes every major military decision through the CMC chair—a post Xi himself holds. What was once a doctrine of party supremacy over the gun has become, in practice, a doctrine of Xi’s personal supremacy over both. The loyalty of which the PLA Daily writes is no longer an abstract loyalty to the party, but a specific loyalty Xi.
The pattern begins with Wei and Li. When the Politburo formally announced the men’s expulsion from the party in June 2024, the official notification accused them of corruption and “collapsed faith and lapsed loyalty.” It said their behavior had “polluted the political ecology of the troops.” That was severe language, but it remained within the bounds of a corruption framing.
The next iteration came in October 2025, when the Chinese Ministry of National Defense announced the expulsion of nine senior officers, starting with then-Politburo member and CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong and Political Work Department director Miao Hua. The ministry’s notification was terse and bureaucratic. But a PLA Daily editorial the following day added the language the original notification had withheld. He, Miao, and seven other officers were said to have suffered “collapsed faith and lapsed loyalty” and to “seriously damaged the principle of the party’s command of the gun and the Chairman Responsibility System of the CMC.” For the first time, a Politburo member and CMC member had been publicly charged with attacking the institutional foundation of Xi’s military authority, not merely with corruption.
The escalation reached its current peak this January with Zhang Youxia, the first vice chairman of the CMC and thus the highest-ranking military leader in China beside Xi, and Liu Zhenli, the joint staff chief. Within days of Zhang’s and Liu’s arrest, the National Defense Ministry announced the opening of formal investigations. The following PLA Daily commentary, the first official statement of the case, accused the men of having “seriously trampled and damaged the Chairman Responsibility System of the CMC” and “seriously aggravated political and corruption problems that affect the party’s absolute command of the army and endanger the party’s foundation of governance.” These are not corruption phrases. They are the sharpest available political indictment in the Chinese military’s vocabulary, applied at the opening of the case, not at its conclusion.
The May 8 PLA Daily commentary on Wei and Li does something subtler than impose the same indictment used against the officers caught up in the He and Zhang cases. The original 2024 notification had framed Wei’s and Li’s offenses primarily as corruption; the May 8 editorial puts political disloyalty first. It still stops short of accusing Wei and Li under the formula reserved for the officers higher up the indictment ladder, but the gap has narrowed. Wei and Li are being walked up the ladder so the cases above them can be processed without the floor shifting in plain sight.
The unusual timing of the convictions, in the middle of an ongoing purge, reinforces this reading. Among the unprocessed cases above Wei and Li, Zhang’s is the hardest to move. He is a deeply networked princeling with decades of ties across the party-state. Senior politicians of that profile rarely face formal charges without intercessors quietly approaching the leadership on their behalf. By handing down the harshest sentences on Wei and Li—both widely understood to belong to Zhang’s network—Xi removes the bargaining chips those intercessors might otherwise have used.
Taken together, the pattern is hard to miss. Xi has abandoned the post-Mao oligarchic equilibrium, in which elite immunity at the very top tier kept court politics from sliding back into Maoist purges. Part of this bargain was also encoded in law. The 2015 amendment to the criminal code substituted suspended death sentences commuted to permanent life imprisonment for the immediate death penalty in bribery cases. Since then, permanent life imprisonment has instead become the operative ceiling for civilian officials of ministerial rank, including former provincial party secretaries Bai Enpei (sentenced in 2016) and Zhao Zhengyong (2020) and former justice minister Fu Zhenghua (2022).
Wei and Li are the most senior officials holding subnational rank ever sentenced to permanent life imprisonment in the People’s Republic. Previous sentences at this rank had topped out at conventional life imprisonment. Now, Xi has already upped the punishment floor once. Whether it moves again—up to the Politburo level—is the operative question for the remaining cases.
Zhang presents the hardest problem. He is still a Politburo member, and the political indictment already attached to him is the most severe used in any of the cases to date. But Zhang turned 75 last year, the age at which Chinese law bars death sentences, including suspended ones, except in cases involving exceptionally cruel killings. The heaviest sentence legally available to him is conventional life imprisonment—lighter than what Wei and Li just received and far lighter than the rhetoric already attached to his case would seem to warrant.
He Weidong, then, is the test case for Xi’s new floor. Unlike Zhang, he can in principle receive the same sentence as Wei and Li. Outside the politically charged trial of the Gang of Four in 1981, no Politburo member has been given a suspended death sentence, let alone one without parole and commutation. Doing so to He would set a new ceiling for Politburo rank itself, one that applies equally to civilian Politburo members now under investigation, such as Ma Xingrui.
The breach would carry real costs. The princeling networks and retired elders who quietly lobbied previously would understand that no future plea would be heard, and their cooperation, which Xi still needs, would become harder to compel. A more awkward problem is that Zhang’s political indictment is heavier than He’s, yet his sentence would be lighter, the legal basis of which is difficult to explain to party members and the public.
But norms have not constrained Xi, as the past decade has shown. The escalating political language in the formal indictments—which frames He and Zhang not as corrupt officials but as men who personally attacked the foundations of party authority—is in part a pre-legal argument for why the Politburo ceiling should not apply. Xi appears to be laying the groundwork for sentences that the system has so far opted not to impose.
There is, however, a structural problem with pushing the sentencing limit further. When a harsher sanction becomes the expected outcome for convicted Politburo members, it loses its marginal deterrent force at a level where deterrence is difficult to achieve. An official who already anticipates the maximum penalty has no reason to limit the scope of what he does on the way down. The harsher the sentencing floor becomes, the weaker its hold on the behavior it is meant to constrain.
Based on past evidence, the deterrent value of severe sentences at the top of Chinese politics is quite limited. The execution of National People’s Congress’s Standing Committee Vice Chairman Cheng Kejie in 2000 did not chasten the Hu Jintao era, which produced the most permissive period of elite corruption in the party’s history. Nor did the 2021 execution of Lai Xiaomin, chairman of the state-owned financial conglomerate China Huarong, interrupt the steady supply of new financial intermediaries for politically connected wealth.
As for Wei and Li: If the two officers in the current purge who face the lightest political indictment have received suspended death sentences with no parole and no commutation, this outcome becomes the default expectation for everyone facing heavier political indictments at lower administrative ranks. Miao, Liu, and the core figures among the generals swept up in their cases are unlikely to escape it. What was the ceiling for ministerial bribery convictions has become the floor for senior military ones. Whether that floor can be carried one tier higher depends on Xi, and on whether the ceiling Xi has spent a decade quietly dismantling can hold the weight he is placing upon it.
