National Interest

by Anushka Saxena

    New internal ethics guidelines won’t be enough to stamp out the deeply embedded corruption within China’s People’s Liberation Army.

    On December 19, 2025, when the Chinese Central Military Commission’s (CMC) Equipment Development Department (EDD) released a new set of guidelines in a bid to eliminate its most systemic and deep-rooted challenges: corruption in procurement and inefficiency in weapons management. Titled “Professional Ethics and Conduct Norms,” the report’s subtext revolves around the grim admission of entrenched graft and inefficiency in procuring and maintaining the very weapons systems at the heart of China’s defense modernization and aggressive foreign policy.

    The new guidelines center their political rhetoric on “Xi Jinping Thought on Managing and Improving Equipment Development” and the need for “loyally manufacturing” weapons for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But beyond the moral exhortations, the guidelines mandate rigor in “scientific gatekeeping,” “rigid benchmarks” for orientation towards actual combat conditions and “honest quotations” to avoid price inflation.

    Because the EDD ecosystem focuses less on combat preparedness and free-market competition and more on the inward slashing of prices and guanxi (the social networks that facilitate business deals), the situation today is such that the department’s very structure has become corrosive to the ambitions of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) modernization.

• The PLA’s Culture of Corruption

    To understand the severity of the current crisis, one must look back to the CMC EDD’s July 2023 “Solicitation of Clues” announcement regarding violations by procurement experts and equipment management officials. That announcement came at a time when US intelligence assessments suggested that corruption was so pervasive that some liquid-fueled missiles in the PLA Rocket Force were filled with water instead of fuel.

    Further, reports also claimed that the massive new ICBM silo fields in Xinjiang had defective silo doors that would not open or function correctly. If true, this could likely be a result of the “expert partiality” and “bid rigging” mentioned in the 2023 announcement, by which construction contracts were awarded to well-connected firms that used substandard materials.

    In this ecosystem, the “experts” tasked with technical evaluations may have exploited loopholes in selecting the right state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or private-sector firms for the job, or may have leaked trade secrets to make bidding easier for select contractors. Inspections of the equipment in field testing, as is common in the CCP-PLA operational relationship, would have hence revealed mediocrity in quality or management. Internal investigations may have shed light on officials accepting kickbacks or pocketing budgets intended to enhance real combat capability, ultimately leading to the disappearance of some who wavered.

• The PLA’s Vanishing Leadership

    At the institutional level, such a system creates leadership crises at the very top. In the past few years, the CMC and the PLA have become graveyards for political careers. In the EDD, in particular, the most recent case is that of Li Shangfu. The former head of the department was purged for discipline-related issues stemming from his 2017–2023 tenure (which was also the period the July 2023 Announcement focused on for investigations). Now, his successor, Xu Xueqiang, has vanished from the public eye.

    Xu’s absence from the CCP Central Committee’s Fourth Plenary in October 2025 and his absence at the commissioning of the Fujian aircraft carrier in November may suggest that the purge is widening. Whether Xu is a victim of his ties to the “Fujian clique”—whose many members, such as He Weidong and Miao Hua, have been purged this year—or is being held accountable for procurement scandals, is uncertain. Nonetheless, there now exists a leadership vacuum in both the CMC and the EDD, which is unlikely to bode well for industry or grassroots confidence.

• Three Structural Problems for Chinese Military Modernization

    The EDD faces three structural hurdles that no amount of political rhetoric can easily overcome. The first is the SOE monopoly. The new guidelines emphasize the need for “competitive selection” in a market dominated by a handful of massive, state-protected monopolies that produce military equipment.

    The second is the obsession with secrecy. Because military procurement is a state secret, it lacks the public oversight and independent auditing that serve as natural checks on corruption in democratic political systems. The EDD is forced to rely on internal policing, the very mechanism that has failed for decades.

    The third is a systematic project problem. The guidelines’ own articulation that industry governance is a “systematic project” means that corruption is baked into the military-industrial complex and is a feature, not a bug, of a system where political patronage supersedes technical merit.

    For Xi Jinping, the stakes could not be higher. The “rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation depends on a military capable of winning “informationized wars” in the “new era” of China’s modernization. But as the 2025 norms make clear, the greatest threat to the PLA may not be an external enemy, but the internal “vanguards” who seem to have traded national security for personal gain. Since he has assumed power, Xi Jinping has aimed to target both “flies” and “tigers.” Now, it seems that the latter are finally coming out of the woods.

    Yet, as long as the system remains opaque and dominated by monopolistic SOEs, these new ethics and norms may remain little more than ink on paper. Until the EDD can prove that its missiles are fueled and its silo doors can open, the “new era” of Chinese military power will remain weighed down by entrenched corruption.