"Wall Street Journal": Top-ranking Chinese general accused of leaking nuclear secrets to Washington

China's top general has been accused of leaking information about the country's nuclear weapons program to the United States and accepting bribes in exchange for official actions, including promoting an officer to the position of defense minister, according to people familiar with a high-level briefing on the allegations, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The briefing, attended by some of the country's top military officers, took place on Wednesday morning, just before China's Ministry of National Defense announced an investigation into General Zhang Youshi, once considered the most trusted military ally of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The official statement provided few details, except to say the investigation was launched for serious violations of party discipline and state laws.

But people familiar with the briefing, the contents of which have not been previously reported, said Zhang was under investigation for allegedly forming political cliques, a term used to describe efforts to build networks of influence that undermine party unity. He is also accused of abusing authority within the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party's top military decision-making body.

Authorities are also closely investigating his oversight of the powerful agency responsible for research, development and procurement of military equipment. Sources say Zhang allegedly accepted huge sums of money in exchange for official promotions within this big-budget procurement system, index.hr reports.

The most serious accusation uncovered during the closed-door briefing, the sources said, was that Zhang leaked key technical data about China's nuclear weapons to the United States. Some of the evidence against Zhang came from Gua Jun, the former general manager of China National Nuclear Corp, the state-owned company that oversees all aspects of China's civilian and military nuclear programs.

The fight against corruption

Beijing announced an investigation into Gu last Monday on suspicion of serious violations of party discipline and state laws. During a briefing on Saturday, authorities revealed that the investigation into Gu had linked Zhang to a safety lapse within China's nuclear sector, but details of the lapse were not released. Zhang, 75, and Gu were not immediately available for comment.

In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the party's decision to investigate Zhang underscores that the leadership maintains a "comprehensive, zero-tolerance approach to fighting corruption."

The biggest purge since the Mao era

Some analysts say Xi's latest crackdown on corruption and disloyalty in the armed forces marks the most aggressive dismantling of China's military leadership since the era of Mao Zedong. Like Xi, Zhang, a member of the party's elite Politburo, is one of China's "princes," as descendants of revolutionary elders and senior party officials are known.

Zhang's father fought alongside Xi's father during the Chinese civil war that brought the communists to power in 1949. "This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents a complete destruction of the high command," said Christopher Johnson, head of China Strategies Group, a political risk consultancy.

Former Minister of Defense

An internal briefing on Saturday also linked Zhang's downfall to his promotion of former Defense Minister Li Shangfu. Zhang allegedly helped Li Shangfu advance in exchange for large bribes. Li's downfall began in 2023, when he disappeared from public view and was later removed from his post as defense minister. The party expelled him the following year for corruption. Li was not available for comment.

In a sign of the depth of the ongoing investigation, Xi has tasked a task force to conduct a detailed investigation into Zhang's five-year tenure as commander of the Shenyang Military Region, from 2007 to 2012. The team has already arrived in the city of Shenyang and, according to sources, they are staying in local hotels rather than military bases, where Zhang might have a support network.

Potential targets

Authorities have already seized mobile phones from officers who rose through the ranks with Zhang and General Liu Zhenli, the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose investigation was also announced on Saturday. Thousands of officers linked to them are now potential targets. Liu, 61, was not immediately available for comment.

The downfall of Zhang and Liu expands Xi’s years-long effort to remove officers seen as corrupt and politically unreliable. The purge of even one of Xi’s personal friends, Zhang, shows that Xi’s anti-corruption zeal now knows no bounds, said Johnson, who served for two decades in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

"Xi sought to avoid mass firings of senior officers in the early years of the anti-corruption campaign by not targeting active-duty senior generals and key parts of the military such as the Strategic Missile Forces," Johnson said. "He later realized that was impossible, and this move is the culmination of that process."

Political motives

Analysts say the lack of transparency in China's political system makes it difficult to determine Xi's precise motivations for removing a longtime ally. Internal explanations provided to party elites do not always reflect the full or true motivations behind Xi's decisions.

Despite this, a Saturday editorial in the PLA Daily, the leading military newspaper, highlighted the importance of political factors in the case against Zhang, whom the newspaper accused of "severely trampling on and undermining" the institutional basis of the authority of the chairman of the Central Military Commission.

That suggests that “Zhang had too much power outside of Xi himself,” said Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. The party has stressed that Xi, as chairman of the commission, has ultimate authority over the military. “So highlighting such a violation suggests that Zhang was outside Xi’s chain of command.”

Cleaning at the top

Xi’s decision to remove Zhang shows that he is “confident in his consolidation of power over the military,” Morris said. “It is not a sign of weakness, but of strength for Xi.” By removing key people from the command structure, Xi is signaling that widespread corruption, networks of patronage, and the compromise of state secrets are existential threats to his goal of taking control of Taiwan.

However, some analysts say the purge of senior ranks is likely to affect combat effectiveness and could reduce the immediate risk of invasion. Since the summer of 2023, more than 50 senior military officers and defense industry executives have been removed.

"Given the size and complexity of oversight of any large and sophisticated military organization, this vacuum at the top is unsustainable," said M. Taylor Fravel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He added that it "will certainly have an impact on the PLA's current readiness to undertake large, complex military operations in the short to medium term."