Inside China’s ideological training camp where PLA top brass study Xi’s speeches
Hundreds of China’s top military officials have spent weeks at an unprecedented ideology training camp – studying President Xi Jinping’s speeches, reading corrupt cadres’ confessions and marching in formation – as the anti-corruption drive in the military deepens. The details of the training camp, w
By Phoebe Zhang
Hundreds of China’s top military officials have spent weeks at an unprecedented ideology training camp – studying President Xi Jinping’s speeches, reading corrupt cadres’ confessions and marching in formation – as the anti-corruption drive in the military deepens.
The details of the training camp, which concluded last week, were published in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, the military’s official newspaper, on Wednesday.
Xi personally decided to launch the exercise, which began on April 8, the PLA Daily reported. During its opening ceremony, he delivered a speech stressing that “leading officers, especially senior cadres, must take the lead in … building an atmosphere where people speak the truth, offer advice candidly and fight against wrongdoings”.
State broadcaster CCTV showed footage of the ceremony, which involved hundreds of officers across various People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units and departments, including generals, lieutenant generals and major generals.
Not all officials present at the ceremony had to go through the entire 10-week camp. Defence Minister Dong Jun, who was in the audience’s front row during Xi’s speech, made a trip to South Africa earlier this month.
The participants’ days began with morning exercises to practise basic military marching formations, chant their oaths to the Communist Party and sing about PLA discipline, the PLA Daily article said.
The training course was meticulously designed, offering over 40 theoretical lectures and more than 10 focused reading sessions on key texts, followed by group discussions. The texts included the military’s most important discipline regulations, Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Military and the president’s speech at the opening ceremony.
CCTV previously reported that Xi stressed that “joining this party, this military, means you have to believe in Marxism, you have to be loyal to the party’s faith, organisation and cause”.
“Our party represents the people’s fundamental interests and has no special interest of its own,” he said. “Any notion or act of seeking personal gain or engaging in corruption is fundamentally incompatible with the party’s nature and purpose.”
The goal was to make sure the cadres knew “which red lines must never be crossed, which bottom lines must never be breached”, the PLA Daily article said.
During the session, senior officials studied, ate and rested together. They were often seen discussing in class, in the cafeteria, in the dormitories, sometimes late into the night, according to the article.
In addition to the texts, the officials were presented with case studies on corrupt individuals, and were divided into groups focusing on military operations, political work, logistics, equipment, technology and national defence mobilisation. They reviewed written confessions of officials, compiled a list of corruption risks and developed countermeasures, the article said.
Just before the course concluded, on June 12, six role models were invited to give speeches. Among them was Wei Changjin, a war hero who fought in a border conflict with Vietnam in 1985.
The only woman among the speakers, He Yuanzhi, is an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a top researcher with the PLA Academy of Military Sciences. She is a satellite communications expert and has won multiple awards for advancing technology in this area.
The article stressed that, in the party’s history, whenever the revolution reached a turning point, “it was invariably the senior officers who had to undergo ideological remoulding”.
The anti-corruption drive in the military has brought down dozens of leaders, including members of the Politburo, the party’s top decision-making body. Commanders across divisions and theatres have also been investigated for corruption or disappeared from the public eye without explanation.
Of the seven members of the Central Military Commission named at the party’s national congress in 2022, only two remain – Xi and the PLA’s anti-corruption chief, Zhang Shengmin.
Xi has stressed on multiple occasions that the anti-corruption fight in the military will not stop.
“The armed forces wield the gun. There must never be room in the military for those half-hearted towards the party, nor any sanctuary for the corrupt,” he said during the “two sessions” in March, the annual meeting of China’s top legislature and political advisory body.