The downfall of Guo Boxiong caps Chinese President Xi Jinping's three-year anticorruption campaign, which has seen some 30,000 Communist Party officials sacked and arrested. As a vice chair of the Central Military Commission from 2002 to 2012, retired four-star general Guo, 73, was its top military representative, making him the most powerful officer in the People's Liberation Army. A civilian court is soon expected to charge him with taking up to 80 million yuan ($12.3 million) in bribes for promoting underlings. Guo's purge is part of a broader effort to expunge rent seeking from the Communist Party and the PLA, says Beijing-based lawyer Guan Anping, an unpaid adviser to the Chinese government: "A corrupt military is a military that cannot win wars."
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