Xu Caihou (; June 1943 – 15 March 2015) was a Chinese general in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the country's top military council. As vice chairman of the CMC, he was one of the top ranking officers of the People's Liberation Army. He also held a seat on the 25-member Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party between 2007 and 2012.
Born to a working-class family in Liaoning province, Xu spent much of his earlier career in northeastern China. He moved to Beijing in 1990 to become political commissar of the 16th Group Army, later serving as editor of the PLA's flagship newspaper, the PLA Daily. In 1996 Xu became political commissar of the Jinan Military Region. He became vice chairman of the CMC in September 2004. He retired from office in March 2013.
In March 2014, Xu was detained and put under investigation on suspicion of bribery in one of the highest profile corruption investigations in PLA history. In June 2014, Xu was expelled from the Communist Party. Xu allegedly accumulated massive wealth by routinely demanding large bribes for the promotion of officers under him during his time as vice chairman of the CMC. Xu was undergoing legal proceedings and facing a court martial but charges were dropped after he died of bladder cancer in March 2015.
Early life and education
Xu was born in 1943 to a working-class family in the town of Wafangdian, Liaoning province; his parents were factory workers. He attended No. 8 Middle School in present-day Dalian. He achieved high scores on his Gaokao exams and was admitted to the elite Harbin Military Engineering Institute in Harbin, where he studied electrical engineering. The institute was a feeder school for the army, and produced many graduates who later went on to become high-ranking officers in the PLA. In April 1966, just prior to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Xu Caihou, along with all the students attending the institute, were mandated by the government to leave the military to take on civilian jobs.
Xu graduated in 1968, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, and was sent to the countryside to perform manual agricultural labour for over a year on a military-run farm in Tangyuan County in China's northeastern hinterlands. Observers believe that through Xu, Jiang continued to influence affairs in the military despite his official retirement in 2004; some retired officers simply described Xu and his partner of equal rank Guo Boxiong as "Jiang's proxy in the military."
During his term as Central Military Commission vice chairman, beginning in September 2004, Xu wielded significant authority over personnel decisions in the upper echelons of the military. Xu was seen by some observers as the day-to-day executive authority in the upper military ranks because CCP General Secretary and Central Military Chairman Hu Jintao, nominally Xu's superior, took a relatively hands-off approach to military affairs.