63-year General Wei Fenghe, a reputed 'quiet achiever' and the last Commander of the PLA Second Artillery Corps, is tipped to be appointed the next Defence Minister at the upcoming NPC session in March 2018. Wei Fenghe was named as one of the members of the Communist Party’s powerful Central Military Commission (CMC) on October 25. He was among the first of a number of senior military officers to pledge their loyalty to Xi Jinping even before the Chinese President announced his ambitious reform programme, according to a source close to the military and based in Beijing. 

(Comment: Wei Fenghe’s career was on the up in November 2012 when, just eight days after Xi formally took over from Hu Jintao as CMC chairman, he was promoted to General – making him, at 58, the youngest to hold the rank. Born into a farming family in the northwestern county of Chiping, in Liaocheng, Shandong province, in 1954, Wei Fenghe joined the Second Artillery Corps in 1970 when he was just 16. Two years later, he joined the Communist Party, paving the way for promotion. At 21, he was sent to learn rocket engineering at a missile school under the Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence. He went on to train as a strategic missile commander at the Second Artillery Corps’ college in Wuhan. It took him less than two decades to rise from grass-roots officer to senior colonel, in 1994. He then became the youngest deputy chief of what was then the General Staff Department in 2010, at the age of 56. The operational department – along with three other PLA headquarters – was disbanded and replaced by 15 new divisions in January 2016.)