China's Xi stresses need to fight graft in military

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's President Xi Jinping stressed the need to enforce discipline and fight corruption in the military, as well as boost information warfare capabilities, state broadcaster CCTV said on Thursday.

Since last year, China's military has undergone a sweeping anti-corruption purge, with at least nine People's Liberation Army (PLA) generals and a handful of defence industry executives removed from the national legislative body.

"It is necessary to strictly enforce discipline and crack down on corruption to ensure that the military remains absolutely loyal, absolutely pure, and absolutely reliable," Xi said.

His remarks come after the defence ministry said last week that a top-ranking military official had been suspended and was under investigation for "serious violations of discipline".

Xi was making his first inspection of the military's new information warfare department, established in April, which reports directly to the powerful Central Military Commission.

Part of the biggest restructuring of China's armed forces since 2015, the new unit points to the ruling Communist Party leadership's increased focus on military modernisation and non-conventional forms of warfare.

"The status and role of network information systems in modern warfare are prominent to an unprecedented degree," Xi told officers, according to a CCTV report.

The People's Liberation Army Information Support Force, as the new unit is known, is first and foremost a "combat force", he added.

Previously part of the PLA's Strategic Support Force, combining cyber, information and space warfare units, the new force is tasked with protecting China's military information systems from cyber and electronic warfare attacks.

(Reporting by Laurie Chen, Liz Lee and Beijing newsroom; Editing by Christina Fincher and Clarence Fernandez)