A senior military commander once believed to have close ties to disgraced former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai was recently promoted. This followed a high-level military investigation launched in April to determine whether there were connections between Bo and the military in the nation's southwest.
Major General Zhou Xiaozhou , who had been commander of the PLA's 14th Army Corps in Kunming , Yunnan , recently succeeded Major General Ai Husheng as chief of staff of the Chengdu Military Command, said a source familiar with military affairs. The source added that Ai had earlier been moved onto the roll as deputy commander of the unit.
The Chengdu Military Command oversees both Chongqing and Yunnan, as well as other southwestern regions including Tibet , Sichuan and Guizhou .
Zhou, 56, has generally been regarded as a close friend of Bo, who had paid a visit to Zhou's troops in Kunming the day after news broke on February 8 about the attempted defection to the US of Wang Lijun , the municipality's former police chief who was also once Bo's right-hand man.
It was unclear whether Zhou met Bo during the visit as the political scandal began to unfold.
Bo's father, the late Bo Yibo , was one of the founders of the 14th Army Corps, and the younger Bo had boasted of his ties with the unit. The son of late Lieutenant General Zhou Yibing , who was the commander of the Beijing military region during the June 4 crackdown, Zhou Xiaozhou is widely seen as one of the nation's powerful 'princelings' - children of senior Communist Party figures.
The Central Military Commission, the PLA's top decision-making body, sent a total of five task forces in early April to investigate Bo's suspected links to the Chengdu Military Command, another source in Chengdu said earlier, adding that the 14th Army Corps had been subject to the investigation.