(Bloomberg) -- China said for the first time that the ousting of nine military members of parliament announced late last year was due to wrongdoing by the officers.

A committee under the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, said the lawmakers’ memberships were revoked because of “suspected serious violations of law and discipline.”

China’s Xinhua News Agency reported the ousters in December, but didn’t provide any explanation. The latest comments were on pages 235 and 236 of a 250-page gazette dated Jan. 15, which also showed the purges happened long before the Xinhua report, with the earliest taking place on July 7. 

US intelligence indicates that widespread corruption has undermined Chinese military capabilities, Bloomberg News reported last month.

Several other senior military figures — including the highest-level defense official since 2017 — have also been unseated since around the middle of last year, in addition to the nine mentioned in the NPC report. 

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.