PLA cyber scientist Guo Shize vanishes from China's academy roster, the latest defence expert to go

Guo Shize, one of the Chinese military's leading cyber security scientists, has been removed from the website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's top national research institute, the South China Morning Post reported on 11 November. Guo, 57, is a researcher at the People's Liberation Army's Information Technology Security Research Centre and was elected an academician in 2023.

Neither the academy nor China's defence ministry has explained the change, and it is not clear whether Guo has formally lost his title or why. The Post said it was not known exactly when his page came down, but that Chinese media reports noticed the change on Monday, 9 November.

Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao gave a more detailed timeline. It said Chinese academic accounts on the WeChat platform had found that, from 5 November, his name could no longer be found in the full list of academicians on the academy's Chinese-language website. His profile was still on the English-language site as of 9 November, the paper said, but when it checked again on the morning of 11 November that page had also gone.

Guo's career sits squarely inside the PLA's cyber and signals establishment. According to Lianhe Zaobao and Taiwan's Central News Agency, he headed the ninth office of a research institute under the former General Staff Department and later led a department of the PLA's Strategic Support Force. He studied for his first two degrees at the PLA Ordnance Engineering College, graduating in 1988 and 1991, and earned a doctorate at the Harbin Institute of Technology in 1994.

His research has focused on network and system security. Both reports said he has won one first-class and three second-class national awards for progress in science and technology. Lianhe Zaobao noted that as recently as September he spoke at a national cyber security conference in Hefei, where he argued that top cyber security schools should be judged by how much they strengthen national security capability.

The Post also noted an unusual personal link: Guo and his two roommates at the Harbin Institute of Technology all went on to become academicians at China's leading scientific institutions.

Guo is far from the first expert with a military background to disappear from the rolls. The Central News Agency, relaying a report by Hong Kong's Ming Pao, said about 11 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering had been removed from the lists in the past year, many of them with ties to the defence industry.

Those named include Liu Guozhi, a former director of the Central Military Commission's science and technology commission and former deputy head of the General Armament Department, and Yang Wei, chief designer of the J-20 stealth fighter. From the engineering academy, the list includes radar specialist Wu Manqing, a former general manager of China Electronics Technology Group, missile expert Wei Yiyin and aero-engine expert Cao Jianguo.

A removal from the website does not by itself end an academician's status. Lianhe Zaobao pointed to the case of Zhang Yaoxue, a former president of Central South University, who was expelled from the Communist Party and public office for serious violations of discipline and law and was then formally stripped of his engineering academy title in May.

The Central News Agency said many of those dropped held senior posts as university presidents, heads of state-owned companies, generals, alternate members of the party Central Committee or members of the standing committee of the National People's Congress. The scale of the clean-up, it reported, shows how determined Beijing's leadership is to purge the academician ranks.

The academies' current election rules state that party and government officials at division level or above, and the heads of enterprises, should in principle not be put forward as candidates while in office, and they call for closer vetting of candidates' research integrity and clean-governance records, Lianhe Zaobao reported. The paper described Guo as the latest academician with a military background reported to have been dropped as China keeps overhauling its research and military-industrial systems.