Chinese navy’s combat software guru Zhao Xiaozhe disappears from academy website

A top naval software expert, whose work helped warships to process battlefield information and support combat decisions, has vanished from the Chinese Academy of Engineering’s online membership list.Zhao Xiaozhe, 63, a vice-admiral in the PLA Navy, once headed the Central Military Commission’s top science and technology body, helping to shape research priorities across China’s armed forces.He is the latest prominent defence expert to disappear from the academy’s website, following reporting in March of the unexplained removal of profiles belonging to a nuclear weapons scientist, a radar specialist and a missile designer, among others.Zhao was reportedly absent from a high-level Communist Party study session on artificial intelligence chaired by President Xi Jinping in April last year, with his deputy attending instead.His profile has also been removed from the academy’s separate online museum of academicians.What China’s swift ousting of two top military generals means for the PLAZhao was elected to the academy in 2011 while at the Dalian Naval Academy, where he was a professor and doctoral supervisor. He also served as director of its Combat Software and Simulation Research Institute.