BEIJING (The Thursday Times) — China’s Communist Party has expelled a record 33 members of its Central Committee, 16 of them from the military, as it closed a four-day plenum on Thursday that had the most empty seats of Xi Jinping’s 14 years in power.
The fifth plenum was attended by 279 Central Committee members, down from 315 at the fourth plenum in October 2025 and 364 at the third in July 2024, the BBC reported. It is the first time attendance has fallen below 300 under Xi. The current committee began its term in 2022 with more than 370 members.
A communique issued at the end of the closed-door meeting in a Beijing hotel said the members were removed for “serious disciplinary and legal violations”, without giving details. The expulsions take the number of committee members removed during Xi’s third term to 51, compared with 35 in his first term and five in his second.
‘Turning the knife inwards’
The party said it had “squarely confronted the grim reality that party leadership had at times weakened or hollowed out” and pledged to keep “turning the knife inwards” to curb disorder. China’s top anti-corruption watchdog said 680,000 people across the party apparatus had been disciplined in the first nine months of this year.
Those removed this year include former Xinjiang party chief Ma Xingrui, former top generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, and the former senior diplomat Liu Jianchao, who disappeared from public view in July last year.
A two-man military commission
The purge of the military’s top brass has been the most striking. Zhang Youxia was vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the armed forces. The seven-member commission is now down to two: Xi as chairman and Zhang Shengmin as vice-chairman. Zhang Shengmin was promoted to the Politburo at the plenum, taking it back to 22 members.
Analysts at the Asia Society Policy Institute said the scale of the military removals raised “serious questions about organisational leadership and combat readiness”, even as China continued to unveil new weapons.
Eyes on 2027
Analysts link the focus on discipline, widely read as loyalty, to next year’s 21st Party Congress, where a leadership reshuffle is due and Xi is widely expected to secure a fourth term. “Xi has few qualms about removing people he promoted,” said Chong Ja Ian of Carnegie China. “That he does so at will with little opposition underscores how unassailable his position is at the moment.”
