Another plenum, another record... just not the kind that goes on the economic scoreboard.
China's Communist Party wrapped up the fifth plenary session of its 20th Central Committee on Thursday after four days behind closed doors, and the Xinhua readout confirmed the expulsion of 33 senior officials, the most ever at a single plenum, 16 of them from the military. That includes Gen. Zhang Youxia, until January Xi's closest ally in uniform and the PLA's top-ranking general, whose fall we covered in real time back in "Shockwaves In Beijing: Xi Targets His Own Top General, Longtime Confidant, In Elite Purge" (Jan 24).
The party says it is "turning the blade inward" to "eliminate serious hidden dangers." Translation: nobody below Xi is safe, and the purge is accelerating going into next year's leadership congress, which the plenum formally scheduled for the second half of 2027 and where Xi is all but certain to collect a fourth term.
Using Nikkei Asia's breakdown of who fell and who rose, let's look at the casualties, the survivors, the promotions and what it all means for 2027.
"Offend Thousands Rather Than Fail 1.4 Billion"
On Friday morning Beijing sent Zhang Fuhai, deputy secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), to take a victory lap. He told reporters that Xi has led an "unprecedented" drive with the resolve to "offend thousands rather than fail 1.4 billion people," and that "the results are plain for all to see."
Well, the results are certainly plentiful. According to Zhang, authorities have punished almost 8 million people, including 963 senior officials, since the 18th Party Congress in November 2012, and 680,000 were disciplined in the first nine months of this year alone. And there is more to come: the CCDI pledged to intensify its "high-pressure deterrence" and to "leverage technology" to make it more effective, which sounds about as relaxing as it reads.
Besides the generals, the headline civilian scalps were:
- Ma Xingrui, ex-Politburo member, Xinjiang party boss and former president of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC). Expelled in July, per Reuters, on charges ranging from selling promotions to "large-scale family corruption" (and exchanges of "power for sex"), making him the third sitting Politburo member purged this term;
- Liu Jianchao, ex-head of the party's International Department and once the foreign ministry's best-known spokesman, missing from public view since August of last year and at one point tipped as the next foreign minister. As ChinaTalk pointed out, Liu also once ran Xi's global manhunt for corrupt officials, so the hunter has officially become the hunted;
- Lan Tianli, former chairman of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region government.
Look further down the list and Bloomberg's tally shows a pattern: China's aerospace and defense-industrial complex has been gutted. Besides Ma (ex-CASC), the newly confirmed names include former MIIT minister Jin Zhuanglong, CASC's former chairman Lei Fanpei and general manager Zhang Zhongyang, CASIC's former chairman Yuan Jie, and China State Shipbuilding's former chairman Wen Gang, together with former top brass of the Eastern, Northern and Western Theater Commands. In other words, the people who build China's rockets, warships and missiles, and the people who would command them in a war, have been the main source of empty chairs.
As usual, the charges were "serious violations of discipline and law," with no details. For Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, the September expulsion notice added that they were "disloyal and dishonest to the Party" and guilty of "forming cliques," while the rumor mill went considerably further back in January:
(The official notice never mentioned nuclear secrets, though as we noted in "China's Sacked Top General Accused Of Leaking Nuclear Secrets To US: Report" the day after his downfall, the WSJ report was enough to get Beijing's rumor mill working overtime.)
Two Men Standing
The single most striking number from the plenum may be two. Of the seven men who made up the Central Military Commission, the body that runs the PLA, after the 2022 Congress, only two remain: Xi himself and Zhang Shengmin. The plenum made no new appointments, so five seats are still empty.
Regular readers know this did not happen overnight. Defense minister Li Shangfu went first, then He Weidong and Miao Hua, then the October 2025 wipeout we described in "China Expels 9 Top Generals, Including Two From Communist Party Leadership, In Sweeping Purge":
And then came January, when Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff chief Liu Zhenli disappeared from a high-profile party study session. One former CIA analyst described it to the NYT at the time as "the total annihilation of the high command."
Nine months later, that looks about right.
The one man who has gone up while everyone else went down is Zhang Shengmin, the CMC's former discipline chief, who led the military's anti-corruption work from 2018 until July of this year and was made vice chairman at last year's fourth plenum. On Thursday he was also added to the Politburo, its only military member, and as Goldman's Sydney futures desk flagged in its Friday morning comment (available to pro subs), the first new member to join between five-yearly congresses in over three decades. The last time it happened was 1994, when Jiang Zemin slotted in his associate Huang Ju.
So, in a fitting twist, the man who ran the purges is the one who gets promoted for them.
Eurasia Group's China team (analysts including Mingda Qiu) called Zhang "Xi's bridge from a purged military to a rebuilt one," while adding that "the construction is far from complete." The note continues:
"Zhang's elevation restores the norm that CMC vice chairmen sit on the Politburo, a practice that was interrupted last January with the ouster of Zhang Youxia. Promoting him now, a year before the 2027 Party Congress, suggests that Xi intends Zhang to span both sides of that transition, anchoring a hollowed-out command structure today and laying the groundwork for the rebuilt one tomorrow."
Then comes the Taiwan question, which every reader is probably asking. Eurasia's view is that "Xi continues to distrust his military leadership" and is "still vetting his top officers rather than fully relying on them or preparing for a near-term conflict," so the near-term probability of a war over Taiwan "remains very low." That's broadly where the consensus sits, although a separate camp argues that a hollowed-out PLA leans more on gray-zone coercion to show it still works, a point we discussed in "PLA Purge May Be Driving China To Rely More On Military Pressure Against Taiwan: Analysts":
Either way, a commander in chief who doesn't trust five of his six top generals enough to replace them is probably not planning an amphibious invasion any time soon. Spot the irony: a purge sold as making the PLA stronger is, for now, the best near-term argument that it is in no shape to fight.
Empty Chairs: Lowest Turnout Since The Cultural Revolution
The damage shows most clearly in the attendance sheet. Per Xinhua, just 162 of the Central Committee's 205 full members showed up this week, along with 117 alternates, for a total of 279. When the current committee was formed in October 2022, it had 376 people; the third plenum in July 2024 drew 364 and last October's fourth plenum 315.
According to Bloomberg's tally, that is the lowest attendance since the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution and the first time turnout has fallen below 300 in Xi's 14 years in power. Put differently, roughly one in four seats in the room where China's leadership is formally chosen is empty, and this is the body that will rubber-stamp next year's lineup.
As Asia Society's Neil Thomas put it, "more empty seats underscores the plenum's focus on Xi's vision of strict internal discipline." The plenum also passed a resolution on "comprehensive and strict governance over the party," and confessed that it had "squarely confronted the grim reality that party leadership had at times weakened or hollowed out." Hollowed out, indeed.
Who Rose: Bankers, Steelmen And The '70 Hou'
To refill at least some of the seats, 10 alternates were promoted to full Central Committee membership, and, as Nikkei notes, four of them were born in 1970 or later, part of what China calls the "70 hou" generation. Their resumes have a common thread: most built their careers in state-owned industry and state banks before moving into government:
- Lu Dongliang (b. 1973): governor of coal-heavy Shanxi, former chairman of state aluminum giant Chalco;
- Liu Jie (b. 1970): governor of Zhejiang, where Xi was once party secretary and from where he has promoted a long line of lieutenants; previously president of Xiangtan Iron and Steel;
- Liu Jun (b. 1972): president and vice chair of ICBC, China's largest lender by assets, previously chair of Bank of Communications;
- Liu Qiang (b. 1971): deputy party secretary of Shandong and party boss of Jinan, previously vice president of Bank of China;
- Xing Shanping (b. 1968): Shaanxi deputy party secretary, a notable promotion for a woman in an overwhelmingly male leadership.
Two state-bank executives elevated in one sitting tells you something about where Beijing sees its next set of problems: local debt cleanup and bank recapitalization will be run by men who know the balance sheets. And managers who spent careers running Chalco and Xiangtan Steel are, presumably, very comfortable taking orders.
Succession watchers are paying attention. Xi would be 79 at the end of a fourth term in 2032, so the speculation has skipped a generation. University of Tokyo professor Shin Kawashima, who believes Xi will get another term "for sure," said he is watching "those joining the central committee and born in the 1970s" for clues on who might be next in line. Meanwhile, the people who would normally be next in line, the 1960s cohort, have been thinned out by the very purges that created these openings.
The Bigger Picture: Xi's Talent Pipeline Problem
Which brings us to the real story heading into 2027. As Bloomberg put it on the eve of the plenum, Xi now faces "a problem of his own making: his sweeping purges are draining the pipeline he needs to staff senior roles next term." The to-do list for next year's congress is long:
- Five of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee would retire if age norms hold, and veteran foreign minister Wang Yi (73) is expected to step down;
- The CMC needs five new members, more or less from scratch;
- The Politburo itself needs restocking after three members were ousted this term, its widest purge since the Cultural Revolution.
The churn is just as visible in the provinces. Bloomberg's analysis of provincial postings shows that the average tenure of a provincial party chief has collapsed from 43 months in Xi's first term to 26.5 months in his third. Anhui and Qinghai have each had three party chiefs since October 2022, and one regional boss lasted just nine months.
Why should markets care? Because, as UC San Diego's Victor Shih told Bloomberg, "officials will have a shorter time horizon and be more inclined to deal with the latest edict from the center instead of longer issues of reform or economic growth." Oxford Economics' Sheana Yue makes the same point in economist-speak, warning that the "emphasis on political discipline could create some tensions with Beijing's economic objectives," because "local officials may prioritize political compliance over experimentation, potentially complicating the implementation of growth initiatives."
In other words, in a system where the safest career move is to do nothing, the stimulus Beijing keeps announcing has a harder time reaching the real economy, a problem that will sound very familiar to anyone who has followed China's property bust. And if anyone hoped the purge would ease once the plenum was over, Xi used a speech published this month to warn against "two-faced people" in the ranks, vowed that "sick trees" must be uprooted, and told cadres frozen by fear that "procrastination before the reshuffles" was also unacceptable. So: don't be corrupt, don't be idle, and don't make a mistake. Good luck.
American University's Joseph Torigian sums up where that leaves the system: "Since the last Party Congress, Xi has lost faith in so many Central Committee members. He is going to have to promote a lot of people next year and doesn't want to make the same mistake again. So the intensity of review and punishment will inevitably intensify."
Loyalty First, Growth Later
Back in October 2025, as the fourth plenum unveiled China's next five-year plan, the headlines were about self-reliance in science and tech. Twelve months later, the fifth plenum was almost entirely about who can be trusted, which tells you how Xi has ordered his priorities heading into 2027.
The optimistic read, and the one Beijing is selling, is that a cleaner, more disciplined party and a rebuilt PLA come out of this stronger. The more likely read, in our view, is that the purge cycle intensifies into the congress: the CMC stays half-empty while candidates get vetted (and re-vetted), provincial officials keep their heads down rather than experiment, and the bench of experienced leaders for the post-Xi era keeps shrinking, which, conveniently, makes the man at the top even harder to replace. For investors that means more top-down policy and slower transmission, and for anyone still modeling an imminent Taiwan war, a PLA leadership that its own commander in chief doesn't yet trust.
And for those of the 33 who had hoped for a quiet exit, ChinaTalk has some bad news: "Expect a few of the 33 in January's installment of the state TV documentary where fallen officials confess on camera." Prime-time viewing.