OPINION: Beijing confirms a record 33 expulsions, and Party discipline serves one man

The Chinese Communist Party does not try its expelled members. It confirms them.

On October 29, the plenary session confirmed 33 expulsions. It is a record, says the BBC. One sentence is enough.

No facts appear in it.

Generals and a diplomat

Generals go through it. A former diplomat too.

A former Party chief in Xinjiang is among the expelled.

Zhang Youxia was vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission. The Party expelled him. The army expelled him too.

The cases tied to his suspected crimes were to go to military prosecutors, the September 21 statement said.

The Party did not wait. The sanction comes before the trial.

279 seats filled

The hall held 279 members.

The emptiness sets a record. One seat escapes the lists. Xi Jinping holds it.

The same man commands the army. Beijing calls it discipline.

The Politburo had decided. The Central Committee confirmed. The names roll by.

The sentence lines up the names. The commas do the rest. No defence appears in it.

Two houses sign the reports.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection targets 18 names. The military body targets 16.

Sixteen of the expelled wore the uniform.

“Serious violations”, nothing more

Beyond “serious disciplinary and legal violations”, the precise charges remain vague, the BBC notes.

The formula returns. It serves for everything. It shows nothing.

No sum is cited. No witness is named.

One name escapes expulsion. Li Yunze loses his position within the Party. He keeps his card.

Ten alternates to plug the holes

The empty seats get filled. Ten alternate members take them.

The contraption keeps turning. The names change fast. The chair stays.

The Party expels. The Party replaces. The Party applauds itself, unanimously.

The list always arrives before the room.

The Central Committee had more than 370 members in 2022. They were 364 seated in 2024.

Last year, they were 315.

This time, 279.

The 300 mark gave way. It had held for fourteen years. The Committee comes out battered.

A forecast from Zurich

Probes and purges have thinned the ranks, Reuters writes. The emptiness has a cause.

Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt, of the University of Zurich, predicted the lowest turnout of any post-Mao plenum. He was right.

The researcher started from 168 full and 147 alternate members in October 2025, according to Reuters. This time, 162 and 117 attended.

Thirty alternates are missing. Six full members too.

77.4%

Before the session, the Asia Society Policy Institute estimated that only 77.4% of the 2022 cohort could attend.

Nearly a quarter of the Committee has vanished in the disciplinary drive, Reuters infers. Do the math.

The absent do not vote. Those present confirm.

November 2012. Xi Jinping becomes general secretary.

He warns: “One has to be very strong if he wants to strike the iron”. The phrase sticks.

The iron is the Party. He is the hammer.

“Biggest threat”

Since 2012, Xi has made the fight against corruption a pillar of his rule. He calls it the “biggest threat” to the Party.

Reread the sentence. The threat is to the Party.

Xi warns the Politburo. Left unchecked, corruption “could spell the end of both the Party and the state”.

The Party comes before the state. The order matters. It always matters.

A cage for cadres

The “eight-point rules” arrive in December 2012, the full doctrine in 2014.

Days before the session, Xi set three priorities in the Qiushi journal, Reuters reports. The instruction comes from him.

He wants to lock the power of cadres in “an institutional cage”, under endless anti-graft pressure.

The fight will go to the end, “no matter how great the resistance or how high the cost”, Xi said early this year, per Xinhua.

Others pay the cost.

The cage exists. It has a door.

The door has a key. Xi keeps the key. The keeper stays outside.

Beijing has a defence. Chinese corruption is real.

I do not dispute it.

The official statement of September 21 accuses Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli of selling promotions. The charge is serious.

Liu Zhenli headed the Joint Staff Department. He is expelled too.

The text accuses them of having “accepted a huge sum of bribes”. No figure follows.

627,000 punished in 2025

In 2025, according to Xinhua, 115 officials at ministerial level or above were investigated.

For misconduct directly affecting the public, 627,000 people were punished.

This year, 680,000 in nine months, according to the anti-graft body cited by the BBC. Beijing counts its catch.

The curves rise.

The “tigers” fall. The “flies” too.

The figure impresses. It judges no one.

Ruby Osman reads it differently

Ruby Osman, senior policy adviser on China at the Tony Blair Institute in London, refuses to see a relapse.

Discipline is growing, she says, “not because behaviour is getting worse, but because the stakes are getting higher”.

She sees a system built to last from one leadership to the next.

The point deserves an answer. The argument holds. It forgets the judge.

A durable system outlives its leaders. This one protects its own.

I keep one word.

Disloyal.

Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli allegedly “formed self-serving cliques, were disloyal and dishonest to the Party”, according to the September 21 statement.

Loyalty becomes a charge. It weighs as much as money. The charge is political.

A campaign set to one man

Chong Ja Ian, non-resident scholar at Carnegie China, sees “an effort to consolidate and maintain authority”. The key word is authority.

The campaign will widen, he says, “depending on how secure Xi feels rather than any real issue with corruption”.

The measure is not money. The thermometer has a name. Xi holds it.

Observers cited by the BBC judge that Xi sees corruption as ideological impurity, and above all as disloyalty.

The offence changes nature. It becomes betrayal.

“Two-faced cadres”

In January, Xi denounced “two-faced cadres”, loyal in words, defiant of orders. Suspicion becomes method.

The Qiushi journal publishes his instruction in October: never let “two-faced people” slip through.

The directive comes down from the top. The criterion is simple. So is the judge.

Disloyalty is measured against one man.

The Central Military Commission controls China’s armed forces. It had seven members.

Two remain seated.

Xi Jinping chairs it. Zhang Shengmin is its vice-chairman. The other five are gone.

Mittelstaedt already counted five departures out of seven, before the session.

Zhang Shengmin rises

Zhang Shengmin also rises to the Politburo. The members elect him to it.

The Politburo has 24 seats. It fell to 21.

Ma Xingrui, former Party chief in Xinjiang, has left it. So has Zhang Youxia.

Former general He Weidong had left in 2025. Three seats empty out.

Zhang Shengmin comes in. The total climbs back to 22.

Since 1980

According to Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt, no sitting Politburo had lost so many members in one term since 1980.

Three departures out of 24. The top thins. The centre does not move.

Xi’s third term now counts 51 members removed from the Central Committee, a record according to the BBC.

The first term had removed 35. The second, five.

Five, then 51.

The figure has risen tenfold. The rhetoric stays the same.

Allies of the past

Millions of officials have been investigated, to varying degrees, Reuters reports. The net hauls them in en masse.

The campaign has purged hundreds of senior officials and generals, including former allies of the president.

Liu Jianchao, a former high-profile diplomat, vanished from public view in July 2025. He is among the expelled.

Fifteen months have passed. The list confirms it.

“Few qualms”

“Xi has few qualms about removing people he promoted”, says Chong Ja Ian. The researcher weighs his words.

Xi removes them at will, with little opposition, he notes, and his position looks unassailable for now.

The lesson spreads. The promoted owe everything.

The promoter can take everything back. The others watch. They remember.

The Party’s 21st congress will be held in Beijing in the second half of 2027, the communiqué says. The calendar is set.

Many analysts expect a fourth term for Xi, a longevity unmatched since Mao, according to the BBC.

The only precedent is called Mao.

2018, the limit goes

Xi abolished presidential term limits in 2018.

The limit went. The door opened. No one has ever closed it again.

A centre, no successor

Chong Ja Ian reads an intention in the readout: to remain “at the centre of China and the Communist Party”.

The centre is him.

The researcher looks further. This concentration could open “a more serious power vacuum” as Xi ages.

No succession plan was expected during the session, according to analysts cited by Reuters.

The centre ignores its own exit. It plans its expulsions.

Neil Thomas, senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, did the count with Lobsang Tsering and Shengyu Wang. Their count is stark.

According to them, 42 of the 44 military officers elected full members in 2022 have been purged or have disappeared.

The toll weighs heavily.

“In a category of its own”

The three researchers place the purge of the top brass “in a category of its own”. The phrase is strong.

It raises, they write, serious questions about command and combat readiness.

China is nonetheless unveiling formidable new weaponry, they add. The machines arrive. The commanders leave.

The Party promises a purer army

Beijing has promised the opposite. The army must “bathe in flames and be forged anew”.

The September 21 statement settles it: “The people’s military has become purer”.

The army would be purer. It is above all thinner. One man holds it.

The communiqué also lists “work related to Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan” among the Politburo’s achievements.

Taiwan appears there too. The arsenal grows. The top shrinks.

At the top of the army, two seats and a single voice.

Neil Thomas announces what comes next. Xi has reasons to “scrutinise the next cohort more closely”.

The rising stars tend to be young, technocratic and tied to Xi’s network, he says.

The network decides. Merit follows.

Fewer ties, same standards

Many of Xi’s closest associates are likely to retire in the 2027 reshuffle, Ruby Osman says.

Disciplinary campaigns serve, she says, to ensure that a generation with weaker ties shares Xi’s standards.

The ties weaken. Dependence grows. The campaign manufactures debtors.

Mingda Qiu, senior analyst at Eurasia Group, is blunt: “the anti-corruption campaign is not winding down”. The engine is running.

Loyalists, warns Steve Tsang

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute, warns: if Xi fills posts, it will be with loyalists.

Loyalty becomes a profession.

The sorting has begun. It bears a name.

Neil Thomas also expects tougher consequences for officials who fail to deliver on Xi’s priorities.

Delivering becomes a duty. Failing becomes an offence.

The communiqué gives two answers to the historical cycle of rise and fall.

The first: “the people’s oversight over government”. The second: “the Party’s self-reform”.

The people come first. The communiqué says so.

The session was held behind closed doors, in a Beijing hotel. It lasted four days. The public was not there.

The missing indictment

You read this communiqué from here. You look for one thing.

You look for the indictment.

You will not find it.

The text promises to eliminate “hidden rules”. The charges, for their part, stay hidden.

The Party, never the people

I draw a distinction that Beijing gladly erases.

The Chinese people are invoked as overseers. The Party keeps the key.

The threat comes from there. The people threaten no one.

“The Party tolerates no corruption”, the communiqué swears.

Xi also promised that no corrupt official will be spared, “regardless of who they are, how high their rank”.

One rank nonetheless escapes the rule. Its holder never stands trial.

The hall confirmed. It confirmed thirty-three times.

In the fall of 2027, Xi Jinping is expected in turn to be confirmed as Party leader, according to The Korea Times.

The verb is ready.

The same verb

The verb does not change. Neither does the name.

A list, then a name

The Party confirms its expelled, then its leader.

Beijing confirms a record 33 expulsions, and Party discipline still serves one man.

How many empty seats will the Party need before we stop calling it discipline?

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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