China's Communist Party expelled a record 33 members as its fifth plenum closed on Thursday, a four-day gathering held behind closed doors at a hotel in Beijing. The official communique confirmed the expulsions without specifying what the 33 did beyond "serious disciplinary and legal violations," a phrase that has become routine in the years since Xi Jinping made anti-corruption work the defining theme of his rule.

The numbers around the meeting are as notable as the expulsions themselves. Just 279 Central Committee members attended, according to BBC Monitoring, compared with 315 at the fourth plenum in October 2025 and 364 at the third in July 2024. It is the first time in Xi's 14 years in power that attendance at a plenum has fallen below 300.

The Guardian puts the empty seats in starker terms: 376 full and alternate members were named to the Central Committee in 2022, so more than a quarter of the original cohort was absent this week, many because they had been purged. That is the highest number of empty chairs at a plenum in modern Chinese history, the paper reported.

"More empty seats underscores the plenum's focus on Xi's vision of strict internal discipline," Neil Thomas, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, wrote on X, as quoted by the Guardian.

The theme marked a shift. Recent plenums have centred on economic reform or social development; this one put party governance and discipline first. The choice fits a campaign that Xi has described as the "biggest threat" facing the party since he took over in 2012. Zhang Fuhai, of the party's disciplinary commission, told a press briefing on Friday that more than two million people have been disciplined in cases tied to what officials call "pointless formalities, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance." He said the party would press on so that officials "dare not, cannot, and do not want to be corrupt."

The scale of the current wave is visible in the party's own figures. The latest round brings the total number of members removed during Xi's third term to 51, against 35 in his first term and five in his second, according to the BBC. Beyond the plenum, the top anti-corruption watchdog reported that 680,000 people across the party apparatus were disciplined in the first nine months of this year alone.

Sixteen of the 33 expelled this week came from the military, the communique said. The names attached to the broader purge are unusually senior: Zhang Youxia, the former vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and once the second-ranking figure in the military hierarchy, and Liu Zhenli, another former top general. Ma Xingrui, the former party secretary of Xinjiang, was also among those removed, as was Liu Jianchao, a former senior diplomat who disappeared from public view in July last year.

The effect on the military's top body has been dramatic. The seven-member Central Military Commission has been reduced to two: Xi as chairman and Zhang Shengmin as vice-chairman. Zhang was promoted to the Politburo at this plenum, leaving him as the only military figure in the party's senior leadership body. The 24-member Politburo was at one point down to 21 members after earlier removals, including that of former general He Weidong in 2025; Zhang's promotion brings it to 22.

Analysts describe the campaign as something more than a graft drive. "It has now become an effort to consolidate and maintain authority," Chong Ja Ian, a non-resident scholar with Carnegie China, told the BBC. "In this case, the campaign will continue and expand depending on how secure Xi feels rather than any real issue with corruption." He added that Xi "has few qualms about removing people he promoted" and that doing so "with little opposition underscores how unassailable his position is at the moment."

The party's own language supports a reading that mixes corruption with loyalty. Its statement said the leadership had "squarely confronted the grim reality that party leadership had at times weakened or hollowed out," and promised to keep "turning the knife inwards." In January, Xi warned against "two-faced cadres" who profess loyalty but defy orders, and earlier this year he said the party must uproot "sick trees" and that the fight against corruption was a "never-ending journey."

The timing points to next year's politics. The plenum laid groundwork for the 21st Party Congress, expected in the second half of 2027, when the party will choose its next leadership. Xi is widely expected to take a fourth term, which would make him the longest-serving leader since Mao Zedong. Thomas said the fall of so many officials from the current committee gives Xi reason to "scrutinise the next cohort more closely," and argued that today's rising stars tend to be younger, technocratic and connected to Xi's political network, with provincial leadership a promising place to look. The Guardian noted that the purges have been so wide-ranging that analysts see few obvious candidates to promote.

For readers outside China, the practical question is what the purge does to decision-making. The military clear-out has raised questions about "organisational leadership and combat readiness," Thomas and colleagues Lobsang Tsering and Shengyu Wang wrote, even as Beijing continues to unveil new hardware. On the civilian side, a smaller, more scrutinised leadership layer may be more loyal and less able to push back.

Two limits apply to this account. Neither the communique nor state media has published specific charges against the 33, so the individual cases rest on official euphemism and analyst inference. And both sources reviewed here rely on the same closed-door meeting and a small group of outside experts; no independent account of the internal debate is available. US campaigns are covered in the open, while Beijing's leadership contests are read from seat counts and communiques. Related coverage includes the Georgia rally where Obama mocked Trump's Oval Office decor, the Fed's survey of US household finances and UK business investment data.