Record purge in CCP under Xi Jinping: 33 members expelled

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expelled 33 party members at its fifth plenary session this week, marking the highest number of empty seats recorded at a plenary in modern Chinese political history.

A total of 376 people were elected to full and alternate membership of the CCP Central Committee in 2022. Only 279 members attended this week's meeting; more than a quarter of the original roster was absent from the hall.

Among those expelled are Zhang Youxia, the second-ranking figure in the military hierarchy after Xi Jinping, and Ma Xingrui, the former party secretary of the strategically critical Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The removal of both figures concretely demonstrated that the operations have reached the state's highest political and military cadres.

The Central Military Commission, the military's top decision-making body, initially had seven members; after the purges, only two remained: Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin, who is responsible for anti-corruption efforts.

Neil Thomas, a senior researcher at the Asia Society think tank, said in an assessment on his X account that the increase in empty seats reflected the emphasis Xi places on strict party discipline. Since 2012, Xi has anchored his rule to an anti-corruption campaign and explicitly stated earlier this year that "diseased trees" within the party need to be uprooted from their roots.