Central Committee attendance falls
Foreign news agencies described the 33 expulsions as the most ever recorded at a plenary session devoted to party discipline. According to BBC Monitoring, they raised the number of Central Committee members removed during Xi's third term to a record 51. The comparable totals were 35 in his second term and five in his first.
Xinhua's account of the meeting listed 279 full and alternate Central Committee members in attendance, against an original membership of 376 appointed in 2022. That put turnout at 74.2%, leaving more than a quarter of the original membership absent. It was the highest absenteeism rate in the party's modern history, with many of those missing affected by the purge.
The attendance breakdown showed 162 of 205 full members present, or about 79%, and 117 alternates, compared with 147 alternates the previous year, according to the South China Morning Post as cited by PTI and The Straits Times. BBC Monitoring and PTI said no plenum in Xi's 14 years as leader had previously drawn fewer than 300 participants.
Military leadership reduced to two members
Military officials accounted for 16 of the 33 expulsions, according to the official communique cited by BBC Monitoring and PTI. The confirmed expulsions included Zhang Youxia, a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and former Politburo member Ma Xingrui.
Five of the seven people appointed to the Central Military Commission in 2022 have been removed. China's highest military command body now has only two remaining members: Xi and Vice Chairman Zhang Shengmin, a senior disciplinary official.
The plenum also promoted Zhang Shengmin to the Politburo. He led the military's anti-corruption work from 2018 until July 2026 and became a Central Military Commission vice chairman in 2025, PTI reported.
His promotion brought Politburo membership to 22, still below its 2022 complement of 24. According to BBC Monitoring, the removals of Ma and Zhang Youxia, together with former general He Weidong's removal in 2025, had previously reduced the body to 21 members.
Investigation of former party diplomat confirmed
The meeting's Xinhua readout provided the first official confirmation that former International Department chief Liu Jianchao had been investigated and that the party had decided to remove him from the Central Committee, PTI reported.
Liu had not appeared in public since August 2025. Fellow diplomat Liu Haixing replaced him the following month.
Discipline campaign extends across the party
In its statement, the party acknowledged serious problems linked to weakened leadership and lax internal governance. It promised to maintain strict internal oversight and act firmly against disciplinary violations.
The campaign reaches well beyond the senior leadership. China's top anti-corruption watchdog reported that 680,000 people across the party apparatus were disciplined in the first nine months of 2026, according to BBC Monitoring, citing a briefing by disciplinary commission official Zhang Fuhai.
At an October 30 briefing, Zhang said more than two million individuals had been disciplined since Xi took power in 2012 over cases involving "pointless formalities, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance", BBC Monitoring reported.
Analysts interviewed by The Straits Times warned that tighter discipline could inhibit local initiative and innovation. University of Zurich scholar Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt argued that "discipline against formalism produces even more formalism". The Asia Society's Shengyu Wang described local cadres as caught between demands for political compliance, economic targets and fiscal discipline.
Leadership congress scheduled for 2027
The plenum scheduled the 21st Party Congress for the second half of 2027 in Beijing, formally opening preparations for the next five-year leadership reshuffle. That congress will determine the party's next leadership lineup, with Xi widely expected to seek a fourth term as party leader.
