Of the 376 people named to the Chinese Communist party's Central Committee in 2022, 279 showed up in Beijing this week. The rest were missing. Some had been expelled, others were simply gone, and the party hasn't explained most of the absences. By the arithmetic, more than a quarter of the original cohort was not in the room, the largest count of empty chairs at a plenum in the modern history of the party. It is the clearest number to come out of the fifth plenum, and it arrives while Beijing is eager to project steadiness to investors and foreign governments. The stated theme was party governance rather than growth or technology, and in Xi Jinping's China governance is a polite word for discipline.
A record purge, in the open
The party expelled 33 members at the meeting, a record, as The Guardian reported. Two names stood out. Zhang Youxia was, until his fall, the second-ranking figure in the military hierarchy beneath Xi, and Ma Xingrui was a former party secretary of Xinjiang, a post with weight well beyond the region's borders. Why the remaining seats were empty was left for observers to guess.
One of those guessing, Neil Thomas of the Asia Society, where he is a senior fellow, took the gaps to be intentional: in his view the gathering was organised around Xi's demand for tight discipline within the party's ranks. That seems a fair reading, since meetings of this kind rarely happen by accident.
Xi has been at the anticorruption work since 2012, and for years it was easy to describe as a clean-up of a bloated, venal bureaucracy. The campaign has since moved up the ladder and now reaches the highest ranks of both the party and the army, which keeps alive an old question: is this discipline, or a way of removing rivals and punishing anyone whose loyalty looks shaky? The party's answer, delivered earlier this year by Xi himself, is that rot must be pulled out like "sick trees" and that the fight is a "never-ending journey". The second phrase tells more. A campaign with no stated finish line is, in practice, a standing instrument of control.
The army's top table, nearly empty
The damage is starkest in the military. The Central Military Commission, the body that commands the People's Liberation Army, was built for seven members. Two remain: Xi, and Zhang Shengmin, the army's anti-graft chief. Zhang was elevated to the party's Politburo during the plenum and is now the only serving military officer in that senior body. The man whose job is to investigate his colleagues now sits almost alone atop the armed forces' leadership, and a system that rewards the investigator while the investigated vanish is unlikely to build depth. It tends to build dependence.
What 2027 will test
The plenum also cleared the ground for the 21st Party Congress, which is expected in the second half of 2027. Xi is already the longest-serving ruler of Communist China since Mao Zedong, and he is widely expected to win a fourth term as party leader. That part isn't in much doubt.
The harder problem lies below him. A congress refreshes the Central Committee and the Politburo, and refreshing needs candidates. Many analysts now think the purges have been so sweeping that the pool of obvious, senior, politically safe successors has thinned, and promotion from a shallow bench produces a leadership defined by how little competition it has faced.
For outsiders trying to read China's economic resilience, this is the quieter variable. Policy continuity looks strong when one man controls every lever. Yet decisions made by a leadership that has thinned its own ranks, and that prizes obedience over dissent, tend to travel without much internal pushback. Whether that proves a strength or a blind spot should begin to show over the next twelve months, as names for the 2027 congress start to leak out and the party reveals who, exactly, is left to promote. The empty chairs, one suspects, will not be the party's only shortage.