China's 'empty chair' mystery: Xi Jinping tightens grip, expels record 33 Communist party officials at key party meeting

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wrapped up a major political gathering this week by expelling a record 33 officials, with an unprecedented number of empty seats at the meeting indicating the scale of the purges under Xi Jinping. The expulsions took place at this week's fifth plenum, an annual gathering of the party's top leadership.

This week's gathering was attended by 279 of the full and alternate members of the CCP’s Central Committee, compared to the 376 members named in 2022. As a result, over 25 per cent of the original cohort were absent, many due to purges, marking the highest number of “empty chairs” at the plenum in modern Chinese history.

The excluded members were Zhang Youxia, the former second-in-command to China’s leader in the military hierarchy, and Ma Xingrui, the former party secretary for Xinjiang. “More empty seats underscore the plenum’s focus on Xi’s vision of strict internal discipline,” said Neil Thomas, a senior fellow at the Asia Society think tank, said in a post on social media platform X.

Xi rooting out corruption since 2012

This week's Communist Party plenum centred on a single theme: party governance. Since taking power in 2012, Xi has made rooting out corruption within the party a defining priority, but that campaign has intensified sharply in recent years, taking out officials at the very top of both the party and the military, and fueling speculation that anti-corruption enforcement doubles as a mechanism for removing political rivals or punishing disloyalty.

Xi himself seems increasingly impatient with what he views as eroding discipline inside the party, which holds unchecked authority over Chinese state and society. He remarked earlier this year that the party must root out its “sick trees,” describing the anti-corruption drive as a fight with no endpoint.

The toll has been especially visible within the Central Military Commission, the body overseeing the People’s Liberation Army, which once held seven members but has been whittled down by successive purges to just two: Xi and Zhang Shengmin, the military’s top anti-corruption official. This week, Zhang was elevated to the Politburo, the Communist Party’s highest decision-making body, making him the sole military figure now sitting at that level of leadership.