BEIJING – China’s President Xi Jinping signaled an uncompromising grip on power at the Chinese Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum in Beijing, formalizing the ouster of top military and civilian officials while elevating anti-corruption enforcer Gen. Zhang Shengmin to the ruling Politburo. The late-October gathering stripped party membership from former Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff Chief Liu Zhenli, leaving the nation’s highest military command body shrunk to just two active members: Xi and Zhang Shengmin.
The leadership shake-up immediately raises stakes across East Asia as Beijing’s armed forces enter an unprecedented command vacuum ahead of next year’s party congress. Even as Xi doubles down on internal purges, the plenum’s final communique echoed nearly two years of pointed warnings from the military’s own newspaper demanding collective leadership over one-man rule—while conspicuously dropping longstanding doctrinal phrases that cement Xi’s absolute military authority.
Key Takeaways• Gen. Zhang Shengmin, head of the military’s internal discipline watchdog, won an unusual out-of-cycle promotion to the Politburo, signaling that fresh rounds of military purges are imminent. • The Fifth Plenum recorded the lowest Central Committee attendance of the post-Mao era—roughly 25% of members were absent—as the body ratified the expulsions of senior generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli. • Official plenum documents echoed People’s Liberation Army Daily calls for collective leadership and omitted standard slogans reinforcing Xi’s supreme command, exposing rare friction at the top of the party. |
A Watchdog Rises Amid Empty Seats
Empty chairs told the sharpest story inside Beijing’s Jingxi Hotel when the 20th Central Committee convened from Oct. 27 to Oct. 30. Only 279 full members attended the session, down from 364 at the Third Plenum in July 2024, according to attendance tallies compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The uniformed contingent suffered the steepest collapse. Out of 42 People’s Liberation Army officers seated on the committee two years ago, just five showed up.
Into that void stepped Zhang Shengmin. At 68, Zhang is already one year past the Communist Party’s informal retirement age of 67 for new Politburo entrants. Promoting a military discipline chief outside a five-year Party Congress breaks decades of modern precedent, according to policy brief analyses from the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Zhang holds no combat or operational command background. His entire career rests inside the political commissar system and the Central Military Commission’s Discipline Inspection Commission.
His elevation sends an unmistakable warning through every barracks in China. Xi intends to ride his political campaign all the way down, relying on an internal inquisitor rather than battlefield commanders to police the ranks. While the plenum promoted 10 civilian alternate members—including Zhejiang Gov. Liu Jie, who leads Xi’s former provincial power base—not a single military officer gained full Central Committee membership. The message was blunt: the purge is nowhere near finished.
The Military Newspaper’s Quiet Rebellion
Beneath the spectacle of Zhang’s promotion, official party texts revealed an unusual tug-of-war over how China’s armed forces are governed. For nearly two years, the PLA Daily—the official mouthpiece of the Central Military Commission—has published a steady stream of commentaries praising collective decision-making and warning against unchecked individual authority inside party committees. Those articles continued even after defense authorities announced probes into Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli in January.
Zhang Youxia was no ordinary target. A fellow revolutionary ‘princeling’ whose father fought alongside Xi’s father during the Chinese Civil War, Zhang Youxia was widely viewed as Xi’s closest uniformed ally and the top operational general in the country. Analysts at the Brookings Institution noted that removing a figure with deep personal ties to the Xi family proved that loyalty offers no shield when policy disputes or procurement scandals surface. Yet silencing Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli did not erase the pushback inside official media.
When the Fifth Plenum released its final communique and its new decision on party self-governance, China watchers spotted two glaring omissions. The documents echoed the PLA Daily’s language on collective leadership and democratic centralism, while leaving out standard references to the ‘CMC Chairman Responsibility System’—the core doctrine codifying Xi’s sole, final authority over every military order. In Beijing’s tightly scripted political vocabulary, dropping a leader’s signature military slogan is never an accident.
Investigative Context: Hollowed Commands and Readiness Risks
To understand why Xi is gutting his own high command—and why senior officers are pushing back through party doctrine—requires tracing the financial and operational roots of the crisis back to 2015. That year, Xi launched sweeping military reforms that poured hundreds of billions of dollars into modernizing the Rocket Force, which oversees China’s land-based nuclear and conventional ballistic missiles, alongside the Equipment Development Department. Instead of building an airtight fighting force, massive off-budget procurement pipelines bred entrenched kickback networks stretching from state defense conglomerates to the top of the Central Military Commission.
What began as an anti-graft sweep in the Rocket Force during the summer of 2023 rapidly metastasized into a systemic purge of the entire officer corps. Research compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that out of 47 senior PLA officers who held the rank of full general in 2022 or earned promotion to three-star posts afterward, 41 have been purged, detained, or vanished from public view. That attrition rate—87 percent of the military’s senior leadership—exceeds even the sweeping ideological purges of the late Mao Zedong era.
On the ground, the operational consequences are visible across China’s five theater commands. Three of those five regional warfighting headquarters, along with the Joint Staff Department and multiple service branches, are currently run by acting commanders or lower-ranked major generals rather than confirmed full generals. At a high-profile Long March commemoration in Beijing on Oct. 22, only six active full generals appeared on stage, down from 38 at comparable ceremonies a decade earlier.
This command paralysis directly affects regional security from the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea. Acting officers lacking permanent political backing tend to delay complex decisions, avoid candid assessments of equipment flaws, and prioritize political survival over realistic combat training. Military analysts tracking PLA exercises around Taiwan noted that response times for large-scale drills slowed markedly over the past year as interim commanders waited for explicit clearance from Beijing. For civilian communities across East Asia, a hollowed-out Chinese high command creates a dual risk: lower near-term capacity for coordinated warfare, paired with a higher danger of miscalculation during an unexpected maritime or aerial crisis.
The Road to the 2027 Party Congress
The Fifth Plenum’s governance resolution also revealed deep anxiety inside Zhongnanhai about the generation of officials born after 1978, when China began opening its economy to the outside world. Party documents warned that younger cadres lack revolutionary tempering and require stricter ideological monitoring before they can be trusted with national power. Rather than rushing to fill vacant seats on the Central Military Commission, Xi appears content to leave key slots empty until the 21st Party Congress convenes in late 2027.
That strategy buys Xi time to vet a new cohort of junior officers, but it leaves China’s 2-million-strong military governed by a two-man committee consisting of a 73-year-old party leader and a 68-year-old disciplinary enforcer. The plenum’s subtle doctrinal concessions on collective leadership suggest that even within a system built around one man, institutional survival still demands guardrails. Whether those guardrails hold—or snap under the weight of Zhang Shengmin’s next round of investigations—will define Beijing’s stability over the coming year.
