China Communist Party plenum opened on Monday 26 October, with President Xi Jinping convening the 20th Central Committee for its fifth plenary session, a four-day closed-door meeting that will lay the groundwork for Xi’s likely fourth five-year term. The meeting runs from 26 to 29 October, according to Brookings Institution analysis and Reuters reporting.
The CCP’s 205 full members and 152 alternates will lay the groundwork for Xi’s likely fourth term, which begins after next fall’s quinquennial party congress, when roughly 2,000 delegates descend on Beijing, according to Brookings. The plenum will focus on how the world’s largest party manages its 101 million members, but the most interesting developments will concern personnel movement, as Xi’s purges have swept through the party elite.
Discipline and self-governance on the agenda
Xi briefed the four-day meeting on a draft document centred on “full and rigorous party self-governance” that state news agency Xinhua said addressed the challenges the party faced, including growing its governing capacity, guarding against complacency and combating corruption, the president’s signature campaign, according to Reuters. “It is essential to both refine institutional rules and regulations to close loopholes and strengthen safeguards, and ensure their effective implementation,” the Xinhua commentary said.
Analysts say this could be the last major party gathering before its 2027 leadership reshuffle, when Xi is expected to hold on to the top job for a fourth term, according to Reuters. “The plenum will present Xi as in control, and able to continue his command,” said Kerry Brown, director of King’s College London’s Lau China Institute. “It is likely everything will be centred on him, to dispel any rumours or doubts about his physical fitness and ability to continue in his role.”
Purges have reshaped the elite
Since last year’s plenum, Xi has continued his anti-corruption campaign against his own allies, according to Brookings. Two more Politburo members were toppled, leaving 21 members, in what Brookings called the body’s most sweeping purge since the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. The party’s supreme military council, the Central Military Commission, has been almost entirely decimated, shrinking from seven members at the start of Xi’s third term to just two — Xi and General Zhang Shengmin, who oversaw the purges of his peers.
At the theatre-command level, one grade below the commission, as many as 33 officers have been removed, according to Brookings. Critics argue the purges, particularly those targeting the highest ranks of the armed forces, are destabilising and undermine combat readiness, while the party has portrayed the campaign as necessary and regenerative. With substantive policy issues already largely set in previous gatherings, Brown added, this will be a plenum where appearances will matter as much, if not more, than substance.
