Of the seven seats on the Central Military Commission, two are filled, one in five members of the Central Committee may never make it to the hall, and the chief enemy has been declared to be the "two-faced" official. Beijing is preparing not a generational transition but power without an heir.
The Central Military Commission of the People's Republic of China is designed for seven members. By the opening of the Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Monday, October 26, 2026, only two remained: Chairman Xi Jinping and General Zhang Shengmin. Just a year ago, Zhang headed the military's discipline inspection commission and handled the cases of the very generals whose seats now stand empty. It is hard to imagine a more accurate portrait of today's China: at the table of the supreme military command sit the leader and his prosecutor.
The four-day plenum, closed to the press and held at an undisclosed location, brought together about three hundred people. Previous sessions of this kind were hosted at Beijing's Jingxi Hotel, but this time the authorities did not even see fit to name the venue. State media reduced the agenda to a formula about "a number of important issues concerning the consistent advancement of full and rigorous party self-governance." Behind the bureaucratic language lies the largest personnel operation in Xi's 14 years in power. Exactly one year remains before the 21st Party Congress, which opens in the fall of 2027 and will almost certainly hand the 73-year-old leader a fourth five-year term. Xi is spending that year testing the party's durability.
Or, more precisely, its obedience.
The General-Prosecutor and the Empty Table: How Xi Decapitated His Own Army
The list of those removed from the Central Military Commission reads like a casualty report after a lost war, even though China has not fought anyone. Defense Minister Li Shangfu vanished in the summer of 2023 and was expelled from the party in 2024. Admiral Miao Hua, who oversaw political work in the armed forces, lost his seat in 2025. In October 2025, General He Weidong, vice chairman of the commission and a member of the Politburo, was expelled from the party along with eight other senior officers. He became the first sitting Politburo member under Xi to be placed under investigation.
The heaviest blow came on January 24, 2026. The Ministry of National Defense announced investigations into Zhang Youxia, the first vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and General Liu Zhenli, chief of the Joint Staff Department. Zhang Youxia was born in Beijing in 1950, put on a uniform in 1968, fought against Vietnam in 1979, and had sat in the top military leadership since 2012. His father once fought side by side with Xi Jinping's father, and for decades Zhang was considered the military commander closest to the leader. He was last seen in public on November 20, 2025, at talks with the Russian defense minister in Moscow. Liu Zhenli, born in Hebei province in 1964, received his general's stars at 57 and was considered the youngest general in the country according to public records.
The charge that the army's official newspaper spelled out two days after the announcement says more than any figures. Zhang Youxia was accused of seriously trampling on and undermining the system under which the chairman of the Central Military Commission bears overall responsibility. Corruption is secondary in this construction. The general's main crime was doubting that the army is commanded by one man.
The scale of the purge is staggering even by Chinese standards. Of the 44 military officers who entered the Central Committee in 2022, according to the count of one American think tank, only two have not been affected or vanished from public view. Another Washington institute offers a formally milder assessment: 17 military officers remain on the Central Committee rolls, but only two of them have appeared in public in recent months. Both estimates agree on the main point. The army, which since 1987 has traditionally held about a fifth of the seats on the Central Committee, will arrive at the 2027 Congress with almost none of its people. Of the 19 Central Committee members removed from their posts after last year's plenum, 12 wore uniforms. Over the same year, only four officers received general's stars, and none of them sits on the Central Committee even as an alternate.
History knows only one comparable peacetime rout of an army's top brass. In 1937 and 1938, Stalin destroyed the command of the Red Army: three of its five marshals were killed, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky. A year and a half later, the Winter War against Finland showed the price of such loyalty, when overwhelming superiority in forces turned into staggering losses. Beijing knows this lesson. Xi is taking the risk anyway, and the logic is clear: by August 1, 2027, the centenary of the People's Liberation Army, the armed forces are supposed to reach their declared modernization milestones, and as early as 2021 American admirals named 2027 as the year by which China could attempt to resolve the Taiwan question by force. A leader who contemplates war wants to be certain that an order will be carried out without hesitation and without anyone else's calculations.
The paradox is that an army whose command has been gutted is less ready for war today. For Taipei, the purges serve as the best security guarantee for the coming year. For Washington, the same purges are cause for alarm over the next five years, because the new generals will owe their careers to exactly one man and will not dare contradict him.
The question remains what Xi will do with the depleted commission. The most obvious options come down to a choice between appointments at the current plenum and a pause until the Congress. Far more interesting is a more radical path that is also being discussed in Beijing: restructuring the very system of party control over the army. Xi has experience with radical restructuring. In January 2016, he abolished the PLA's four general departments, which had existed since the 1950s, and broke them up into 15 functional bodies under the Central Military Commission, and a month later he replaced seven military regions with five theater commands. Back then the reform was presented as modernization. Today a similar restructuring could become a way to formalize what has already taken shape de facto: the army is run by the chairman, and every other link has been reduced to execution and oversight.
The Emptiest Hall Since Mao: The Arithmetic of Fear
The 20th Central Committee formally numbers 376 people: 205 full members with voting rights and 171 alternates. At the Fourth Plenum in October 2025, 168 full members and 147 alternates came to the hall, 315 people in total. That set a record low for the entire period since 1976. For comparison, 364 people attended the plenum in 2024 and 373 the year before.
The current session promises a new collapse. By the calculations of American specialists on the Chinese elite, about 291 people will be in the hall, or 77 percent of the official roster. By the same estimate, 44 full members and 41 alternates will be absent. Eight full member seats are already vacant. Another 15 people are under investigation and will most likely be removed. Hong Kong counts are harsher: about 20 full members and roughly seven alternates under investigation. The discrepancy is easily explained. Some of the officials who have disappeared have not been officially charged with anything; they have simply stopped appearing in public, and in Chinese politics silence around a name is usually more ominous than a verdict.
The Politburo has suffered losses unseen since 1980. Of the 24 people elected in 2022, three have dropped out: He Weidong, Zhang Youxia and former Xinjiang party secretary Ma Xingrui, whose investigation was announced on April 3, 2026, and who was expelled from the party in July. The Politburo has shrunk to 21 members. The plenum is expected to formally approve the expulsion of Zhang and Ma.
The reference to 1980 explains a great deal. In February of that year, also at a fifth plenum, Deng Xiaoping removed from the Politburo four associates of the late Mao, led by Wang Dongxing, Mao's former chief bodyguard, and at the same time brought Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang into the Standing Committee. Deng was removing other people's men to make room for reformers and future successors. Xi is removing his own protégés. It was he who raised He Weidong, Zhang Youxia and Ma Xingrui to the top.
Yet no one is being brought in as heirs to the vacated seats.
The "Two-Faced" in the Crosshairs: Whom Xi Has Named the Party's Chief Enemy
On the eve of the plenum, the party's main theoretical journal published a speech Xi delivered in January at the plenary session of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. In it, the leader lashed out at "two-faced" officials who pay lip service to the center's directives while inwardly resisting them and indulging in "individualism" and "political opportunism." He named his priorities bluntly: unquestioning execution of the leadership's decisions under its indisputable authority, and reining in the power that party functionaries have concentrated in their own hands. Politburo member Li Hongzhong distilled this philosophy into a single formula that is now repeated in party lecture halls: loyalty that is not absolute is absolute disloyalty.
The numbers show what this philosophy turns into in practice. In the first half of 2026, disciplinary bodies across the country opened 538,000 cases and punished 412,000 people. In 2025, 115 officials at the provincial and ministerial level and above came under investigation, 42 more than a year earlier. The purge has reached the purgers themselves: in the first half of this year, 1,685 employees of disciplinary bodies were investigated.
Xi is fighting a problem that has tormented Chinese rulers since imperial times. An old saying holds that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. The center sets more and more tasks, while local officials control information, answer to local interests and carry out orders only to the extent it suits them. The classic principal-agent problem, in its Chinese version, is solved with fear instead of incentives.
Fear, however, produces silence, not truth. The party press simultaneously demands the opposite of cadres. In February 2026, Xi urged officials to boldly take responsibility and tackle difficult and sensitive tasks. A month later, the same Xi warned them against chasing quick results and vanity projects. Add the 412,000 people punished in six months, and the choice facing a provincial party secretary becomes obvious: sign nothing and report nothing upward before being asked. China has long had an ironic term for this behavior: "lying flat."
Who in such a system will bring the leader bad news?
Silence as a Press Release: The Information War Around the Empty Seats
Chinese authorities long ago learned to announce the fall of top officials while announcing nothing. The script has been honed to automatism. First, a person disappears from a television report. In January 2026, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli did not appear in footage of a meeting chaired by Xi and attended by Zhang Shengmin. Four days later, the Ministry of National Defense announced the investigation. Observers in Washington and Taipei now read protocol footage the way Sovietologists once read the order in which Politburo members stood atop the Lenin Mausoleum.
Official propaganda offers the outside world its own interpretation. On the eve of the plenum, the state news agency published a commentary describing the purges as a signal of greater predictability for global investors: in China, supposedly, merit and law are prevailing over connections and bribes. Such a text is written for foreign bankers, not for Chinese officials. The party apparatus does not believe this version, because it sees exactly who is being removed.
Alongside it exists a second information field, hostile to Beijing. In the summer of 2025, American social media filled with rumors of Xi's own imminent fall, and a former U.S. national security adviser from the first Trump administration actively amplified them. The central figure of these rumors was Zhang Youxia himself, portrayed as the man really in charge of the army. Six months later, it was Zhang, not Xi, who ended up under investigation. None of the theories about a plot within the generals' ranks has been documented, and I would not take them at face value. What has been confirmed is something else: Xi perceives any independent figure in the army as a threat, regardless of whether a real conspiracy exists.
The purges have also extended beyond the active structures. On March 3, 2026, on the eve of the annual session, three retired generals and Zhang Kejian, a defense industry representative under investigation, were removed from the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The current term of that body does not expire until March 2028, and the early removal of honored retirees shows that in today's China no one can consider himself out of the game.
From "Core" to "Chairman": Sixteen Years of Ascent Without a Ceiling
Fifth plenums are not new to Xi's biography. In October 2010, the Fifth Plenum of the 17th Central Committee appointed him vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and the whole world understood who would succeed Hu Jintao. From there, the ladder was built with an engineer's methodical precision. In October 2016, a plenum proclaimed Xi the "core" of the party, a status his predecessor never held. A year later, the Congress wrote his ideas into the party charter under his own name, placing a living leader on a par with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. In January 2018, another plenum proposed lifting the two-term limit for the president of the PRC, and in March the National People's Congress approved the amendment by 2,958 votes to two, with three abstentions.
The Sixth Plenum in November 2021 adopted a resolution on the historical achievements of the party's centennial journey. There have been only three such documents in the entire history of the Communist Party of China: in 1945 under Mao, in 1981 under Deng, and in 2021 under Xi. In the fall of 2022 he secured a third term as party leader, and in March 2023 a third term as head of state.
The next step is discussed in hushed tones. Analysts seriously consider the revival of the post of party chairman, once held by Mao. The position was abolished in 1982, and its last holder was Hu Yaobang. It was abolished deliberately: Deng's generation, having survived the Cultural Revolution, wanted to rule out a return to the cult of one man above collective leadership. Restoring the title would mean giving legal form to what has already happened in practice.
I do not expect the word "chairman" to appear in Thursday's communiqué. If Xi decides to restore it, it will happen at the Congress in the fall of 2027, where amendments to the charter are approved ceremoniously and before a full hall.
Generation 7G in the Anteroom: Why Xi Has No Heir
Beijing watchers are looking at the current plenum for signs of the rise of the so-called seventh generation of leaders, born in the late 1960s and the 1970s. At the 2027 Congress, according to China scholars, up to two-thirds of the Central Committee could turn over, and it is these people who will fill the vacated seats. Some of them may enter the Politburo.
The arithmetic of the Politburo Standing Committee, meanwhile, looks merciless. An informal rule introduced in 2002 held that at 67 one may stay, and at 68 it is time to go. By October 2027, of the seven current Standing Committee members, only Ding Xuexiang, born in 1962, will be younger than 68. Zhao Leji will turn 70, Li Xi and Cai Qi will each be 71, Wang Huning 72, and Premier Li Qiang exactly 68. Xi Jinping himself turns 74 in June 2027.
The comparison with 2010 is unforgiving here. Back then, the fifth plenum designated an heir. In 2026, the fifth plenum designates no heir, and the field from which one might be grown has been cleared with a bulldozer.
Those who, like me, were schoolchildren in the Soviet 1980s remember well how a regime that postpones the question of succession ends up. Between November 1982 and March 1985, the country buried a general secretary three times: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. Chinese party historians have studied the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party more closely than anyone in the world, and Xi has repeatedly called it the main cautionary tale. He drew one conclusion from it: never loosen your grip. The second conclusion, about the price of gerontocracy, appears to have gone unread.
4.5% Growth and a 20% Construction Slump: Purges Cannot Cure the Economy
The plenum is taking place against the backdrop of an economy that looks respectable only at first glance. In the third quarter of 2026, GDP grew 4.5% year on year, after 4.3% in the second quarter, the weakest reading in more than three years. Over nine months, the economy expanded 4.6%, reaching 107.11 trillion yuan, about $15.94 trillion. The annual target of 4.5% to 5% looks achievable, although such a pace would in itself be among the lowest in decades, excluding the pandemic years.
Beneath this figure lie cracks. Real estate investment fell 20.6% in January through September, and fixed-asset investment overall dropped 7.2%. Retail sales rose just 1.1% in September after 0.4% in August, and economists attribute part of the September increase to the calendar effect of the holidays. Urban unemployment is holding at 5.2%. Growth is being driven by exports and industry, whose output rose 5.5% in September. The domestic consumer is still not spending.
Last year's Fourth Plenum approved recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan for 2026 to 2030, with an emphasis on technological self-reliance. The cure for weak demand has long been known: reform of the hukou household registration system, broader social insurance, an overhaul of the finances of debt-ridden local governments, and a lower savings share of household income. All these measures require delegating authority downward and tolerating provincial mistakes. Xi has chosen the opposite path. The tighter the control from the center, the less willing a local official is to launch a risky project or admit that an old one has failed.
A plenum on discipline instead of a plenum on the consumer reads as a verdict on priorities, and a fully deliberate one. For Xi, the political reliability of the apparatus matters more than the pace at which household incomes grow.
Washington Counts the Empty Chairs
Xi arranged the plenum's external backdrop as carefully as the domestic one. On October 30, 2025, in Busan, he and Donald Trump concluded a one-year truce in the trade war: the United States lowered tariffs, and Beijing suspended its harsh restrictions on rare earth exports until November 10, 2026, and promised to buy 12 million tons of American soybeans. In May 2026, Trump made a state visit to China. From September 23 to 25, Xi paid a reciprocal visit to Washington, the first state visit by a Chinese leader to the United States since 2015.
The outcome of the September summit proved more modest than the ceremonies. The truce was extended by only two months, to January 10, 2027, while tariffs, rare earths and technology restrictions were deferred to later rounds. Upon landing at Joint Base Andrews on September 23, Xi declared that China and the United States should be partners, not rivals. Behind closed doors, he demanded that Washington oppose Taiwanese independence, one of his most direct statements on the subject.
A short truce suits both sides. Xi needs quiet on the external front while he rebuilds the internal one. Trump retains leverage in the form of tariffs and export controls on chips. The next checkpoints have already been set: the APEC summit China is hosting in Shenzhen in November, and the Group of 20 meeting in the United States in December.
American military planners read the purges in two ways. In the short term, an army whose commanders are replaced faster than they can learn their staffs is unlikely to undertake a major operation. Over a five-year horizon, Beijing will acquire a command stripped of any internal brake, and such a command is dangerous precisely because of its readiness to carry out any decision of one man.
The View From Baku
For Azerbaijan, the Beijing plenum has long been a factor in planning. In April 2025, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Xi Jinping signed a document on comprehensive strategic partnership in Beijing. On September 1, 2025, at the SCO summit in Tianjin, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev noted that since 2022 cargo traffic along the Middle Corridor through Azerbaijan had grown by almost 90 percent, and called the Zangezur Corridor a future segment of this route. On October 14, 2026, twelve days before the plenum, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who arrived for the CICA summit as Xi's special envoy, was received in Baku by the head of state. The Chinese side declared its readiness to expand cooperation on the Trans-Caspian route and to remain a reliable long-term partner of Azerbaijan.
A telling detail: Wang Yi, a Politburo member since 2022, has survived all the purges. Beijing's foreign policy line in Eurasia remains one of the few areas where Xi is not breaking anything. For Baku, this is good news. A hypercentralized China is predictable in its strategy, and for Beijing the Middle Corridor, which bypasses Russia and Iran, has long ceased to be exotic and has become insurance against any blockade.
There is a flip side, too, although official communiqués do not mention it. Chinese state companies and provincial administrations, frightened by the scale of the inspections, are slower to sign investment agreements and more cautious in seeking approvals. Decisions once made in Urumqi or Xi'an increasingly wait for a signal from Beijing. Azerbaijani diplomacy will have to work with this reality: negotiate at the very top and not count on initiative from below.
Forecast: What Thursday Will Bring and What Will Happen in a Year
The plenum will conclude on October 29, and I will venture to name what the world will see. The communiqué will approve a decision on full and rigorous party self-governance and formally confirm the expulsion of Zhang Youxia and Ma Xingrui. Vacancies on the Central Committee, as in October 2025, when 11 alternates were elevated to full membership at once, will be filled from the ranks of alternates. By my assessment, there will be no full-scale renewal of the Central Military Commission before the Congress: Xi will prefer to run the army directly through Zhang Shengmin rather than entrust the seats to people vetted for less than a year. The trade truce with the United States, set to expire on January 10, 2027, will be extended once again, with no breakthrough on rare earths.
The main forecast concerns the fall of 2027. Xi Jinping will receive a fourth term, and the new Politburo Standing Committee will not include a single person under 60 who could seriously be considered a successor. If I am wrong and such a person appears, it will mean Xi is preparing a transfer of power sooner than Washington thinks. For now, every sign points the other way.
Forty-six years ago, a fifth plenum cleared the Politburo for heirs. Today's fifth plenum is clearing the party for one man. On Thursday evening, when Beijing publishes the communiqué, the Central Military Commission will still consist of two people: a 73-year-old chairman and the general who interrogated the other five.