China's ruling party to tighten discipline at key plenum
China's Communist Party will hold its fifth plenum next week, with analysts expecting President Xi Jinping to use the meeting to reinforce authority and ideological uniformity ahead of the 2027 leadership reshuffle. The closed-door session will focus on party self-governance and anti-corruption camp
China's ruling Communist Party will gather some 300 of its highest-ranking members next week to discuss tightening discipline among its ranks, a conclave analysts say could be the last major party gathering before its 2027 leadership reshuffle.
Although experts widely expect President Xi Jinping to hold onto the party top job for a fourth term at next year's 21st Party Congress, the upcoming plenary session offers him an opportunity to shore up authority, enforce ideological uniformity and cement his imprint on the party that rules the world's second-largest economy.
The officials will deliberate "issues concerning the sustained advancement of full and rigorous party self-governance", the party has said, as Xi steps up an internal discipline campaign he introduced in 2014, two years after ascending to power. The party's current Central Committee will convene in a closed-door meeting in Beijing from Monday to Thursday.
Millions of people within China's vast bureaucracy have been investigated under Xi's anti-corruption campaign, which has purged hundreds of senior officials and top generals. While critics argue the purges are destabilising, the party has portrayed the campaign as necessary and regenerative.
"The growing focus on discipline is not because behaviour is getting worse, but because the stakes are getting higher," said Ruby Osman, a senior policy adviser on China at London's Tony Blair Institute. Many of Xi's closest associates are likely to retire in the 2027 reshuffle and "disciplinary campaigns are a way to ensure a new generation with fewer personal ties share his political standards," Osman said.
With probes and purges thinning the Central Committee's ranks, turnout among its members "will most likely be the lowest at any post-Mao plenum, below last October's 168 full and 147 alternate members," said Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt of the University of Zurich. The New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute estimates only 77.4 per cent of the original 2022 cohort would be in a position to attend next week's proceedings.