China’s Communist Party Confirms 34 Central Committee Purges and Promotes Ten Alternates

China’s Communist Party ended the fifth plenary session of its 20th Central Committee on Thursday 29 October by confirming the removal of 34 of the committee’s own members and promoting ten alternate members to full membership, according to the communiqué published by Xinhua.

The list reaches the top of the armed forces. It includes Zhang Youxia, a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, which commands the People’s Liberation Army, and Liu Zhenli, a former member of it. The Politburo announced both men’s expulsions on 21 September, the Jamestown Foundation reported. The plenum was the body with the formal last word.

Why did the Central Committee have to vote on it?

Because the party’s constitution says so. A decision to remove a member or alternate member of a party committee from post, or to expel them, “must be approved by a two-thirds majority vote at a plenary meeting” of that committee, according to the English text of the constitution Xinhua published after the 19th Congress in 2017, the most recent full English text this publication could open. Between plenums the Politburo may act first, “while awaiting confirmation at the plenary meeting.” That is the sequence the communiqué records: the Politburo had already decided, and the plenum confirmed.

The communiqué divides the cases by who investigated them. Eighteen came through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s internal investigator, among them Ma Xingrui, Liu Jianchao, Jin Zhuanglong and Yi Huiman. Sixteen came through the Central Military Commission, Zhang and Liu Zhenli among them. One case is different in kind: Li Yunze, head of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, was removed from his position within the party rather than expelled, so 33 of the 34 were expelled, as Manoj Kewalramani of Tracking People’s Daily counts them.

How are empty seats filled?

By the alternates, in a fixed order. “Empty seats on the Central Committee shall be filled by alternate members in order of the number of votes they were elected by,” Article 22 of the constitution says. The plenum moved up Lu Dongliang, Bao Gang, Xing Shanping, Qu Yingpu, Lv Jun, Zhu Tianshu, Zhu Guoxian, Liu Jun, Liu Jie and Liu Qiang. The rule leaves the leadership no choice over who rises, only over who falls; the vote totals that set the order are not published.

Ten promotions against 34 removals do not mean 24 seats left empty. The communiqué does not say how many of the 34 were full members and how many were alternates, and earlier plenums had already filled some vacancies. The same session elected Zhang Shengmin, a vice chairman of the military commission, to the Politburo, and fixed the 21st Party Congress for Beijing in the second half of 2027. That congress elects a new Central Committee, and under Article 23 the general secretary is elected by the new committee in plenary session.

How much smaller is the committee now?

The attendance figures give a measure. The 2022 congress elected 205 full members and 171 alternates. The communiqué says 162 members and 117 alternates attended this session. At last year’s fourth plenum the figures were 168 and 147, Reuters reported; that session replaced 11 members, then the most since 2017.

The following table is this publication’s arithmetic from those published figures.

Attendance is not membership: members can be absent for illness or other reasons, and the communiqué gives no roll. But the direction is plain. Ninety-seven of the people elected four years ago were not in the room, 36 more than a year earlier, and most of the fall came among the alternates, from 147 to 117, the pool from which vacancies must be filled.

What did the plenum decide besides personnel?

A resolution on what the communiqué calls “persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance,” the internal-discipline programme under which most of the 34 cases were brought. The committee voted to continue the programme that had just removed 34 of its own members, and filled their seats from a list it cannot reorder. The constitution allows a party conference to replace up to one fifth of the committee between congresses; the leadership has not called one. It has a congress in a year instead.