China’s Communist Party has opened a four-day meeting of its most senior officials, focused on tightening discipline and pressing officials to carry out Beijing’s orders, in what analysts say could be the last major party gathering before a leadership reshuffle next year expected to extend President Xi Jinping’s rule for another five years.
President Xi briefed the party’s Central Committee on Monday, 26 October, on a draft document centred on “full and rigorous party self-governance,” according to state news agency Xinhua. The document addresses the challenges the party faces, including growing its governing capacity, guarding against complacency and combating corruption, the president’s signature campaign. The Central Committee, the largest of the party’s top decision-making bodies, will meet behind closed doors from Monday to Thursday.
The gathering is the fifth plenum of the current Central Committee, formed in 2022, and it takes party governance as its single subject, the first in this cycle devoted to it. It comes a year before the 21st Party Congress, with provincial leadership turnovers already under way, and follows a Politburo meeting on 21 September that set the dates and reviewed the draft decision.
Discipline at the centre
The emphasis on discipline reflects a long-running theme of Xi’s leadership. Since taking power, he has overseen a vast anti-corruption campaign that has led to the removal of hundreds of senior officials and top generals, including some of his own one-time allies. The party has portrayed the campaign as both necessary and regenerative, saying the military must undergo a phoenix-like rebirth, while critics argue the purges, particularly those targeting the highest ranks of the armed forces, are destabilising and undermine combat readiness.
The draft document under discussion reviews achievements and experience in strict party governance since 2012, analyses the situation and tasks facing party building in the coming period, and sets out a strategic deployment for the years ahead. According to an official commentary, the implementation of major decisions and plans of the Central Committee must not be empty rhetoric. “It is essential to both refine institutional rules and regulations to close loopholes and strengthen safeguards, and ensure their effective implementation,” the commentary said.
Party-building efforts under Xi have also stressed obedience to the central leadership. Official commentary has described upholding the centralised and unified leadership of the Central Committee as an important component of Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building and the supreme principle of party leadership. The commentary attributed China’s achievements, including the anti-corruption campaign against the military, fundamentally to the “Two Establishes”: establishing Xi as the core of the party and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the party’s guiding ideology.
The plenum’s disciplinary demands on cadres include efforts to crack down on improper dining and drinking, on the acceptance of gifts in violation of regulations, and on showy but ineffective projects intended to boost officials’ political achievements. Two recent strands feed into the meeting: a study campaign on officials’ “performance outlook” that concluded in August, and a push by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to curb over-broad accountability that leaves grassroots cadres carrying the blame.
A plenum of appearances as much as substance
Analysts say that with substantive policy issues largely set in previous gatherings, this plenum will be as much about presentation as about new policy. “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.”
Brown added that with substantive policy issues already largely settled, “this will be a plenum where appearances will matter as much, if not more, than substance.” That assessment reflects the position of the gathering in the political calendar: it is expected to be the last major party meeting before the 2027 leadership reshuffle, when Xi is widely expected to hold on to the top job for a fourth term, and the meeting’s purpose is in part to demonstrate unity and control ahead of that transition.
What the plenum will and will not reveal
The closed-door format means little detail will emerge until the meeting concludes. A formal summary of the decisions and outcomes is expected after the four-day session ends on Thursday, and the full text of the decision on party governance will be scrutinised for signals about personnel, institutional changes and the direction of the anti-corruption campaign.
What happens next
The immediate outcome will be the plenum’s concluding communique on Thursday, which will set out the decisions taken and the language the party will use to describe them. Observers will look for clues about the leadership reshuffle, including any signs of rising or falling figures, and for the practical measures attached to the discipline drive, such as new rules on officials’ conduct and on the implementation of central decisions.
Beyond the communique, the plenum sets the stage for the year ahead. Provincial leadership changes are already in progress, and the groundwork laid this week will feed into the 21st Party Congress in 2027, when the party’s top leadership for the next five years will be confirmed. For Xi, the meeting is an opportunity to enter that transition with his authority reaffirmed and his discipline agenda codified. For officials across China, it is a signal that the demands for obedience, austerity and implementation will only intensify as the reshuffle approaches.
