Xi Jinping will gather the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party next week to issue a stark warning: Respect the rank.
The meeting of the party’s Central Committee, its largest leadership group, will highlight President Xi’s frustration with the discipline and performance of cadres who run the country’s provinces and the party-state’s most important ministries and agencies, according to Chinese observers.
The Fifth Plenum, as the meeting is called, will open on Monday and last four days, making it the last major event on China’s political calendar this year.
It also comes at an important time for Xi and the party.
China is now a year away from the party’s five-year leadership congress, at which Xi, 73, is expected to begin a fourth five-year term as CPC leader. His third term, which began in 2022, broke the two-term norm for modern party leaders.
Setting the tone, Qiushi, the CCP’s official ideological newspaper, this month published excerpts from a closed-door speech Xi gave to the party’s feared internal watchdog in January.
Xi asked members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to identify and dismiss “two-faced cadres who pay lip service to directives while practicing political opportunism, departmentalism or factionalism behind the scenes.”
He also called for greater oversight of officials’ implementation of his key policy goals, including developing new quality productive forces – party language speaks of massive investments in advanced technology and manufacturing – and tackling the risk of high debt of local governments.
Xi stressed the importance of his signature anti-corruption campaign so that officials “do not dare, cannot and will not be corrupt” and called for “self-cleansing” within the CCDI itself.
Alexander Davey, an analyst specializing in China’s party-state at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said the remarks reflected a “principal-agent problem” in which provincial leaders were seen as not working hard enough to realize Xi’s vision for China.
Xi’s belief was that “if people don’t do what I say and the way I want them to do, we’ll never get there,” Davey said. “This is a problem that has plagued Xi Jinping since he came to power – he has yet to find a way to solve it.”
Authorities have publicized a series of high-profile corruption cases in recent weeks, including Huang Qifan, the former mayor of Chongqing, and Wang Fengchao, who until last year was mayor of Chengdu.
Neil Thomas, a senior fellow in Chinese politics at the Asia Society, a U.S. think tank, said Xi would also use the plenum to attack disloyalty and ineptitude “all the way up the chain of command.”
Last year, the number of civil servants sanctioned for “formalism” and “bureaucratism” – terms that Thomas translates as ticking boxes and passing the buck respectively – almost tripled from the previous year, to 118,000.
“Xi sees significant implementation gaps between what he wants and what is happening on the ground,” Thomas said. “It’s not like he declared victory on his national agenda, by any stretch of the imagination. »
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Analysts said that in addition to strengthening discipline in the ranks, Xi would seek to project stability ahead of next year’s party congress, when the leadership is expected to undergo a generational reshuffle.
While a fourth term for Xi is considered a certainty, there is less consensus among foreign experts on the rotation of members of the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee, the highest echelon of Chinese power.
Most of Xi’s longest-serving advisers are in their 60s and early 70s. By party standards, officials aged over 68 at the time of the convention generally retire, making way for those aged 67 and younger.
If these age limits are respected, figures such as chief of staff Cai Qi, 70, and ideological adviser Wang Huning, 71, are expected to resign. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi, 73, who sits on the Politburo but not the smaller Standing Committee, could also be replaced.
But exceptions have been made in the past.
“Repeated disregard for age-based conventions… has made it significantly more difficult to determine who should retire, who can remain in office, and who remains eligible for promotion,” said Alex Payette, managing director of the Cercius Group, a consultancy specializing in China’s political elite.
The plenum is also being closely monitored for signals that Xi is reorganizing the highest echelons of China’s military leadership.
Earlier this year, Xi dismissed two members of the Central Military Commission, the top military oversight body he chairs, including its first vice chairman, Zhang Youxia. Both were accused of insubordination, state media suggested.
The purge left the CMC with only Xi and one other active member, a political commissar tasked with investigating corruption. Two former defense ministers were also given suspended death sentences in May.
Meanwhile, as many as 36 generals and lieutenant generals have been officially discharged since 2022 and another 65 are missing or may be under investigation, according to February data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank.
Foreign observers interpreted the dismissals as a full-scale campaign to consolidate Xi’s control over the military. But they also question whether the purge has harmed the PLA’s conflict preparedness.
Official accounts have pointed to deep-seated corruption in military procurement.
The Asia Society’s Thomas thought it was more likely that Xi would “refresh” the PLA leadership, including appointing a new CMC, at the party congress rather than at next week’s meeting.
As Xi worked to consolidate his long-term power and codify his legacy within the pantheon of Chinese leaders, it was even possible that he could “lay the foundation for a return to the position of ‘party chairman,'” said Christopher Nye, a non-resident scholar at the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. research group.
The title, most closely associated with Mao Zedong, has not been used since the early 1980s, and its revival would underscore Xi’s characterization of his time in power as a transformative period for China.
Other experts consider such a move highly unlikely, not only because it would be controversial for Xi to rise rhetorically to the same level as Mao, but also because it would open up the current position of party general secretary to him and raise questions about the possibility of succession.
Nye said Xi could also adopt the title of lingxiuor leader, of the party, the army and the nation at the plenum.
“If he does, the position of ‘party chair’ in the 21st Congress becomes a real possibility,” Nye added.
Data visualization by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong
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