Xi's anti-corruption drive is political warfare, not governance
China's Fifth Plenum turns on discipline and loyalty as Xi culls senior military and political figures. The anti-corruption campaign is less about cleaning up the party than about keeping it afraid.
The purges have a pattern, and the pattern points upward
The Central Military Commission of China used to have seven members. Now it has two.
One is Xi Jinping. The other is Zhang Shengmin, who happens to run the commission’s internal discipline bureau. The rest have fallen—some to investigations, some to quiet removals, some to arrests that arrive with the theatrical timing Chinese political observers have learned to expect.
Zhang Youxia, the most powerful general after Xi himself, was placed under investigation in January. Last month, he was expelled from the party. Ma Xingrui, the former Communist Party chief of Xinjiang, went next. Huang Qifan, a former Chongqing mayor who had survived the Bo Xilai scandal a decade earlier—the one case where Xi’s own political rival was convicted—was deemed corrupt this time around. No longer the survivor.
The message is not subtle. Discipline is not being enforced. It is being wielded.
What the Fifth Plenum actually is
The current gathering of Communist Party leaders, described in state media as focused on “major issues on advancing the party’s full and rigorous self-governance,” is code for something far more specific.
In Chinese political language, “self-governance” means loyalty. It means obedience. It means staying on the right side of whoever controls the disciplinary apparatus. The plenum, which brings together more than 300 of the party’s most senior officials, is happening because there is a problem that cannot be solved by normal bureaucratic mechanisms.
Last year alone, China’s disciplinary authorities opened investigations into more than one million people. Over a hundred were at or above ministerial or provincial rank. These are not minor infractions. These are people who controlled budgets, appointments, and regional economies. They are people who had built networks.
The anti-corruption campaign that Xi Jinping launched when he came to power in 2012 is now more than a decade old. Its pace has not slowed. Its scope has expanded. Its targets have reached into institutions that were supposed to be off-limits, particularly the military.
The discipline dilemma
Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, puts the logic plainly. In Xi’s worldview, corruption and political disloyalty are not distinct problems. If you’re corrupt, you’re not loyal. If you’re loyal, you’re not corrupt.
The distinction matters because it explains why the campaign never ends.
Neil Thomas, a senior fellow at the Asia Society, argues that corruption in China’s system is “a feature rather than a bug”—a structural problem inherent to governing 1.4 billion people through a sprawling authoritarian bureaucracy. But the solution is not structural reform. It is permanent surveillance. It is the constant threat that any official, at any time, can be investigated.
“Xi has made the party less corrupt and strengthened his control,” Thomas said. “But he knows that tougher punishment cannot fully resolve the problem of officials putting their own interests ahead of the party’s.”
The answer, then, is to keep tightening. To make anti-corruption a permanent method of governing with no obvious point at which the job is declared done.
This is not governance in any conventional sense. It is control through perpetual vigilance.
The 21st Party Congress is coming
Timing is everything in Chinese politics. The Fifth Plenum is significant not just for what it says, but for when it happens.
It is almost certainly the last substantive gathering of the Central Committee before next year’s 21st Party Congress. That event will choose a new Central Committee. It will also anoint Xi Jinping for a fourth term as head of the Communist Party—an outcome that is all but certain, but one that still requires the performance of consensus.
Between now and then, any figure who might challenge that consensus, or whose existence complicates it, needs to be managed. The purges serve this function.
Zhang Youxia’s fall is especially notable. As second-in-command of the military apparatus, he represented a center of institutional power that existed independently of Xi. Removing him sends a clear signal: no branch of the party-state operates outside Xi’s control.
Huang Qifan’s case cuts deeper. He had survived the Bo Xilai scandal—a scandal in which Xi’s rival was convicted and sent to prison for life. Huang was connected to those events. He was an eyewitness, a confidant, a man who knew things. For more than a decade, he remained in the system. Now he is gone.
The lesson is clear: no one is safe. No network is permanent.
What this means for global observers
Some analysts interpret these purges as evidence of instability in the Chinese regime. The language they use—“showing signs of fractiousness,” “internal divisions”—suggests a system under stress.
But Xi likely does not see it that way. In his framing, corruption investigations demonstrate who is in charge. They are, as Brown puts it, “the most easy and natural tool by which to enforce unity and discipline.”
The question is whether this approach is sustainable. A campaign that never ends requires constant mobilization. It demands that officials remain perpetually anxious. It creates a system where advancement depends not on competence or performance, but on loyalty and survival.
That has consequences for governance. Officials who are afraid do not take risks. They do not innovate. They do not solve problems—they avoid making decisions that could later be interpreted as evidence of disloyalty or incompetence.
This is the paradox of Xi’s anti-corruption drive: it has strengthened his personal authority while potentially weakening the state’s capacity to govern effectively.
The deeper implication
Xi Jinping has warned that the party could “lose its ruling status and inevitably be eliminated by history” if it does not get its house in order. He has called this “by no means an exaggeration.”
The logic of that warning is that the party must be kept in a state of permanent readiness. Not reform. Not modernization. Readiness. The enemy is always at the gate—whether it is foreign powers, internal dissent, or officials who have lost their way.
The Fifth Plenum is not about solving corruption. It is about reinforcing the premise that corruption is a permanent threat, and that only Xi can manage it.
The purges are not pathology. They are policy.
And the next chapter will play out at the 21st Party Congress, where the question will not be whether Xi remains in power, but what kind of system he leaves behind: one governed by rule, or one ruled by fear.