Milan (AsiaNews) – The fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) will meet in Beijing on 26–29 October, the last major event before the 21st party Congress, the fourth of the Xi Jinping era, slated exactly for a year from now, in October 2027.
The meeting is highly anticipated, not least because of what is on its agenda. According to official announcements, the session will focus on critical issues concerning the "comprehensive strict governance of the Party” with the Politburo set to present a report on the matter.
The stated goal is to make officials “more obedient and efficient”, ensuring that the leadership’s decisions translate into concrete results.
Since 2014, the so-called strict governance of the party has been a core element in Xi Jinping’s strategy. It encompasses ideological training, control over career advancement, administrative oversight, and, above all, severe sanctions.
Fighting corruption, curbing waste, addressing the falsification of statistics, and cracking down on projects designed solely for political visibility are the tools employed to carry this out, a process in which the line between tackling abuses of power and purging those deemed disloyal to the general secretary remains very blurred.
Discipline or efficiency?
Xi believes that a more disciplined and centralised CPC can govern more effectively and pursue the goal of China’s national rejuvenation. But can further tightening of control truly improve the functioning of a machine as complex as the administration of the People’s Republic of China?
This is the question raised in an analysis released recently by the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), authored by Neil Thomas, Lobsang Tsering, and Shengyu Wang, three experts from the Center for China Analysis.
Controlling the political leadership in Beijing, they note, is a different matter from managing an organisation, the CPC, with more than 100 million members, and ensuring that its decisions are implemented across a vast and complex land.
Xi frequently calls out officials who profess loyalty to the leadership but, in practice, ignore, delay, or circumvent central directives. Some avoid taking responsibility, while others chase short-term results, or focus on improving their own image in the eyes of their superiors.
One of the most significant aspects of the analysis by Thomas, Tsering, and Wang concerns the contradictory effects of disciplinary campaigns.
Local CPC officials in the People’s Republic of China find themselves having to respond to an ever-increasing number of demands and shifting objectives, while also being required to produce constant documentation to prove that they have carried out directives.
At the same time, they often have limited financial resources at their disposal. Under these conditions, completing a visible project can be more advantageous than slowly addressing structural problems.
A flashy undertaking provides superiors with something to showcase during official visits, whereas less spectacular interventions might take years to yield results.
Indeed, official data provided by the party itself confirms this intensification of pressure: the number of officials punished for "formalism" and "bureaucratism" jumped from about 46,000 in 2023 to 118,000 in 2025.
In the first eight months of 2026, the figure was 16 per cent higher than in the same period the previous year. In 2025, nearly nine out of ten sanctions related to negligence, inaction, misconduct, or the perfunctory, or merely nominal, performance of official duties.
Xi introduced an evaluation system aimed at rewarding long-lasting results while penalising pointless projects, abrupt policy reversals, and inadequate oversight. However, the fear of sanctions can lead officials to risk avoidance, thereby limiting experimentation and innovation.
The "anti-corruption drive" within the military
Even more striking is the issue of corruption, which Xi identifies as one of the primary threats to the survival of the party and to China’s economic development.
By 2025, disciplinary authorities had launched approximately 1.01 million investigations, a sharp increase from the roughly 155,000 in 2012, the year before Xi came to power.
The plenum may now introduce further oversight mechanisms for strategic decision-making, public investment, and expenditure, alongside an expanded use of digital data to detect suspicious conduct.
There is also speculation that stricter accountability measures could be imposed on officials whose subordinates break the rules.
However, while enforcing discipline may help curb corruption and waste, it does not automatically ensure a more competent administration. In fact, by offering officials only incentives to avoid mistakes and the resulting punishment, the outcome could well be paralysis.
Moreover, the purges will be clearly apparent in the Central Committee itself. Thomas, Tsering, and Wang estimate that, taking into account both removals and ongoing investigations, 161 full members and 130 alternate members could be at next year’s congress, that is, just over three out of every four (77.4 per cent) at the last congress in 2022.
Many of the missing are from the campaign Xi has waged against the top brass of the People’s Liberation Army, following a procurement scandal within the Rocket Force that broke out in 2023.
Of the 44 uniformed officers elected as full members of the Central Committee in 2022, only Zhang Shengmin and Dong Jun do not appear to have been purged or disappeared. Only 12 of the 23 military alternates appear to still be performing their duties.
The current composition of the Central Military Commission is surreal, reduced to just two members: Xi, in his capacity as chairman, and General Zhang Shengmin, who was promoted to vice-chairman at last year’s plenum. The other five original members, Zhang Youxia, He Weidong, Li Shangfu, Liu Zhenli, and Miao Hua, have all been purged.
The plenum could provide an opportunity to at least partially rebuild the Central Military Commission. However, it remains to be seen whether the general secretary will choose to make new appointments now or prefer to wait until the 2027 Congress.
At present, there is little doubt that Xi Jinping will seek a fourth term at next year’s Congress; his influence over appointments, control mechanisms, and security apparatuses leaves little room for any organised resistance by other leaders.
Meanwhile, the selection of future leadership cadres is likely already underway, with a particular focus on relatively young provincial-level officials who possess technical expertise and ties to the leader’s political network.
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