BEIJING: A Chinese Communist Party conclave on toughening internal discipline this week formally expelled a record number of senior officials and logged the highest absence rate in its modern history as purges thinned its leadership ranks.

The gathering, the party’s fifth plenum since the current leadership cohort was formed in 2022, also set the 21st Party Congress for the second half of 2027 in Beijing, effectively starting proceedings for China’s tightly choreographed, twice-a-decade top reshuffle, when President Xi Jinping is expected to extend his rule for another five-year term.

The closed-door meeting of the party’s Central Committee, the largest of its top decision-making bodies, was marked by the highest rate of absences in the post-Mao era, underscoring the scale of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign and wider political shake-up.

In total, 279 full and alternate members of the leadership body attended the gathering this week, compared with the 376 originally named in 2022, a summary of the proceedings dispatched by the official Xinhua news agency showed. This means more than a quarter, or 25.8pc, of the original cohort was absent, many of them due to purges.

Despite the record churn, the party portrayed itself as stronger than ever, hailing achievements it said were worthy of being “recorded forever in the history books of building Marxist political parties.” “The main messaging for the party to its domestic and external audiences is that it must be unified,” said Kerry Brown, director of King’s College London’s Lau China Institute.

“The US will be emerging from the midterms, where the strong likelihood is yet more division and conflict,” and for Xi and his colleagues, Brown said, “the message will be: We are united, we are disciplined, and we are not like them.”

Published in Dawn, October 30th, 2026