China's Fifth Plenum Communiqué Confirms 33 Party Expulsions, Zhang Youxia Among Them

The communiqué adopted as the Fifth Plenum closed on Thursday evening was mostly a policy document. It was also, in a single paragraph near the end, a formal reckoning: the plenum confirmed the expulsion of 33 of the party's most senior officials, among them Zhang Youxia, a former vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Ma Xingrui, a Politburo member who had run Xinjiang as its party chief.

The confirmations came through two review reports, and the split says something about how the campaign is organized. Seventeen civilian officials were expelled on the recommendation of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection — a list that includes Liu Jianchao, once spoken of abroad as a possible foreign minister; Jin Zhuanglong, the minister of industry and information technology; Yi Huiman, the former head of the securities regulator; and the provincial leaders Lan Tianli, Wang Lixia and Sun Shaocheng. The remaining sixteen, confirmed on a report from the Central Military Commission, are military officers — among them Zhang Youxia, once the PLA's most senior officer, and Zhong Shaojun, a long-serving military aide to Xi Jinping. One official was treated more gently: Li Yunze, listed on the discipline commission's report, received the lesser punishment of removal from his party posts rather than expulsion.

With 33 seats vacated, the plenum promoted ten alternate members into full membership. Caixin flagged two of the names, Liu Jun, president of ICBC, and Liu Qiang, the party secretary of Jinan, as unusually senior figures with financial-sector backgrounds — a reminder that even a purge reshuffle is also a hiring round. The plenum also co-opted Zhang Shengmin, a Central Military Commission member, into the Politburo, and fixed the next party congress for the second half of 2027.

The hashtag ranking first on Weibo's hot-search list through Thursday night was the communiqué's own title, but the passage that rippled through Chinese social media was the expulsion roll call. RT's Chinese-language service counted the names under the hashtag "Ma Xingrui and Zhang Youxia among 33 expelled," and the topic sat at No. 1 on Baidu's board all evening. The document's own language is blunter than the ritual suggests: it praises a decade of "turning the blade inward" (刀刃向内) against corruption, vows to keep a "high-pressure posture" on misdeeds, and commits the party to strengthening its centralized leadership over anti-corruption work — the mechanism that produced the list in the first place. The site covered the discipline decision at the center of the plenum when the communiqué landed Thursday evening; what only became public in the same document was the scale of the housecleaning behind it.

What happens next is written into the communiqué's last lines. The ten members elevated on Thursday will sit in the seats the expelled once held, and the discipline campaign that emptied them now runs under the same Politburo member added to it — with the 21st Party Congress, and the leadership lineup it will confirm, two years away.