China’s ruling Communist Party announced on Thursday that it had formally expelled 33 senior political and military officials, including a prominent former diplomat and a military secretary of Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader.
The announcement laid bare the depth of Mr. Xi’s anticorruption purges as he prepares to secure a fourth term in power next year.
The party said the expulsions had been made earlier by the Politburo, a council of top officials. They were confirmed by the party’s Central Committee, which concluded a four-day meeting in Beijing on Thursday.
The communiqué released by the Central Committee confirmed the fate of some officials who had disappeared for months or longer without official explanation. They included Liu Jianchao, a senior foreign affairs official who was most recently the head of the party’s International Department, until he abruptly left that job last year.
Another was Zhong Shaojun, a senior secretary to Mr. Xi who had served for over a decade as his eyes and ears in the Central Military Commission, which controls the People’s Liberation Army.
“This meeting marked a comprehensive purge by Xi Jinping of officials he had promoted since taking office” in 2012, said Wen-Hsuan Tsai, a research fellow at Academia Sinica, an institute in Taiwan, who studies the Chinese Communist Party.
The sparse benches at this year’s meeting of the Central Committee, a policy-setting body that meets roughly once a year, told their own story.
Only 279 officials attended the meeting, the party’s statement said. When the current committee was formed at a Communist Party congress in 2022, it had 376 members.
That suggests that nearly 100 officials have been removed from the committee over the past four years.
“This is the biggest purge in history,” Mr. Tsai said, referring to the numbers removed from the committee.
The party also confirmed that it would hold its next congress some time in the second half of 2027. At that congress, Mr. Xi is virtually certain to win a fourth five-year term as party general secretary, a feat that would extend his rule to at least 20 years and seal his status as China’s most powerful leader in many decades.
Since he came to power nearly 14 years ago, Mr. Xi has waged campaigns to eradicate corruption and disloyalty in the party, military and security services. But he has recently complained that still too many officials remain disloyal and are tempted by bribes.
This week’s Central Committee meeting focused on instilling stricter discipline in officials.
“We must maintain a high-pressure stance in punishing corruption and strengthen checks and balances on the exercise of power,” the communiqué from the meeting said. But the party leadership has made similar promises before, including at a Central Committee meeting on the same anticorruption theme a decade ago.
The meeting approved only one major promotion, that of Zhang Shengmin, the general who has overseen sweeping investigations and removals for corruption and disloyalty in the military. He was elevated into the Politburo, the party’s council of over 20 top officials.
Of the 33 Central Committee members whose expulsions were confirmed at the meeting this week, 16 came from the military, including Zhang Youxia, formerly China’s most senior general until he was detained for investigation in January.
“This signifies a further strengthening of the military’s disciplinary inspection system,” Mr. Tsai, the Taiwanese scholar, said of General Zhang’s promotion. “It’s possible that more senior officers will be purged in the future.”
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