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Why China’s ex-leader was escorted out of Communist Party congress. China wants the World.
Xi Jinping’s Purges Have Escalated.
The final months of 2024 witnessed a new wave of purges in Xi Jinping’s China. On November 28, the Defense Ministry announced the suspension from his duties of Admiral Miao Hua, the number four military leader below Xi, who oversaw the political and organizational work of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Miao’s ouster makes him the third PLA general in charge of political and organizational work Xi has purged, and the second of the six members of the 20th Central Military Commission. An official announcement in late December also confirmed the removal of two former PLA generals from the National People’s Congress (NPC), You Haitao, former deputy commander of the PLA Ground Force, and Li Pengcheng, former commissar of the PLA’s Southern Theater Command Navy.
Rumors of more purges have been circulating but they are often impossible to verify, especially when they involve high-ranking PLA officers. In late November, the Financial Times reported that Defense Minister Dong Jun was under investigation, but Dong later appeared before the public with his official title. That does not necessarily mean, however, that the rumors are baseless. At least one high-ranking commissar, Qin Shutong, was dismissed from his position, and three others went absent from meetings in which they were supposed to participate, after rumors swirled around them for several months.
The phenomenon is not confined to the military. Purges of civilians have also been numerous. Across the Party-state system, at least 58 high-ranking cadres lost their positions in the first three quarters of 2024 and 642,000 cadres at various levels were punished over the same time period, according to official statistics. Among 205 full members of the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at least eight were purged (including one who committed suicide in office after reportedly being investigated by the Commission for Discipline Inspection, which carries out the Party’s anti-corruption campaigns); eight seemed to be in trouble given their prolonged, unexplained absence from important meetings among other signals; and three were sidelined. In all, those affected comprise 9.3 percent of the members of China’s most powerful body of political authority only a little more than two years since it was reconstituted.
The beginning of Xi Jinping’s third term leading China at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 was widely viewed as a milestone in his extraordinary consolidation of power. Among the main indications of how firm his grip had become was his successful reorganization of Party-state leadership with his loyalists installed in prominent positions. And yet, the purges continue. Why? Why would Xi purge men he has personally chosen to lead the country? What can the purges tell us about the current state of China’s politics and governance? To understand better why Xi governs the way he does, it’s illuminating to examine the ways that his methods of exercising power, in particular his penchant for purges of handpicked allies, mirror those of his communist forebears. When Xi’s actions are viewed through the lens of what might be termed “Stalin Logic,” they become both less paradoxical and easier to predict.
Xi Jinping’s third term has not resulted in élite solidarity or the ebb of purges. Instead, it has occasioned unceasing political storms sweeping across the country and, especially, the Party-state-military system, resulting in the fall from power of several newly promoted high-ranking leaders. Most prominent among them are Foreign Minister Qin Gang, the youngest among the national leadership anointed at the March 2023 session of the NPC, who was removed from office in July 2023, and Defense Minister Li Shangfu, promoted at that same NPC session but investigated in August 2023, dismissed from office in October 2023, and then expelled from the CCP in June 2024, despite his close relationship to PLA leader Zhang Youxia, who is second only in military power to Xi himself, and despite being a member of the so-called “red second generation” of offspring of Party elders. What happened with Qin and Li remains mysterious, even though more than a year has now passed since their sudden descent from the firmament of rising CCP stars into Xi’s dungeon.
Additionally, in December 2023, China officially revoked the positions of nine deputies to the NPC, all former PLA generals with positions spread across equipment and weapons development, the military-industrial sector, the Air Force, the Ground Force, and the Navy. Especially hard hit was the headquarters of the PLA Rocket Force, which saw the arrests of its commander, deputy commanders, and a former commander. Also in December 2023, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), announced the revocation of memberships of leading officials including prominent figures from the military-industrial sector, which is owned and managed by the Party-state. Other high-ranking cadres in serious trouble include: Jiang Chaoliang, former party secretary of Hubei province, who was investigated in February 2025; Jin Zhuanglong, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, who has been absent from important meetings since the end of 2024; Luo Zengbin, party secretary of Haikou city, who was investigated in December 2024; Wu Cunrong, a full-provincial-level cadre of Shanxi, who was investigated in mid-December 2024; Wu Yingjie, former party secretary of Tibet, who was expelled from the CCP in December 2024; Yu Jianhua, Director General of Customs, who reportedly committed suicide in mid-December 2024 while under investigation by the Party’s disciplinary organization; Zhang Hongwen, party secretary of Hefei city, who had been viewed as a leading figure for post-Xi power succession but who has missed seven important meetings in a row since mid-December 2024; and Zhu Zhisong, the chief of Shanghai’s Pudong New Area, who had a career in the aerospace sector for 25 years, who was put under investigation for corruption in November 2024.
To be sure, purges have been a feature of Xi’s entire tenure. And yet, the most recent bout of investigations and ousters differs from those that came before in several ways worth pondering. First, many of those purged in the most recent round were widely viewed as Xi’s protégés because it was under Xi himself that they were promoted to the significant positions from which Xi then ejected them. By contrast, during Xi’s first ten years in office, purges primarily targeted allies of former CCP chiefs and members of non-Xi factions. Second, as survivors of the purges of Xi’s first two terms in power, they had gained their positions by replacing predecessors whom Xi had not trusted. Especially within the military, this process has occurred several times, sifting those in power down to those Xi presumably esteemed. Third, those who fell victim to the most recent rounds of purges had only recently been appointed, and thus likely had just been vetted for their political backgrounds, interpersonal relations, and above all their loyalty to Xi. Fourth, the span of time from their new appointments to their removals set records for its brevity.
If all of this seems puzzling, it is far less so when viewed through the lens of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin launched his Great Purge in 1936 within the Communist Party, military, and society at large, which pushed the series of political purges he had carried out since becoming party chief of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1924 to a peak and resulted in the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of millions of people, including political rivals, intellectuals, and perceived enemies of the state. A prominent feature of Stalin’s Great Purge rested in its continuous, extensive, and ruthless cleaning out of communist leaders who had closely worked with Stalin. Many of them were Stalin loyalists who helped purge former comrades before Stalin ordered their arrests as well. A promotion to a higher-ranking position under Stalin, therefore, did not mean anything equal to trust from the General Secretary of the CPSU or political security for an official’s career, but instead a growing danger of being purged the next day.
Xi’s new wave of purges, like Stalin’s, also started more than a decade after he assumed power. As was the case for Stalin, Xi’s previous ten years had already seen numerous cadres purged. These were communist élites who gained positions and power prior to Xi’s reign, and they were accordingly perceived as rivals and threats to Xi’s consolidation of power. Such purges seem easily understandable, but things since then have gone beyond common sense. Like Stalin’s Great Purge, Xi’s purge has been continuous, wave after wave, increasingly victimizing those who had helped him to purge former enemies. Also in the public security apparatuses, as in Stalin’s KGB, Fu Zhenghua, executive minister of Public Security, played a significant role during Xi’s first term (2012-17) in purging former Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang and his people, but Fu was then purged in 2021. A similar case is Sun Lijun, who was purged in 2020 after serving as chief of staff to the new Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu, who succeeded Zhou Yongkang and executed the purge of Zhou.
Connecting Stalin and Xi is Mao Zedong, who also fought against enemies within the CCP for years, then, beginning around the founding of the PRC in 1949, turned to targeting former allies who had helped him gain supreme power, and during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), to the comrades closest to him. These victims included Gao Gang, purged in 1954, Liu Shaoqi in 1966, Lin Biao in 1971, and Deng Xiaoping, twice in 1966 and 1976, among an extremely long list.
In this pattern, when leaders of the Communist Party first come to power, they purge political opponents, as Xi Jinping did with his anti-corruption campaign during his first two terms, and once they obtain unrivaled power with no restrictions, they turn to purging their allies and even their protégés. If one purges continuously, like Stalin, then it’s inevitable that sooner or later, the enemies will all be gone and the targets will have to be one’s own cronies. Xi’s tactics in doing so more closely resemble Stalin’s than Mao’s, in that Mao relied on mass mobilization while Xi, like Stalin, deploys internal state apparatuses including the police, state security, and Party organs for discipline enforcement to topple his targets. We could thus refer to the reasoning behind a dictator’s reliance on state coercion to undertake continuous purges, and their inevitable progression from targeting internal opponents to political allies and their own protégés, as the “Stalin-Xi logic,” or, more simply, the Stalin Logic.
Purging one’s political opponents and rivals may be relatively straightforward to understand, but the elimination of allies and even protégés puzzles many observers. Why the continuous purges? Why not stop when power has been consolidated and leadership consists entirely of people one has personally chosen and placed in their positions of leadership?
In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s consolidation of power in the early 1930s came with a series of disasters in governance, particularly in agricultural collectivization and industrialization. In an effort to increase agricultural productivity, Stalin had initiated the forced collectivization of agriculture; peasants were required to give up their individual farms and join collective farms. The process was fraught with violence, including the use of armed forces and even bombers to suppress peasants who resisted collectivization. The consequence was the Great Famine in various parts of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” in the early 1930s in which an estimated five to eight million people died of starvation. The Great Purge followed.
In a similar vein, in the 1950s Mao launched the Great Leap Forward to accelerate industrialization and establish People’s Communes in rural areas, which also resulted in China’s own Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. This man-made famine, the largest in human history, claimed the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people. Then Mao intensified the promotion of his personality cult, and eventually launched the Cultural Revolution, his own version of the Great Purge, which lasted for ten years until his death in 1976.
Is the similarity in this cycle of governance failures and political purges a coincidence? Or is it somehow an outgrowth of communist politics? Here are Xi Jinping’s contemporary answers: In the past few years, Xi’s policies, from “Zero Covid” enforced with state violence to the “pandemic tsunami” unleashed by the sudden ending of lockdowns, caused major humanitarian disasters; his crackdown on the private sector and wider anti-market economic policies have exacerbated the slowdown of China’s economic growth and directly and negatively affected the employment, income, and consumption of hundreds of millions of people. The new wave of purges followed these calamities.
Instances of bad governance and the internal political blame they frequently occasion form a reinforcing cycle. The effect takes hold in the political interactions between the consequences of the leader’s concentration of power and the effectiveness of the regime’s policies. When a policy failure, or even an outright disaster, occurs against the backdrop of a leader’s concentration of power, the Great Leader may justifiably worry that cadres will express discontent in a way that might diminish his power. Purges address this vulnerability by creating an atmosphere of fear that silences potential challenges or criticism. But this atmosphere also disincentivizes communist cadres from taking initiative in their jobs, which further degrades the quality of policymaking and increases the likelihood of further missteps and further crises, and thus more purges.
Both Stalin and Mao fell into this vicious cycle when they reversed their regimes’ relative relaxation of control of the populace, especially in the economic domain. Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” (NEP) in the 1920s put the communist regime in a temporary tactical retreat from its previous policy, which had brought the Soviet economy to the point of breakdown. The NEP was introduced to help the Communist Party maintain its hold on power but, paradoxically, led to a relaxation of centralization and doctrinaire socialism in a “compromise with capitalism” aimed at improving the regime’s economic performance. Stalin’s reversal of the NEP, however, occurred alongside his purges of intraparty rivals, culminating in catastrophic outcomes such as the Great Famine and the Great Purge. Similarly, in China, the Great Leap Forward led to a widespread famine that temporarily sidelined Mao Zedong, allowing Liu Shaoqi and others to implement reforms to revitalize the economy. However, Mao responded with the Cultural Revolution, dismantling both the “capitalist” economic policies of his rivals and the intraparty threats to his power and authority.
Xi’s concentration of power coincided with the reversal of China’s marketization and global involvement as exemplified in China’s dual circulation policy, which unsurprisingly yielded disastrous consequences in China’s economic performance and overall governance. Although there have been no obvious signs to indicate Xi’s power is being challenged from within the leadership, as Mao’s was, that does not mean Xi is not anxious about governance, let alone his power and authority. The implication is that the autocratic leader purges his allies, especially in the security, military, and police domains, because they are the instruments of state coercion and the leader needs absolute control over these sectors, even more so than those government departments that were more directly involved with the governance catastrophes. Moreover, purging officials who are ostensibly directly connected to governance failures could be read as an admission of responsibility on Xi’s part. This explains why Xi did not purge the health minister over Covid or economic officials over the bad economy, but instead unleashed his anti-corruption campaigns primarily at the military and the like.
The central concern is power. The targets of purges also provide a ready supply of scapegoats for the leader’s governance problems — not individually, but as a political phenomenon. For Stalin, they were anti-revolutionaries; for Mao, class enemies, including “capitalist roaders”; for Xi, corrupt cadres whose sabotage causes policy failures and makes the Great Leader’s further consolidation of power necessary and more desirable for better governance.
It is no accident that the communist leader’s concentration of power sits at the center of this entire cycle. From the perspective of administrative science, concentration of power is necessary for effective management. In the cases of Stalin, Mao, and Xi, however, power becomes ultra-concentrated. The difference here is not only one of degree, but involves deeper institutional elements. “Institutions” here primarily mean the rules with which power is gained, distributed, and exercised. To put it simply, for effective administration, concentration of power must follow explicit rules, but in conditions of ultra-concentration of power the leader remakes rules at his will. Communist politics by nature tends to yield ultra-concentration, which greatly strengthens the leader’s control but inevitably undermines the governance capability of the regime.
The Stalin Logic does not simply arise from the personality problems of a given communist leader. Rather, its foundations are institutional. They rely on a quartet of linkages.
First is the linkage between “legitimacy” and ultra-concentration of power. The communist political system suffers constantly from a “legitimacy deficit,” epitomized by the top leader’s legitimacy deficit, as the leader gains power without open and fair competition, nor with any constitutional guarantee that his position will endure even after he has successfully gained power. Stalin followed this path through the 1920s to the 1930s; he became General Secretary of the CPSU in 1922, and, after Lenin’s death in 1924, began to continuously purge political opponents and centralize power in a process that peaked during the Great Purge. Mao accomplished his power concentration during the years between 1935 and 1945, but, as discussed earlier, he experienced some setbacks in the early 1960s, which led to his political revenge during the Cultural Revolution. Xi Jinping moved fast in this regard in his first ten years in office, so that he achieved a complete triumph of ultra-concentrated power by the 20th Party Congress held in 2022. The legitimacy deficit, however, doesn’t simply vanish once a leader has consolidated power, and this is because it is rooted in the fundamental power structure of communist politics.
The second linkage is between ultra-concentration of power and bad governance, which results in the third-order effects of ensuing political campaigns to cover for governance crises. For autocratic leaders, the more personal power is centralized, the more unchecked they are, and the more willful their decisions are, thus the more catastrophes their governance produces. Disasters are caused by bad governance; the more disasters occur in governance, the more the dictator feels that his power is still insufficient and his status insecure, so he must further strengthen personal authority and power, which occasions further political purges.
The fourth linkage reveals an answer to the enigma of how communist dictators like Stalin, Mao, and Xi can purge their hand-picked élites and nevertheless strengthen their own power and authority. It must be emphasized that the entire power system of a communist party provides sufficient and powerful institutional means for the leader’s personal concentration of power to endure even amid political cleansing. Cults of personality are one such means. Stalin cultivated a cult of personality, presenting himself as the embodiment of the Soviet state and the leader of the international communist movement. CPSU official publications told people that Stalin “knows all our dreams and thoughts; he will take care of us as long as he lives.” Mao’s cult of personality was legendary, growing more extreme from the 1940s until it reached its zenith during the Cultural Revolution. Today we are witnessing the rise of the cult of Xi’s personality in China. Governance disasters like those of the Covid-19 pandemic and the economy do not hinder such a rise, but rather prompt and propel it. Ultra-concentration of power, therefore, makes continuous purges feasible and, in contrast with its self-defeating in governance, leads to the dictator’s self-strengthening in politics.
During Xi Jinping’s third term in power, Chinese politics are exhibiting a “Stalin logic,” featuring continuous purges targeting the great leader’s protégés, a series of disasters in governance, and a further promotion of the leader’s concentration of power and cult of personality. This is why China’s post-20th Party Congress politics has not been stable, but has instead teemed with zigzags of policy upheavals, surprises in personnel reshuffling, and a series of paradoxes. The paradoxes include: Xi’s ultra-concentration of power coinciding with his inability to overcome economic difficulties; Party-state élites claiming loyalty to Xi while purges of élites continue with new intensity; and, in the social sphere, the ever-increasing tightening of social control coinciding with a surge in the incidence of violent crime. Chief among them is the declining ability of the regime to achieve its public goals even when it is in the firm control of its leader. Certainly no single factor can explain the paradoxes, but Xi’s mode of exercising political power and its institutional foundations unquestionably stand alone among the most significant.
This does not necessarily imply the unchallengeable endurance of Xi’s power, nor of his regime’s longevity. Instead, it reveals the deep-seated vulnerability of both Xi and his regime. Behind the vicious cycle of policy lapses and purges lies Xi Jinping’s incurable insecurity. Xi has made everybody else within his system his enemy or his potential enemy, and this makes it more likely that animosity, discontent, and resentment among élites will proliferate as the negative consequences of bad governance create and increase social grievances. At the moment, none of this presents an immediate threat to Xi or to his regime, but in the long term it makes their vulnerability certain.
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