Empty seats in the Great Hall: Xi’s ruthless party purge

There is a deep “contradiction” at the heart of the Chinese state, said Han Yong Hong in Lianhe Zaobao (Singapore). “Despite the extraordinary concentration of power at the top,” Xi Jinping, all-powerful general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of China for the past 13 years, “has still struggled to secure genuine loyalty” from leading figures in the bureaucracy beneath him.

Earlier this year, he railed against the “performative obedience” of party officials, describing in a caustic speech their many forms of “two-faced” behaviour. Some, he said, loudly proclaim their political loyalty while quietly defying orders; others are opportunists who resort to flattery and deception, but “stand ready to jump ship at any moment”. And it was revealing to find that the focus of last week’s party plenum in Beijing was not economic planning, as is customary – but discipline and loyalty. Behind closed doors, officials were told they will now face even tighter oversight and constraints over the way they carry out their duties, not least through more detailed performance reviews.

Warning to others

The internal machinations of a far-off bureaucracy may not seem significant, said The Indian Express (Noida). But “in a system where the Party effectively subsumes the state”, the way the CCP governs itself can have far-reaching consequences. It will shape how China projects its power abroad, impacting global markets and the strategic calculations of other powers.

The subtext for this latest crackdown, said The Straits Times (Singapore), is that Xi’s long-running purges are not paying off. Millions of CCP members have been dragged into the autocrat’s “anti-corruption” drive in the past few years, and hundreds of senior officials and top generals have disappeared from view. Yet Xi seems anxious to shore up his authority even further.

Xi took out one of his biggest targets just two weeks before the gathering, continued Han Yong Hong. Former Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan, who earned the nickname “roly-poly toy” for his ability to be knocked about by political upheavals without being toppled, was taken from his home by the authorities on 10 October for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law”. Huang had stepped down as Chongqing mayor a decade ago, but his intricate network of political connections was clearly considered a threat by Xi. His removal will have served as a “stern warning to others within the political establishment” ahead of the Fifth Plenum.

Lonely princeling

A record 33 members of the CCP’s central committee were purged ahead of last week’s meeting, said Allegra Mendelson in The Telegraph – including Zhang Youxia, Beijing’s highest-ranking general, who was dismissed after a months-long corruption investigation; and a former party secretary from Xinjiang who was removed for “nepotism, bribery and paying for sex”. It left the “largest number of empty chairs” in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People since these plenums began.

These regular party meetings matter a huge amount to a leader like Xi, said James Palmer in Foreign Policy (Washington DC), because his power is almost entirely rooted in the CCP’s formal structures. That marks a sharp contrast with Mao Zedong, who was able to use the strength of his personality cult to bypass the formal structures and attack his enemies – as he did during the Cultural Revolution “when he mobilised the student-led Red Guards against the CCP’s established leaders”.

Xi’s personality cult is only surface level: “unlike Mao, nobody has ever cried singing Xi’s poems”. Nor does he have the personal networks to sustain his influence. Although he is the son of one of the founding fathers of the People’s Republic of China, he has not built close ties to other princelings, “choosing instead to curtail them”. Xi’s power stems almost entirely from his formal position and his ability “to control the CCP’s internal security services”. Without that, his authority would disappear.