China's Communist Party fixed October 26 to 29 as the dates for a leadership plenum on party discipline, and at the same September 21 meeting in Beijing expelled the most senior uniformed officer in its armed forces from the party and the military.
Zhang Youxia, a Political Bureau member and vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Liu Zhenli, a commission member and former chief of the Joint Staff Department, were stripped of their party and military membership for serious violations of discipline and law. Their cases have been handed to military prosecutors. The session that sealed their expulsions was the same Political Bureau meeting, chaired by Xi Jinping, that scheduled the fifth plenary session of the 20th Central Committee.
The plenum date had been left open since a July 30 Political Bureau session promised only a meeting sometime in October. Delegates will deliberate a document on the Central Committee's decision regarding strengthening full and rigorous Party self-governance with perseverance, the designation carried in the official Xinhua News Agency report. The Political Bureau heard a report on comments gathered on the draft within and outside the party, and decided to revise the text before submitting it.
A Discipline Text Replaces The Economic Blueprint
Fifth plenums are, by long convention, planning meetings. The session is normally where the party signs off on the recommendations that become the next five-year plan, the document that sets national growth, industrial, and technology targets. That convention does not apply this time. The recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026 to 2030, were handled at the fourth plenum in October 2025, leaving the fifth free for business of a different kind.
A provincial-level party organization department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the subject, told Storm Media that two conclusions follow. Substantive discussion of the five-year plan has effectively been completed in other forums or moved forward on the calendar. And with the 21st Party Congress due in 2027, the task of reconfirming the leadership's power structure and testing the loyalty of its members has become considerably more urgent than any economic roadmap.
Full and rigorous self-governance is not a new slogan. The 20th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party's internal watchdog, made it and anti-corruption enforcement the twin priorities of 2026 at its own plenary session in January, stressing political supervision, discipline enforcement, and graft investigations. What has changed is the scale of what now needs to be formalized.
Military Officers Fill Most Of The Vacant Seats
Roughly 19 Central Committee members have been removed, expelled, or stripped of their National People's Congress delegate status over the past year, and more than half of them wear uniforms. Counting officials who left their posts under unexplained circumstances or who have not appeared in public for months, the plenum could plausibly process close to 30 cases in a single sitting.
The cumulative toll is heavier still. By a tally the Epoch Times published in April, close to 70 of the 376 full and alternate members of the 20th Central Committee had been purged by then, roughly 18%, which the outlet described as the largest share in a single Central Committee term since the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. The concentration among officers points to a systematic turnover cutting across theater commands and service branches rather than a scattering of isolated cases.
Plenums are where the party formally ratifies such decisions, which is why the procedural business often matters more than the political language. The list of who is absent, which alternate members are elevated to fill vacancies, and who is newly promoted usually reveals more about the real distribution of power in Beijing than the communiqué issued at the close.
Five Of Seven Military Commission Members Are Gone
The October 2025 fourth plenum confirmed the expulsion from the party of He Weidong, then a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Miao Hua, former director of the commission's Political Work Department, alongside other senior officers accused of serious violations of discipline and law.
Zhang and Liu had been under investigation since January 2026. In August, the National People's Congress Standing Committee removed them from their posts on the state military commission and revoked their legislative seats, but announced no party sanction, leaving the cases formally open until September 21.
Of the seven men named to the Central Military Commission at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, five have now been expelled from both the party and the military: former Defense Minister Li Shangfu, He Weidong, Miao Hua, Zhang, and Liu. Only Xi, who chairs the body, and Vice Chairman Zhang Shengmin remain.
The damage reaches into the Political Bureau itself. He Weidong, Zhang Youxia, and Ma Xingrui, the former Xinjiang party secretary expelled in July, all held seats on the 24-member body, making this the heaviest attrition in the party's top leadership organ since the Cultural Revolution.
Beijing Accuses The Generals Of Forming Cliques
The charges published against Zhang and Liu were unusually pointed. The official notice said the two had betrayed their original mission, grown estranged from the party, abandoned party principle, and crossed red lines, and it accused them of being disloyal and dishonest to the party and of forming cliques. Both were also said to have used their positions to help others win promotion in exchange for large bribes, and to have failed to supervise their families and staff. Their credentials as delegates to the 20th Party Congress were revoked.
Chen Pokong, a US-based political commentator, told the Epoch Times that the self-governance campaign is aimed squarely at the two cases, pointing to new rules on party organization elections in the military and a round of senior officer training rolled out since January. Xi "is in fact using these regulations to emphasize how senior commanders ought to behave, and in turn to indirectly condemn the offenses committed by Zhang Youxia, Liu Zhenli and others," Chen said. "These are all interlocking. In substance it is a struggle for power."
Quiet Cases Spread Into Science, Medicine And Finance
Away from the barracks, the discipline apparatus has taken down dozens of officials in academia, technology, health care, and the economic bureaucracy in recent months. Many of those cases surfaced only on local WeChat accounts or in routine personnel notices rather than in formal announcements, a low-visibility disclosure pattern that makes the current wave considerably harder to track from outside China than earlier campaigns.
The cost of sustained pressure is now discussed openly within the system. Risk aversion, passive inaction, and defensive decision-making among cadres have become a recognized structural problem for governance, and the plenum document is widely read as an attempt to find a workable balance between disciplinary control and administrative effectiveness.
Official language points in the same direction. Xinhua reported that regions, departments, and sectors had fully affirmed the draft, describing it as a realistic summary of the achievements and experience of the new era, and that the consultation had proceeded by developing democracy and pooling wisdom. The readout said the text demonstrates the historical initiative of the Central Committee in strengthening both the party and the country, and the meeting stressed preserving the party's pioneering character while reinforcing its political leadership capacity and its ties to the public. Framing self-governance in those terms signals that anti-corruption is being handled as a matter of political security rather than as a series of individual disciplinary files.
The PLA Centenary Raises The Stakes For Taiwan
For Taipei, the consequence of all this lies in what the purges do to the chain of command. 2027 marks the centenary of the People's Liberation Army, a milestone Beijing has tied to its military modernization targets and a date US commanders have repeatedly cited as a readiness benchmark for a Taiwan contingency. A command structure that has lost most of its top tier in four years is harder to read from Taipei and harder to rely on from Beijing.
What emerges from the plenum will indicate which phase the campaign has entered. If new cases remain concentrated among the most senior officers, the military purge still has room to widen. If the plenum's output shifts toward institutional rules and routine discipline enforcement, Beijing may be moving from case-by-case punishment to systemic consolidation.
Either way, the ordering is the message. By placing party-building ahead of economic planning at a session historically devoted to the latter, and by clearing the two generals' files five weeks before it opens, the leadership has signaled that under mounting domestic and external pressure, regime security comes first. The substantive news from October 26 will most likely be found in the personnel decisions, not the communiqué.
