China’s Purges Are Working as Designed

For two decades, scholars believed that the main reason Chinese communist rule endured into the twenty-first century—whereas every communist regime in Europe collapsed—was that it had built sturdy, long-lasting institutions. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had moved away from the unpredictable personalist dictatorship of the Mao Zedong era and established the foundations of a modern state. It set term limits on its leaders, embraced collective leadership, and increasingly promoted officials based on merit, which made it resilient enough to bounce back from the external and internal shocks that had felled other socialist systems. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, however, has spent the past decade demolishing nearly every institution that supposedly kept the party strong. He abolished presidential term limits in 2018, hollowed out collective leadership, and has declined to designate a successor. Xi has also purged high-level officials at will, especially in the most sensitive domain: the military. In January, only months after party leaders expelled nine senior military officers, the country’s Ministry of National Defense announced that General Zhang Youxia and General Liu Zhenli—until that point the People’s Liberation Army’s most senior uniformed officer and top operational commander, respectively—had been placed under investigation. Since 2022, according to data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the party has formally purged three dozen generals and lieutenant generals, and many more are conspicuously missing. In Washington, many observers see these purges as evidence of China’s weakness. They see a powerful leader consumed by suspicion and obsessed with maintaining his own grip on power. If the party’s strength were indeed based on the freestanding institutions that China had built in the post-Mao era, then Xi’s purges would be a warning sign of fragility and even a potential crackup. But the party has not shown any signs of falling apart. If anything, as these purges have continued, Xi and the party appear to have only gotten stronger. Far from weakening its rule, the way the CCP cleans its ranks can explain part of what makes it durable. A purge is not an event but a process—one that the party has run in nearly identical form for a century. It regularly targets, evaluates, and forces cadres to seek clemency to retain their standing within the system. The goal is to reform them rather than get rid of them entirely, which strengthens the party by encouraging obedience and dedication to the party’s cause. CCP leaders believe it’s working, too: Xi has embraced “self-revolution,” or continuous and permanent rectification, as the means by which China will escape the unhappy fate of the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes now residing in the dustbin of history. What could threaten the party’s longevity, then, is not the count of how many officials have been purged but the one problem that such a strategy cannot solve and can even make worse: how to handle succession. A regime of self-revolution will rise and fall on that question, no matter how hard it tries to avoid internal decay. CURE THE SICKNESS, SAVE THE PATIENT China’s history of purges predates the founding of the People’s Republic, in 1949. In some cases, as has been true in similar regimes, the CCP launches violent purges to remove cadres from its ranks. The type of purge now synonymous with the actions of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union aims at eliminating someone from the party, whether through incarceration, exile, or death. The victim of such a purge does not come back. Mao employed this tactic as early as 1930, when he executed more than 700 army officers in a show of total control. But what the CCP has also done, and what is unique to its continued rule, is not a purge in the traditional sense. CCP leaders often turn to a different method of discipline: rectification. Rectification aims to keep a person inside the party, even if sometimes at a greatly diminished status. Whereas the traditional idea of a purge seeks to eliminate enemies in the ranks (the Chinese term qingdang means to “cleanse the party”), rectification aims to retain and remold cadres while keeping them in the party’s orbit. Throughout its history, the CCP has sought to rectify cadres far more frequently than it has sought to eliminate them. In December 1929, in the village of Gutian, in Fujian province, Mao put forward a resolution called “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” that asserted the party’s control of the military. The resolution also included clues as to how the party understood internal discipline: it described its targets not as enemies but as people who had deviations in their thinking. Cadres might suffer from ailments such as having a “purely military viewpoint” (a perspective untethered from politics), promoting ultrademocracy (a political system lacking party authority), and supporting individualism. Mao’s resolution treated each of these as a sickness that could sometimes be cured through a regimen of criticism and self-criticism in front of peers. And it attached a promise to the cure: if party members submitted to the process, the CCP would retain them rather than destroy them. In the northern Chinese area of Yan’an, where Mao and his followers set up a wartime base camp starting in the mid-1930s, leaders turned rectification into doctrine. Party membership exploded from roughly 40,000 in 1937 to 800,000 by 1940, which meant that almost everyone in the organization was new and not yet trustworthy in the eyes of party leaders. The Rectification Movement of 1942–45 was the solution. Every cadre wrote an autobiography, measured his or her life against printed self-examination outlines, confessed before his or her party branch or work unit, and was examined, graded, and sorted by the party’s personnel department. In February 1942, Mao summarized the approach in a famous line: “Cure the sickness, save the patient.” Rectification aims to retain and remold cadres. None of this was gentle. The Yan’an campaign was brutal: many were tortured, and thousands died. Subsequent campaigns were often even harsher. But Mao’s approach separated Chinese communism from its nearest relatives. Stalin quickly executed unreliable cadres, and Pol Pot sent them to mass graves. In China, in many cases, the strategy was to keep cadres and try to remold them while also building permanent files detailing their every mistake. The basic procedure remains nearly identical today. A person is singled out for deviating in some way and made to write an account of his or her shortcomings. The account is checked against what his colleagues say about him and against what the organization’s records (in that individual’s personal file) already hold. The cadre is placed on a graded scale of possible sanctions, ranging from no action at one end to expulsion from the party at the other. (Most sanctions fall in the middle, including issuing a serious warning or putting someone on probation.) When a verdict on how to deal with a cadre, official, or campaign target is issued, that person, if deemed to have confessed sufficiently, is kept in the party but on terms that are revocable and conditional on the political winds. And every piece of paper the process generates goes into the cadre’s official file, permanently. It is the process used in 1952 against a village storekeeper who skimmed off the top of procured grain. It is also the process used today for China’s Politburo, whose members—the country’s most powerful men—read self-criticisms aloud to one another once a year and have their confessions written down and permanently attached to their files following the same template that was used in Yan’an. Even as Xi has expanded the scope of who can be targeted, the machinery has not changed. The ongoing case of the purged military officers under Xi likely fits this model, too. Zhang and Liu have been placed under investigation, not shot, and there is a chance that they remain on the party’s books, even if they are saddled with a thicker personal dossier and given a meaningless post or sidelined from public life altogether. In 2023, the diplomat Qin Gang, for instance, was removed from his position as foreign minister; news investigations reported that he had kept his party membership but had been reassigned to a low-level desk job at the foreign ministry’s publishing house. And even if Zhang and Liu are expelled from the party, purging remains the exception rather than the norm, as has been the party’s long-standing practice. Of the 101 generals and lieutenant generals that the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified as purged or potentially purged, only 14 had been officially kicked out of the party as of February. SINGLE FILE Rectification rarely, if ever, changes cadres’ beliefs. Eighty years of evidence, much of it the party’s own, shows cadres parroting the scripts given to them, performing the required contrition, and then reverting to their earlier behaviors the moment the campaign ends. It is a process so ritualized that participants learn to say exactly what examiners want to hear. Yet the main goal of the process is not to reform belief but to create a document to put into a dossier on file. Such a file contains objective personnel data as well as observable assessments of a cadre’s political shortcomings. It is this paper trail that enables the regime to maintain discipline even if no cadres change how they act or think. For cadres and others subject to rectification, the process sorts who is in and who has fallen out of the good graces of party leaders. As cadres constantly jockey for status, a purge is exceptional and devastating. For most party members, surviving a rectification process with minimal punishment is grounds for relief (and often accompanied by a desire to recommit to a forgiving regime) combined with a sliver of fear that the next campaign is always just around the corner. Expanded to 100 million party members, this process produces an internalized discipline in each person that strengthens the organization’s grip on power. Each cadre wakes up every day knowing the dossier exists and that it can be used against them at any time. The permanent, standardized, reopenable record of every party member’s history, associations, and vulnerabilities is also an information system that gives party leaders immense power. Autocratic rulers need information to head off threats to their power; the CCP’s personnel file system, filled with information about the party’s cadres, is an irreplaceable channel of information for China’s rulers. Most cadres are willing to go along with the party’s wishes, but for the small minority that does not express the proper attitude in the face of a discipline campaign, the party can expel them or put them in jail, heading off any threat of revolt from within. High-level defection and dissent sometimes occur, but when they do they are rarely organized and quickly fizzle out. Such record-keeping might be expected to generate resentment among party cadres, but the process is designed to spread the blame and thus insulate Beijing from any backlash. There is no single person or entity that issues a rectification verdict. Instead, party task forces (known as work teams) are mobilized to draft the verdict, colleagues from their workplace endorse it, and then a committee at a higher level of administration ratifies it. It passes through enough hands in the process that authorship is aggregated and spread so that no individual leader or party entity can be said to be responsible. Even the cadre, through his or her own self-criticism, is a co-author in the verdict. Disciplining cadres with rectification is also a coordination device. The Chinese party-state is a sprawling network of bureaucratic agencies, regional power bases, and administrative offices that have their own interests and frequently have to bargain with one another. A rectification campaign is one of the few instruments that transcends these fissures. As with the party’s other massive campaigns, such as the one-child policy, cadres understand that compliance with rectification is mandatory and a high priority for leaders. Discipline campaigns offer unambiguous carrots and sticks, including leniency for cadres who show the right attitude and professional purgatory, even exile, for those who do not. Many cadres who normally benefit from taking advantage of the fragmentation in China’s political system know to drop everything else and go along with discipline campaigns, providing Beijing with a highly visible way to impose unified priorities and strengthen party control. WHAT DISCIPLINE CANNOT SOLVE Chinese history is rife with examples of once powerful dynasties weakening and eventually falling apart. To avoid this outcome, Mao’s solution was mass mobilization: only by letting the people supervise the government, he believed, would it not slacken. Xi’s answer, offered in 2021 and elaborated since, is the party’s self-revolution. In this framework, the cure for the party’s ills can only come from inside the party, not from any external force. Ongoing party rectification campaigns require all officials to discipline themselves, and the occasional outright purge of some cadres provides undeniable proof that failure to comply has consequences. It is the first time the party has explicitly located the mechanism of its own survival inside itself. The choreography has been equally explicit. In the fall of 2014, with investigations that felled two senior military leaders underway, Xi summoned some 400 senior officers to the same hall in the village of Gutian where Mao had issued “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party.” State media called it the “new Gutian conference.” In 2024, Xi convened the military to discuss political work (that is, ideological loyalty) at Yan’an—a clear reminder that the party sees a direct line from past rectification campaigns to its present strength. Beneath the symbolism is Xi’s fear that China could end up like the Soviet Union, whose own Communist Party, Xi believes, let its internal disciplinary mechanisms atrophy and thus was the architect of its own demise. Beijing believes that the purges and rectification must continue permanently if the party is to remain in power. Whether or not the analysis of Soviet collapse is accurate, the CCP’s continued strength suggests that the party’s method of disciplining cadres may indeed explain its durability. Xi’s purges should not be measured by how many cadres they ensnared but whether they continue to produce files, verdicts, and party retention that keep the party firmly in control. The greatest source of uncertainty now is Xi’s eventual succession. But what strengthens the party also weakens some of China’s instruments of power. Senior military commands sit vacant or are staffed by less experienced officers, and future officers learn that the safest career record is a thin one. When forced to choose, political control is always more important to the party than operational effectiveness. This is a tradeoff that the party has been willing to make for a century and will continue to make. And China’s method of purges cannot solve the danger of succession. Rectification produces no mechanism for choosing the next ruler—if anything, by ensuring that no subordinate accumulates independent standing, it makes the emergence of a credible successor even harder. Succession, not discipline, is where the system is weak. The older generation of CCP leaders, including Mao and Deng Xiaoping, overcame the challenge of succession by drawing on their unassailable authority as revolutionaries who had fought for the party’s survival, and subsequent leaders relied on the institutions—term limits, collective leadership, and regularized succession rules—that Xi has summarily destroyed. Xi has neither, which makes the succession problem especially acute. The moment to worry about Chinese stability is not when generals disappear amid an investigation, but when the man who reads their files begins to age out of the role without an answer as to who will follow. The CCP is not going to collapse: the file system exists precisely to prevent elite fracture, and it has worked. What is likely to emerge instead is a state that is militarily weaker and politically stronger than most assessments suggest. The greatest source of uncertainty now is Xi’s eventual succession. Beijing’s own theorists are watching this, too, because they know that even a well-engineered system of rectification that has kept the party strong for a century has no answer for an elite power struggle over who comes next. You are reading a free article Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. - Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives - Six issues a year in print and online, plus audio articles - Unlock access to the Foreign Affairs app for reading on the go Already a subscriber? Sign In