China's Communist Party has handed a Politburo seat to the general who ran the army's internal police for most of Xi Jinping's purge of his own high command.

General Zhang Shengmin, 68, was elected to the Politburo as the Central Committee closed its fifth plenary session in Beijing on October 29, according to the plenum communique released by Xinhua. He is already a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the party body that commands the People's Liberation Army (PLA), a post he took a year ago after heading the commission's discipline inspection arm from 2017. He passed that job to General Zhang Shuguang in July.

His rise owes as much to attrition as to favour: of the seven men appointed to the CMC in 2022, only Xi and Zhang remain. The five who have gone are former defence minister Li Shangfu, political work chief Miao Hua, vice chairman He Weidong and, in January, senior vice chairman Zhang Youxia together with Joint Staff chief Liu Zhenli, whose removal completed the commission's hollowing-out. Zhang Youxia, a fellow princeling whose father fought alongside Xi's in the civil war, had long been counted among the leader's closest allies in uniform. The officer who oversaw military discipline through most of that clear-out is now the only uniformed member of a Politburo that has customarily seated two generals since the late 1990s.

The communique put the purge on the record, confirming the expulsion of 33 Central Committee members from the party, Zhang Youxia, Liu Zhenli and former Xinjiang party chief Ma Xingrui among them, and removed Li Yunze, head of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, from his party post. Sixteen of the cases came through the military's own channels. Ten alternate members were moved up to fill vacant full seats, and the party said "serious dangers hidden within the Party, the state, and the military have been removed", and declared that it "tolerates no corruption".

Only 162 full and 117 alternate members attended, 279 of the 376 elected at the 20th Party Congress four years ago. That gave an attendance rate of 74%, the lowest since the Mao era, according to calculations by Neil Thomas, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. A year earlier, at the fourth plenum, 315 had turned up; in July 2024 the figure was 364.

“More empty seats underscore the plenum’s focus on Xi’s vision of strict internal discipline,” Thomas wrote in a post on X.

The plenum's main document, a resolution on persevering with "full and rigorous Party self-governance", points the same way. The party's discipline commission says more than 2mn people have been disciplined since 2012, 680,000 of them in the first nine months of this year alone.

Zhang's elevation also says something about the shape of the 21st Party Congress, which the communique set for the second half of 2027 and at which Xi is widely expected to take a fourth term as party leader. Under the informal convention that members aged 68 or over at a congress step down, Zhang would be due to retire then. Either he is a caretaker for the military seat, or Xi is ready to bend another rule in the name of loyalty, as he did for himself in 2022.

A commission designed to share command of the world's largest armed force among seven senior officers now rests on two men, one of them a career political and disciplinary officer rather than a field commander, and the thinning of the high command comes as the PLA works towards its 2027 centenary goals, a deadline widely read in Washington and Taipei as the point by which Beijing wants a credible option on Taiwan.

When the January arrests set off rumours of a coup, the more plausible reading was a power consolidation by Xi rather than a revolt against him. Nine months on, the plenum has confirmed that reading: the generals who might once have checked him are gone, the man who investigated them has been promoted, and a quarter of the Central Committee did not show up.