For two decades, Western scholars and political scientists held a consensus view on the longevity of the People’s Republic of China. While every single communist regime in Europe collapsed under the weight of internal stagnation and external pressure at the close of the twentieth century, the Chinese communist system endured. The prevailing theory was that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had successfully transitioned away from the unpredictable, personalist dictatorship of the Mao Zedong era and laid the robust foundations of a modern bureaucratic state.
According to this conventional wisdom, the party had fortified itself by introducing institutional guardrails: it established formal term limits for its top leaders, embraced a model of collective leadership, and increasingly promoted officials based on professional merit. These measures were widely believed to have made the regime resilient enough to weather external shocks and internal crises that historically felled other socialist systems.
Yet, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has spent the past decade systematically dismantling nearly every institutional safeguard that was once credited with keeping the party strong. In 2018, Xi famously abolished presidential term limits, effectively clearing the path for indefinite rule. He has hollowed out the structures of collective leadership and repeatedly declined to designate a clear successor. Furthermore, Xi has purged high-level officials at will, targeting the most sensitive and powerful domains of the state, particularly the military.
This ongoing internal overhaul was thrown into sharp relief in January. Only months after party leaders abruptly expelled nine senior military officers, the country’s Ministry of National Defense announced that General Zhang Youxia and General Liu Zhenli—who until that moment served as the People’s Liberation Army’s most senior uniformed officer and top operational commander, respectively—had been placed under formal investigation. Data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies indicates that since 2022, the party has formally purged three dozen generals and lieutenant generals, while many other high-ranking figures have vanished from public view.
In Washington and other Western capitals, many observers interpret these aggressive purges as undeniable evidence of deep-seated weakness within Beijing. To foreign analysts, these moves reveal a powerful leader consumed by paranoia and obsessed with absolute control over the levers of power. Under the assumption that the party’s stability relied entirely on the freestanding institutional norms built in the post-Mao era, these sweeping purges are viewed as glaring warning signs of institutional fragility and potential future fracturing.
However, despite these continuous high-level removals, the party has shown zero signs of falling apart. On the contrary, as these purges have pressed forward, Xi and the party apparatus appear to have only consolidated their strength and tightened their grip on the nation.
Far from undermining its rule, the specific mechanism by which the CCP cleanses its ranks explains a vital component of its structural durability. Within the Chinese political system, a purge is not merely an isolated disciplinary event; it is an ongoing, institutionalized process. The party has executed this very process in a nearly identical form for a full century. It regularly targets, evaluates, and compels cadres to seek clemency in order to retain their standing within the political establishment. The ultimate objective is ideological reform and behavioral compliance rather than total elimination, which strengthens the party as a whole by fostering deep obedience and unwavering dedication to the party’s overarching cause.
Current CCP leadership firmly believes this strategy is working. Xi has championed the concept of "self-revolution"—a policy of continuous and permanent political rectification—as the ultimate safeguard that will allow China to escape the unhappy fate of the Soviet Union and other defunct socialist regimes now consigned to the dustbin of history. Consequently, what truly threatens the party’s long-term longevity is not the sheer count of how many officials have been purged, but rather the one intractable problem that such a disciplinary strategy cannot solve, and can even exacerbate: the question of succession. A regime built on permanent self-revolution will ultimately rise and fall on how it manages the transfer of power, no matter how vigorously it attempts to purge internal decay.
Cure the Sickness, Save the Patient
China’s extensive history of internal purges predates the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Much like other authoritarian systems throughout history, the CCP has at times resorted to violent purges to violently remove cadres from its ranks. The style of purge synonymous with Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union aims at the total elimination of an individual from the political ecosystem, whether through long-term incarceration, internal exile, or execution. The victims of such traditional purges do not return to grace. Mao Zedong employed this brutal tactic as early as 1930, when he ordered the execution of more than 700 army officers in a dramatic display of absolute control.
However, the CCP has also relied heavily on a different, distinct method of internal discipline that is largely unique to its continued rule: rectification. Rather than seeking to destroy perceived enemies, rectification aims to keep individuals inside the party, even if their status is significantly diminished. While traditional purges (known in Chinese as qingdang, or "cleansing the party") seek to eradicate internal foes, rectification aims to retain and remold cadres while keeping them safely within the party’s broader orbit.
Throughout its turbulent history, the CCP has sought to rectify errant cadres far more frequently than it has sought to eliminate them. In December 1929, in the remote village of Gutian in Fujian province, Mao put forward a foundational resolution titled "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party," which firmly asserted absolute party control over the military. The resolution also provided crucial insights into how the party conceptualized internal discipline. It described its targets not as irredeemable enemies, but as comrades suffering from ideological deviations.
According to this framework, cadres might suffer from ailments such as a "purely military viewpoint"—a perspective dangerously untethered from political ideology—alongside ultrademocracy, which represented a political system lacking proper party authority, and unchecked individualism. Mao’s resolution treated each of these ideological flaws as a treatable sickness that could be cured through a rigorous regimen of public criticism and self-criticism in front of peers. Crucially, the process carried an explicit promise: if party members fully submitted to the procedure, the CCP would retain them rather than destroy them.
In the northern Chinese area of Yan’an, where Mao and his followers established a wartime base camp beginning in the mid-1930s, leaders turned rectification into official doctrine. Party membership exploded from roughly 40,000 in 1937 to 800,000 by 1940, meaning that the vast majority of the organization’s members were new recruits who were not yet trusted by veteran leadership. The massive Rectification Movement of 1942–45 was designed as the definitive solution to this vulnerability.
Under this system, every single cadre was required to write a detailed autobiography, measure their life against printed self-examination outlines, confess their ideological shortcomings before their local party branch or work unit, and undergo rigorous examination, grading, and sorting by the party’s personnel department. In February 1942, Mao famously summarized this methodical approach in a single phrase: "Cure the sickness, save the patient."
None of this administrative and ideological pressure was gentle. The Yan’an campaign was profoundly brutal, involving widespread torture and thousands of deaths. Subsequent political campaigns were often even harsher. Yet, Mao’s distinct approach separated Chinese communism from its ideological relatives. While Stalin swiftly executed unreliable cadres and Pol Pot consigned them to mass graves, China’s strategy prioritized retaining cadres, attempting to remold their political outlook, and meticulously building permanent archival files detailing their every mistake and ideological slip.
This basic procedure remains nearly identical in the modern era. An individual is singled out for a perceived deviation and instructed to write a comprehensive account of their political shortcomings. This written account is then cross-referenced against the observations of colleagues and the existing records stored within the individual’s personal dossier at the personnel department. The cadre is subsequently placed on a graded scale of disciplinary sanctions, ranging from no formal action on one end to complete expulsion from the party on the other.
The vast majority of sanctions fall safely in the middle, including the issuance of a serious internal warning or placement on disciplinary probation. Once a formal verdict is reached, any official deemed to have offered a sufficient confession is kept within the party, though on conditional terms that remain entirely revocable and dependent upon shifting political winds. Every single piece of paper generated by this exhaustive process is permanently archived in the cadre’s official dossier.
This is precisely the administrative process that was used in 1952 against a rural village storekeeper who skimmed off the top of procured grain quotas. It is also the exact process used today for members of China’s elite Politburo. The country’s most powerful political leaders read formal self-criticisms aloud to one another once a year, with their confessions documented and permanently attached to their personal dossiers following the exact same template established decades ago in Yan’an. Even as Xi has dramatically expanded the scope and scale of who can be targeted by anti-corruption and disciplinary drives, the underlying machinery of the state has remained unchanged.
The ongoing investigations surrounding China’s purged military officers under Xi likely adhere to this same historical model. Generals Zhang and Liu have been placed under formal investigation rather than summarily executed, leaving open the possibility that they may remain on the party’s administrative books. Even if they are sidelined from public life or assigned to obscure, low-level posts with thicker personal dossiers, their retention fits historical patterns.
For instance, when diplomat Qin Gang was abruptly removed from his position as foreign minister in 2023, subsequent news investigations revealed that he had managed to retain his party membership while being reassigned to a low-level desk job at a publishing house run by the foreign ministry. Even if Zhang and Liu are eventually expelled from the party altogether, purging remains the exception rather than the norm in Chinese politics. Out of 101 generals and lieutenant generals identified by the Center for Strategic and International Studies as purged or potentially purged, only 14 had been officially stripped of their party membership as of February.
Single File
Rectification rarely, if ever, fundamentally changes a cadre’s internal beliefs. Eight decades of internal party evidence shows that cadres routinely parrot the required political scripts, perform the necessary acts of public contrition, and then quietly revert to their prior behaviors the moment a political campaign concludes. The process has become so highly ritualized that participants quickly learn to say precisely what examiners want to hear to secure their survival.
However, the primary goal of this elaborate process is not to alter personal beliefs, but to generate a permanent document to be filed away in a dossier. These files contain objective personnel data alongside observable, documented assessments of a cadre’s political shortcomings. It is this extensive paper trail that enables the regime to maintain ironclad discipline, even if no individual cadre genuinely changes how they act or think in private.
For cadres and other officials subjected to rectification, the process acts as a sorting mechanism that determines who remains in good standing and who has fallen out of favor with party leadership. Because cadres constantly jockey for political status and professional survival, being targeted by a purge is exceptional and devastating. For the vast majority of party members, surviving a rectification process with minimal punishment brings a profound sense of relief—often accompanied by an instinctive desire to recommit loyalty to a forgiving regime—coupled with a lingering fear that the next campaign is always just around the corner.
When expanded across a membership of 100 million people, this recurring process produces a deeply internalized discipline within every individual, continually reinforcing the organization’s grip on power. Every cadre wakes up each morning fully aware that their dossier exists and that it can be weaponized against them at any moment.
This permanent, standardized, and reopenable record of every party member’s history, personal associations, and vulnerabilities functions as a sophisticated information network that grants supreme power to top leaders. Autocratic rulers inherently require comprehensive information to preemptively neutralize threats to their authority. The CCP’s personnel file system, packed with intimate details on millions of cadres, serves as an irreplaceable intelligence channel for China’s rulers.
While most cadres willingly align with party directives, the small minority that fails to display the proper attitude during a disciplinary campaign can be swiftly expelled or imprisoned, effectively heading off any risk of internal revolt. High-level defections and political dissent do occasionally occur, but when they materialize, they are rarely organized and quickly fizzle out under the weight of the party’s surveillance apparatus.
Such extensive record-keeping might reasonably be expected to generate deep resentment among party cadres, but the process is deliberately designed to diffuse blame and insulate Beijing from direct backlash. There is no single individual or isolated entity that unilaterally issues a rectification verdict. Instead, temporary party task forces known as work teams are mobilized to draft the initial verdict, local colleagues from the workplace endorse it, and a higher-level administrative committee ultimately ratifies it.
The decision passes through enough administrative hands that authorship is heavily aggregated, ensuring that no single leader or party body can be held uniquely responsible. Even the targeted cadre, through their own forced self-criticism, acts as a co-author of their verdict.
Disciplining cadres through rectification also serves as a critical coordination mechanism across the state. The Chinese party-state is a sprawling, decentralized network of bureaucratic agencies, regional power bases, and administrative offices that possess distinct economic and political interests, frequently forcing them to bargain with one another. A rectification campaign is one of the few institutional instruments that can cut across these bureaucratic fissures.
Just as with other massive state initiatives, such as the historic one-child policy, cadres understand that compliance with rectification is mandatory and treated as an absolute priority by top leaders. Discipline campaigns offer clear, unambiguous rewards and penalties, including leniency for officials who demonstrate the correct political attitude and professional purgatory or exile for those who do not. Many cadres who normally benefit from exploiting the fragmentation within China’s political landscape know they must drop all other priorities and fall in line with discipline campaigns, providing Beijing with a highly visible method to impose unified national priorities and reinforce central control.
What Discipline Cannot Solve
Chinese history is replete with examples of once-powerful dynasties that slowly weakened and eventually collapsed from within. To avoid this historical fate, Mao’s solution was mass mobilization, based on the belief that only by allowing the general populace to supervise the government could the state prevent bureaucratic slackness. Xi’s answer, introduced in 2021 and continuously elaborated since, is the concept of party self-revolution.
Within this ideological framework, the ultimate cure for the party’s internal ills can only come from inside the organization, entirely free from any external oversight. Ongoing party rectification campaigns require all officials to continuously discipline themselves, while the occasional high-profile purge provides undeniable proof that failure to comply carries severe consequences. This marks the first time the party has explicitly located the fundamental mechanism of its own survival entirely within its own internal structures.
The symbolic choreography of this approach has been deliberate. In the fall of 2014, with investigations into two senior military leaders already underway, Xi summoned approximately 400 senior officers to the exact same hall in the village of Gutian where Mao had issued his foundational text on military discipline. State media heavily promoted the gathering as the "new Gutian conference." In 2024, Xi convened military leaders once again to discuss political work and ideological loyalty in Yan’an, sending an unmistakable signal that the party draws a direct, unbroken line from its historical rectification campaigns to its modern strength.
Beneath this heavy symbolism lies Xi’s persistent anxiety that China could ultimately suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. Xi firmly believes that the Soviet Communist Party allowed its internal disciplinary mechanisms to atrophy, thereby acting as the primary architect of its own sudden demise. Beijing’s leadership is convinced that purges and rectification must continue permanently if the party is to retain power.
Whether this specific historical analysis of the Soviet collapse is accurate or not, the CCP’s continued resilience suggests that its method of disciplining cadres may indeed help explain its political durability. Xi’s purges should not be measured simply by counting how many cadres they have ensnared, but rather by whether they continue to successfully produce dossiers, verdicts, and party retention that keep the ruling apparatus firmly in control.
At the same time, what strengthens the party simultaneously weakens certain operational instruments of the Chinese state. Senior military commands frequently sit vacant or are staffed by less experienced officers who pose less of a political threat, while future military officers quickly learn that the safest career record is a thin one devoid of bold initiatives. When forced to choose between the two, political control is invariably prioritized over operational effectiveness by the party leadership. This is a deliberate tradeoff that the CCP has been willing to make for a century, and one it will continue to make.
Furthermore, China’s traditional method of handling purges and rectification cannot solve the inherent danger of political succession. Rectification produces no institutional mechanism for choosing the next ruler; if anything, by ensuring that no subordinate is allowed to accumulate independent political standing, it makes the emergence of a credible successor even more difficult. Succession, rather than internal discipline, remains the system’s most acute vulnerability.
Older generations of CCP leaders, including Mao and Deng Xiaoping, managed the immense challenge of succession by drawing upon their unassailable personal authority as revolutionary veterans who had fought for the party’s survival. Subsequent leaders relied heavily on formal institutions—such as term limits, collective leadership, and regularized succession rules—that Xi has summarily dismantled. Xi possesses neither revolutionary founding authority nor institutional succession rules, making the upcoming transition especially acute. The precise moment to worry about Chinese political stability is not when high-ranking generals disappear amid corruption investigations, but when the man who reads their files eventually begins to age out of his role without providing an answer as to who will follow him.
The CCP is not on the brink of collapse; the extensive personnel file system exists precisely to prevent elite fracture, and thus far, it has proven effective. What is likely to emerge instead is a state that is militarily weaker and politically stronger than most external assessments suggest. The greatest source of uncertainty moving forward is Xi’s eventual succession. Beijing’s own political theorists are closely watching this dynamic, fully aware that even a brilliantly engineered system of rectification that has sustained the party for a century holds no answer for an elite power struggle over who comes next.
