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.

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