By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

China’s Self-Revolution

President Xi has ramped up calls for self-revolution in recent speeches, stressing that internal discipline and China’s economic and social development are “closely linked, mutually reinforcing, and mutually enhancing.” More purges are therefore likely - especially ahead of next year’s 21st Party Congress, when Xi will seek to secure a record fourth five-year term as general secretary and elevate a new cohort of clean, loyal lieutenants. The deeper he embeds self-revolution into the regime’s operating logic, however, the more real its inherent risks become, including bureaucratic paralysis, a depleted elite, and the possibility that a highly centralized discipline system will prove untenable once Xi himself is gone.

 

The Rot Within

Autocracies have always struggled to control their own bureaucrats. Without an independent judiciary, a free press, or competitive elections, the system lacks many of the external checks that constrain official abuse elsewhere. To police the party’s more than 100 million members, enforce rules, investigate violations, and punish offenders, the CCP has relied on the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection since 1978. But while the CCDI was formally powerful - it reports directly to the party’s elite Central Committee - it was relatively weak in practice. During the post-Mao era, graft was tolerated to a remarkable degree because cash-for-access deals helped lubricate Beijing’s pursuit of rapid growth. Corruption boomed, and disciplinary enforcement failed to keep pace.

Xi rose through the CCP ranks during this time and was apparently alarmed by what he saw. A 2009 U.S. embassy cable based on a conversation with a “former close friend” described Xi as personally disgusted by the self-dealing and money worship he had witnessed among his CCP colleagues. Corruption threatened not only the party’s image but also its capacity to govern effectively. In 2008, for instance, when the Sichuan earthquake left more than 87,000 people dead or missing, public praise for the government’s rapid response gave way to widespread anger over shoddily built school buildings, which collapsed and killed more than 19,000 children and teachers, according to one official estimate. One study of buildings damaged in the earthquake found that projects constructed when officials had hometown ties to their superiors were 75 percent more likely to collapse, suggesting that patronage and corruption worsened building quality and, in turn, the human toll. Around the same time, a series of revelations about the extraordinary wealth amassed by the relatives of senior leaders deepened the sense that abuse of office had become endemic within the political elite.

Once he became leader, Xi quickly pushed the Politburo to adopt the “Eight-Point Regulation,” which curbed officials’ extravagant spending by restricting lavish banquets, official junkets, luxury vehicles, expensive gifts, and other forms of publicly funded excess. He also strengthened the CCDI by stripping away ancillary functions, giving higher-level discipline bodies greater control over the appointment of local disciplinary officials and empowering central inspection teams to conduct intrusive audits, solicit whistleblower complaints, and investigate provinces, ministries, and state-owned enterprises without political interference by the leaders of those institutions.

Yet Xi’s anticorruption work during this time was inseparable from his drive to dismantle rival political networks. Together with Wang Qishan, the CCDI chief and a personal associate, Xi purged major targets, including Ling Jihua, Hu’s top aide; Sun Zhengcai, the Politburo member who was once viewed as a possible successor to Xi; Zhou Yongkang, a recently retired Politburo Standing Committee member; and Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou, former PLA power brokers who had built vast and corrupt patronage networks in the military. As Ling Li has argued, lurid exposés of venal cadres and a sustained propaganda campaign helped Xi generate both public backing and internal support in his brutal struggle to control the party.

 

From Purge to Process

In Xi’s second term, however, the character of the campaign began to change. According to a database compiled by the authors, in his first term, Xi purged 26 leaders of ministerial rank or higher - more than the total under Jiang and Hu over the previous two decades. But that number fell to 13 in the following five years, and no Politburo or Central Military Commission members were removed. U.S. President Donald Trump’s surprise trade and technology war from 2018 onward, followed by the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in late 2019, likely reduced Xi’s appetite for elite upheavals. Purges did not disappear, but the center of gravity shifted from high-level takedowns toward lower-level cadres.

Disciplinary work became more institutionalized. In 2018, China’s legislature established the National Supervisory Commission, a new state anticorruption body that operates alongside the CCDI and effectively extends its oversight to all public servants, whether or not they are party members. Xi pushed the reform as part of a wider effort to merge previously separate anticorruption functions into a single party-state apparatus. He also expanded the presence of resident discipline offices and inspectors to cover all central agencies and state ministries. The system became broader, more embedded, and more deeply fused with governance. According to central authorities, the new framework allowed thousands more officials to be prosecuted.

It wasn’t until Xi secured his third term, however, at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, that the ambition of the anticorruption campaign truly came into focus. By breaking the decades-long norm of serving only two terms and filling the top leadership roles with his own people, Xi secured one of the most decisive personal victories in modern Chinese politics. If purges were merely a tool of power consolidation, one might have expected Xi’s anticorruption campaign to level off or even relax at that point. Instead, it intensified. Indeed, in the past four years, investigations of civilian and military officials have risen to new post-Mao highs in both Beijing and at the grassroots. That escalation could just reflect the paranoia of highly personalist rule, but Xi’s campaign remains far less brutal, far less chaotic, and far more focused on governance than the late-stage purges of dictators such as Mao and Joseph Stalin.

Xi also signaled this would happen at the very start of the term. Just days after the 20th Party Congress, he took his new Politburo Standing Committee to Yan’an, the CCP’s old revolutionary base. Their first stop was the site of the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, where Mao cemented his authority after a years-long purge known as the Yan’an Rectification Movement. Xi told his colleagues that this had “established the correct path” for the party’s eventual triumph in the Chinese Civil War. The message was clear: discipline had delivered results before. It would do so again.

The group’s next stop was the cave dwellings where revolutionary leaders had once lived. It was there, a month after the Seventh Party Congress, that the educator Huang Yanpei asked Mao how the party could avoid the historical cycle in which Chinese dynasties rise vigorously and then collapse suddenly. Mao’s answer - “Let the people supervise the government” - entered party lore. Xi has repeatedly returned to this so-called cave dialogue, far more than any of his predecessors. Still, he has proposed what he calls a “second answer”: not simply supervision but self-revolution.

 

Purity As Survival

On April 8, when Xi convened a first-ever “training course for senior military cadres of the entire army,” the CCP’s mouthpiece newspaper, The People’s Daily, published a companion piece that opened with the same question that haunted Huang: How can the world’s largest Marxist ruling party escape the historical cycle of rise and decline? The answer, it declared, was the party’s self-revolution.

Self-revolution is Xi’s demand that the party governs itself strictly, rectifies its own problems, and preserves its ideological purity. The goal is not solely to catch corrupt officials or eliminate rivals. As the political scientist Christopher Carothers has shown, it is to ensure compliance with Xi’s broader agenda and to tighten control over a sprawling bureaucracy. To that end, most CCDI punishments are not spectacular prosecutions of high-ranking “tigers” but slap-on-the-wrist penalties intended to reshape the behavior of low-ranking “flies.” Moreover, as the China scholar Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt has illustrated, the proliferation of ideological campaigns under Xi - such as those that call out subversive personal behaviors and those that mandate careful study of party history - has also helped to expand the party’s normative authority. Xi fears that without such constant vigilance, the party will again succumb to the “corrosive influence” of vested interests and privileged groups resistant to change.

Critics may argue that talk of self-revolution is merely a facade for political intrigues. The campaign, after all, has undoubtedly strengthened Xi’s personal position and spared some of his allies and patrons. But for Xi, self-revolution appears to be an existential imperative. Again and again in internal speeches, he returns to the question of how the party can escape the ancient pattern of order giving way to chaos. He has spoken of a “deep sense of worry” about the party’s long-term survival. The Soviet collapse remains one of his defining cautionary tales. Early in his tenure, he famously said that “nobody was man enough” to stop Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed reforms because they had stopped believing in communism. But he also sees poor governance as an important factor, arguing that the Soviet Communist Party “separated itself from the people and became a privileged bureaucratic group that only protected its own interests.”

Xi draws a similar lesson from Chinese history. In a speech to senior cadres in 2018, he quoted at length from the ninth-century poet Du Mu’s famous essay on the fall of the Qin dynasty, which blames Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, for exploiting the people, indulging in luxury, and squandering vast resources on a lavish palace. Xi then recited the precise lifespans of more than a dozen imperial dynasties, observing that even the mightiest eventually grew complacent and fell because of corruption, decadence, or rebellion. Rot from the inside, then, not external threat, is Xi’s greatest preoccupation. Self-revolution is his answer - a way to remedy political and organizational weakness before it becomes fatal. It is Xi’s bid to make the party last forever.

 

The Costs of Control

Judging whether self-revolution is working is tricky. Some analysts see record numbers of cases as proof that the anticorruption campaign has failed. But Xi has never claimed that corruption can be eradicated once and for all. On the contrary, he has said that self-revolution must remain “forever on the road.” Persistent purges are not evidence of failure, in his view, but rather a feature of the system’s design.

Xi can point to some measurable successes, as well. Petty bribery and brazen embezzlement appear far less common than they once were. According to the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, China improved on both “control of corruption” and “government effectiveness” over the course of Xi’s leadership, moving from roughly in line with other upper-middle-income countries to well above average. Political gift-giving also seems to have declined. Luxury jewelry imports fell 55 percent in the seven months after Xi released his first five-year plan to fight corruption in December 2013. Anticorruption inspections in Beijing during Xi’s first term also triggered fire sales of nearby luxury condos.

Stronger oversight has also helped Beijing implement policies in areas Xi considers essential to high-quality development. In environmental policy, for instance, regulations have become harder to evade. One study finds that the discipline crackdown cut city-level air pollution by about 20.3 percent, in part by strengthening enforcement pressures, while another shows that firms lost some of the political protection that had previously shielded them from punishment for environmental violations. Part of Xi’s campaign to reduce rural extreme poverty worked in a similar way. Research suggests that in more corruption-prone counties, the anti-corruption drive increased poor households’ incomes and reduced poverty by curbing government expropriation and limiting their exclusion from transfer payments and formal credit from state financial institutions. A comparable pattern appears in innovation strategy, where closer scrutiny of graft has lowered corruption in the allocation of R & D subsidies, making them more merit-based and more likely to flow to firms that later produced stronger innovation outcomes.

Across several metrics, a firm hand has thus helped the party become a more capable governing force. But the disadvantages of self-revolution are serious. The political scientist Jessica Teets and others have shown that tighter centralization and harsher penalties create incentives for local officials to avoid risk, conceal problems, and focus on documentary compliance rather than practical problem solving. The result can be a system that oscillates between paralysis and overcompliance, producing a more rigid and less adaptive policy process. Cadres become less willing to experiment and more inclined to carry out orders mechanically.

The information problem may be worse still. Beijing already struggled to elicit accurate data and candid reporting from below - campaigns that punish perceived disloyalty make it harder. China’s Leninist system works best when Beijing mobilizes around clear priorities and observable metrics. It works less well when flexibility, improvisation, and honest feedback are needed. The COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, for instance, showed how fear of punishment for reporting bad news can discourage local officials from acting quickly on emerging risks, delaying early containment of a deadly virus. Over time, this reticence may leave the party less able to devise creative responses to China’s complex structural problems, such as weak household consumption, mounting local debt, and demographic decline.

Xi seems aware of these criticisms; at a Politburo study session last year, he addressed them one by one - before ultimately dismissing them as “mistaken viewpoints.” But he also seems frustrated with the self-revolution’s results thus far. He has complained, with unusual frankness, that “if I do not write comments on reports, no work gets done.” Among the millions who staff the party-state, he sees too many officials with “inadequate understanding,” “old-fashioned concepts,” and “insufficient ability.”

Yet Xi is unlikely to change course. In fact, this sense of unfinished business - sharpened by the approach of the 21st Party Congress - suggests he intends to stay on as leader and keep up the pressure. In this way, self-revolution has become his substitute for normal succession planning. Instead of stepping down or naming an heir, he is trying to forge a party disciplined enough to survive anything. Xi says self-revolution guards against “the regime ending when the leader dies,” underscoring the centrality of this idea and suggesting that he understands the dangers of poor preparation. But if he secures a fourth term, as seems likely, self-revolution may prove to be both the strength and the weakness of his legacy. It could leave behind a party that is less corrupt, more institutionalized, and better able to enforce central priorities. But it could also leave behind a system that functions only so long as a strongman like Xi remains at the center of it. And the longer he waits to prepare a successor, the less likely it is that the next leader will gain the needed authority.

 

A Rival Operating System?

China watchers have often underestimated CCP leaders. At the end of the Cold War, many assumed China was moving toward democracy. Then, when China joined the World Trade Organization, it was widely believed the move would unleash markets and entrepreneurs in ways that would challenge authoritarian rule. Countless scholars also insisted that innovation could not emerge under Leninism. Dislike of the regime and neglect of Chinese sources has often led to analyses that affirmed democratic values and overlooked Beijing’s agency.

Dismissing Xi’s own logic for his discipline campaign risks repeating these mistakes. In the end, he is trying to do in politics what China has already done in economics: build a rival operating system that defies Western expectations. The wager is that the party does not need elections or the rule of law to remain effective. Internal discipline and self-correction, Xi believes, can generate enough accountability, legitimacy, and success to sustain its rule. Andrew Nathan’s concept of “authoritarian resilience” - or a regime’s use of limited institutionalization, regularization, and public participation to withstand pressures for democratization - captured the CCP’s capacity to adapt to political challenges, yet Nathan still predicted elsewhere that, “sooner or later,” the party would dissolve amid elite crisis or popular protest. Xi is trying to turn that resilience into permanence.

His efforts could work. Even a partially successful attempt to discipline the party without liberalizing would challenge the long-standing assumption that authoritarian systems must either democratize or decay. For policymakers in Washington and other capitals, this carries practical implications. Both before and after the 21st Party Congress, the discipline apparatus will likely keep producing headlines about fallen officials. The temptation will be to interpret each one as evidence of a regime in trouble - but the opposite may be closer to the truth.

Success could also resonate abroad. Xi does not frame self-revolution as a purely domestic project. He has presented it explicitly as a “powerful answer” to advocates of the “Western formula” of multiparty competition and separation of powers. Beijing has increasingly promoted self-revolution as a model to emulate, signing anticorruption cooperation agreements with dozens of countries and running political discipline training for officials from around the developing world.

Xi’s focus on self-revolution may also make him less inclined toward major external gambles. Only months ago, he told the Central Committee that “corruption is the greatest threat our party faces” - not the United States, or Taiwan, or even the economy. The recent PLA purges, which will make any war harder to fight in the near term, reveal how deeply Xi remains preoccupied with corruption, loyalty, and institutional effectiveness. A leader consumed by domestic discipline and elite governance may pursue a foreign policy that is hard-edged and nationalistic, but he is also likely wary of truly high-stakes risks.

The words of Chinese leaders are often taken seriously when they confirm a reader’s priors and dismissed as propaganda when they do not. Xi’s insistence on self-revolution suggests that, above all, he wants to be remembered for making the party great again.

Since becoming China’s leader in 2012, Xi Jinping has carried out stunning assaults on both the Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army, purging millions of cadres and even senior leaders who were once thought untouchable. Rooting out corruption was an early focus of Xi’s tenure, but he has intensified the effort in recent years: in 2025, the party’s discipline-inspection authorities filed more than one million cases, an almost sevenfold increase from the year Xi took office. In January, Xi abruptly removed top generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, which hollowed out a Central Military Commission already depleted by years of investigations. And in early April, former Xinjiang boss Ma Xingrui was placed under investigation. It was the first time since the aftermath of the tumultuous Mao Zedong era that three Politburo members had fallen during the same five-year term.

The standard explanation for these purges is that Xi, China’s most powerful ruler in generations, seeks to sideline rivals and consolidate power. There is much truth in that. The takedown of crooked senior leaders tied to his predecessors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao helped Xi win public support and centralize decision-making, eventually setting him up to rule for life. From this perspective, he now keeps purging because he has made so many enemies within the party that he must continue striking to stay secure. Some interpretations of Zhang’s ouster, for example, suggest that Xi was responding to a political challenge from within the top brass.

But that explanation is not enough. Xi’s discipline campaign is not merely a military cleanup or a settling of political scores. Indeed, focusing only on dramatic top-level purges risks missing the larger story. What began as an anticorruption push has evolved into an extensive apparatus for managing cadres, enforcing political priorities, and supervising policy implementation. Xi’s discipline campaign should thus be understood as a sweeping effort to transform the CCP itself.

While Mao told the party to make revolution, Xi, the princeling son of a revolutionary hero, is now guiding what he calls the party’s “self-revolution.” He is using discipline not only as an instrument of control but also as a theory of governance: internal rules define priorities and acceptable conduct, ideological education produces more dedicated officials, inspections improve compliance, and high-level purges deter wrongdoing. If self-revolution succeeds, and it well might, it could make the CCP a more effective and durable institution - one capable of ruling China indefinitely, irrespective of who is at the helm. In that sense, self-revolution is Xi’s effort to render China’s succession concerns moot.

 

 

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