BEIJING, Oct 23 (Reuters) - China's ruling Communist Party will gather some 300 of its highest-ranking members next week to discuss tightening discipline among its ranks, a conclave analysts say could be the last major party gathering before its 2027 leadership reshuffle.
Although experts widely expect President Xi Jinping to hold onto the party top job for a fourth term at next year's 21st Party Congress, the upcoming plenary session - known as a plenum - offers him an opportunity to shore up authority, enforce ideological uniformity and cement his imprint on the party that rules the world's second-largest economy.
The officials will deliberate "issues concerning the sustained advancement of full and rigorous party self-governance", the party has said, as Xi steps up an internal discipline campaign he introduced in 2014, two years after ascending to power.
The party's current Central Committee, the largest of its top decision-making bodies, will convene in the closed-door meeting in Beijing from Monday to Thursday - the fifth since the current cohort was formed in 2022 and therefore known as the fifth plenum.
NECESSARY DISCIPLINE
Millions of people within China's vast bureaucracy have been investigated to varying degrees under Xi's anti-corruption campaign, which has purged hundreds of senior officials and top generals - even the president's one-time allies.
While critics argue the purges - particularly those targeting the highest ranks of the armed forces - are destabilising and undermine combat readiness, the party has portrayed the campaign as both necessary and regenerative, saying the military must undergo a phoenix-like rebirth and "bathe in flames and be forged anew."
"The growing focus on discipline is not because behaviour is getting worse, but because the stakes are getting higher," said Ruby Osman, a senior policy adviser on China at London's Tony Blair Institute.
Many of Xi's closest associates are likely to retire in the 2027 reshuffle and "disciplinary campaigns are a way to ensure a new generation with fewer personal ties share his political standards," Osman said.
Despite a thinning leadership body, analysts do not expect major personnel moves or any indication of a potential succession plan at the four-day conclave.
"This plenum is probably less about deciding individual promotions, more about signalling the system-wide changes Xi wants ahead of a competitive 2027 Party Congress," Osman said.
In an article published in the party's flagship Qiushi journal days before the plenum, Xi laid out three priorities: enforcing the party leadership's decisions while ensuring uncontested authority, putting the sometimes vast power wielded by its cadres in "an institutional cage", and sustaining the high-pressure anti-graft campaign, while increasing its "penetrating power," indefinitely.
Xi also criticised "two-faced" opportunistic officials who pay lip service to the party leadership while privately resisting its decisions and undermining its authority, as well as those who seek only short-term gains while jeopardising the country's balanced development.
PURGES TRIM NUMBERS
With probes and purges thinning the Central Committee's ranks, turnout among its members "will most likely be the lowest at any post-Mao plenum, below last October's 168 full and 147 alternate members," said Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt of the University of Zurich.
"Three of the 24 Politburo members elected in 2022 are gone, the most removed from a sitting Politburo in one term since 1980" as well as five out of the original seven members of the country's supreme military command body, the Central Military Commission, said Mittelstaedt.
The New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute estimates only 77.4% of the original 2022 cohort would be in a position to attend next week's proceedings, meaning nearly a quarter of the leadership body has been removed in the party's disciplinary drive.
The conclave is set to ratify the expulsions of two members of the elite Politburo, Zhang Youxia and Ma Xingrui, over charges including corruption and disloyalty.
(Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Editing by Liz Lee and Lincoln Feast.)
