China’s ruling Communist Party announced on Thursday that it had formally expelled 33 senior political and military officials, including a prominent former diplomat and a military secretary of Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader.
The announcement laid bare the depth of Mr. Xi’s anticorruption purges as he prepares to secure a fourth term in power next year.
The party said the expulsions had been made earlier by the Politburo, a council of top officials. They were confirmed by the party’s Central Committee, which concluded a four-day meeting in Beijing on Thursday.
The communiqué released by the Central Committee confirmed the fate of some officials who had disappeared for months or longer without official explanation. They included Liu Jianchao, a senior foreign affairs official who was most recently the head of the party’s International Department, until he abruptly left that job last year.
Another was Zhong Shaojun, a senior secretary to Mr. Xi who had served for over a decade as his eyes and ears in the Central Military Commission, which controls the People’s Liberation Army.
“This meeting marked a comprehensive purge by Xi Jinping of officials he had promoted since taking office” in 2012, said Wen-Hsuan Tsai, a research fellow at Academia Sinica, an institute in Taiwan, who studies the Chinese Communist Party.
The sparse benches at this year’s meeting of the Central Committee, a policy-setting body that meets roughly once a year, told their own story.
Only 279 officials attended the meeting, the party’s statement said. When the current committee was formed at a Communist Party congress in 2022, it had 376 members.
