Solidariogb | Report on CPC | 29 October 2026
The 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) met for its fifth plenary session in Beijing from 26 to 29 October 2026, with 162 full members and 117 alternates attending. The meeting was not about growth targets or foreign policy. Its single great theme was the Party itself: its discipline, its ideological formation, its cadres and its capacity to remain, in the communique’s own idiom, a “vanguard” party after more than a century in existence.
For anyone trying to understand how the world’s largest governing communist party reads its own historical moment, this is a document to study carefully. Below we set out what was decided, place it in the sequence of recent plenums, and offer a critical reading from an anti-imperialist and Marxist standpoint. We separate what is documented from what is interpretation and from what remains unknown.
1. What is documented: the essential facts
- Dates and format. The plenum ran four days. Xi Jinping delivered a work report on behalf of the Political Bureau and explained the draft resolution, which was adopted at the close.
- The central document. This was the Resolution on Certain Major Issues concerning Persevering with Full and Rigorous Party Self-Governance. The opening report noted that profound changes in the world, in China and within the Party create new circumstances and challenges for self-governance.
- Personnel. Zhang Shengmin was elected a new member of the Politburo. Ten alternate members were promoted to fill vacant seats on the Central Committee.
- Discipline. The plenum adopted reports from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on 18 senior figures, and from the Central Military Commission on 16 more. The reports concerned grave violations of discipline and the law. It also confirmed earlier Politburo decisions to expel them. These include the former Politburo member Ma Xingrui and, from the military, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli. A further official, Li Yunze, was removed from his Party position.
- Next Congress. The Central Committee decided that the 21st National Congress will convene in Beijing in the second half of 2027. It described the Congress as an event of great political significance at a critical stage for “basically realizing socialist modernization.”
- Economic assessment. The communique declares the 14th Five-Year Plan successfully concluded and the 15th Five-Year Plan period “off to a good start.”
2. The sequence: from reform, to planning, to the Party
A plenum is best read as one chapter in a series.
The Third Plenum (July 2024) adopted a resolution on further deepening reform comprehensively to advance Chinese modernization. That was a plenum about the economy and institutions. The Fourth Plenum (October 2025) examined the proposal for the 15th Five-Year Plan, which Xi explained to the session. That was a plenum about the national plan.
The Fifth Plenum completes the triad: reform, plan, and now the instrument that must carry out both. There is a clear internal logic here. A party that intends to steer a continental economy through technological upgrading, demographic change and external pressure must first be certain of its own cohesion. The leadership appears to have concluded that the Party’s internal condition is the decisive variable for everything else.
3. What the Resolution says: a reading of the main lines
A historical claim. The communique places the Party’s success in its pursuit of the communist ideal and its commitment to the people’s happiness and national rejuvenation. It also advances a bolder historical thesis. The Party, it argues, has found two answers to the old question of how a political force escapes the cycle of rise and fall: the people’s oversight of government and the Party’s self-reform. These are presented as unique discoveries of the Communist Party of China.
A theoretical claim. The text formally credits the leadership with giving rise to “Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building,” presented as part of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. It is described as enriching Marxist party-building theory and as integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with Chinese realities and traditional culture.
A sober diagnosis. The language on dangers is notably blunt. The communique describes a past situation of weak, hollow and watered-down Party leadership, together with lax self-supervision and “startling problems” within the Party. It claims these have been addressed “at the root,” but also warns that the “four tests” and “four dangers” remain protracted, complicated and serious.
Seven guiding principles. These include taking political strengthening as the overarching principle, a problem-oriented approach, a top-down approach and running the Party according to regulations.
Nine areas of systematic action:
- strengthening the Party spirit of Communists;
- strictly practising democratic centralism;
- cultivating high-calibre cadres;
- building a well-knit organizational system;
- improving conduct and tightening discipline;
- firm and coordinated action against corruption;
- running the Party through systems and regulations;
- refining Party and state oversight;
- ensuring responsibilities for self-governance are fulfilled.
4. Three points worth dwelling on
a) Democratic centralism
The communique calls democratic centralism the Party’s fundamental organizational principle and demands both fuller “intraparty democracy” and “correct centralism.” Concretely, it promises stricter deliberation rules and decision-making procedures for leadership teams, and regulation of how heads of leadership teams exercise power.
The classical Leninist formula has always held two poles in tension: free discussion before a decision, unity in action after it. The concern with regulating the power of “first-in-command” officials is a revealing admission. It acknowledges that in practice centralism can overwhelm democracy at the local level, with one individual dominating a committee. This is a problem Marxist parties have confronted since the early twentieth century.
b) The class language on corruption
The communique states that the Party tolerates no corruption because it has no special interests of its own besides those of the working class and the greatest possible majority of the people. The approach combines severe punishment, targeted remedy and prevention, aimed at ensuring officials lack the “audacity, opportunity or desire” to be corrupt.
From a Marxist standpoint, this is the heart of the matter. Corruption in a state that retains a large public sector, plus a vast private one, is not merely a moral lapse. It is the channel through which private capital captures public power. A Party that treats the fight against corruption as a class question, and not only a legal one, is attempting to keep the commanding heights of the economy politically accountable.
c) The purge in the military
The most consequential detail may be the listing, alongside civilian figures, of senior military officers, including Zhang Youxia. Zhang held one of the highest uniformed posts and had long been regarded in Western commentary as close to the leadership. The communique gives no details of the alleged violations, which is typical of the genre.
That a Party leadership is willing to remove officers of this rank, a few years before a major Congress, tells us two things. It suggests the leadership views loyalty and discipline in the armed forces as inseparable from the Party’s survival, consistent with the principle that “the Party commands the gun.” It also underlines how much we do not know. Neither the specific charges nor the full internal debate are public.
5. The economic message at the turn of the year
The communique’s economic passage is short and orthodox. It calls for progress with stability, full application of the “new development philosophy,” faster construction of a new pattern of development, fuller use of macro policies, and deeper exploitation of domestic demand. It also calls for deeper reform and opening up and for innovation-driven growth.
Particularly worth noting for readers concerned with social conditions is the explicit emphasis on public services that are inclusive and meet essential needs. They are meant to provide a cushion for the people most in need, alongside workplace safety, disaster relief and food and drug safety. The document also asks newly elected leadership teams to be trained in the “correct view of performance,” an ongoing campaign to discourage vanity projects and box-ticking in favour of results that serve the public good.
6. A Marxist reading: strengths, tensions, open questions
Our platform stands for anti-imperialism and solidarity with peoples fighting for sovereignty. We therefore start from a basic fact: China’s rise has broken the monopoly of Atlantic powers over development finance, technology and trade, and has opened real room for manoeuvre for much of the Global South, including Latin America. A Party that is organizationally strong, ideologically disciplined and able to resist capture by private wealth is, in this respect, a material factor in the world balance of forces.
Serious left analysis should also note the arguments in the other direction, without caricature:
- Self-reform versus popular oversight. The communique names both as answers to the historical cycle. In practice, the plenum’s emphasis falls overwhelmingly on the second of the two: self-supervision from above, top-down, through discipline commissions and inspections. Marxists will legitimately ask what institutional place workers’ own organizations, assemblies and unions occupy in oversight from below, which is the tradition of the Paris Commune and the early soviets.
- Opacity. The long lists of expelled officials come without charges, evidence or public debate. That makes independent assessment impossible, and it sits uneasily with a claim to “people’s oversight.”
- Class composition. A party can proclaim that it represents the working class and the majority. The test, in classical Marxist terms, is the real relationship between labour and capital in the economy it governs. The communique offers principles. Verification lies in outcomes: wages, working conditions, inequality and the power of workers on the shop floor.
- A theory in the making. Elevating “Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building” into a formal body of theory will be received differently across the communist movement. Some see creative Marxism adapted to national conditions. Others warn against personalisation of leadership. These are open debates, and the movement needs to conduct them seriously and comradely rather than by slogan.
7. What is documented, what is interpreted, what is unproven
Documented: the dates, the attendance, the adoption of the Resolution, the election of Zhang Shengmin to the Politburo, the confirmation of the expulsions, and the decision to hold the 21st Congress in the second half of 2027.
Interpretation (reasonable, but not proven): that the leadership sees internal discipline as the precondition for managing the 15th Five-Year Plan, and that the military purge reflects a determination to keep the armed forces tightly subordinate to the Party before the Congress. These are inferences from the text and the context, not statements the communique makes.
Unproven or unknown: the specific charges against most of those named; the internal balance of opinion in the Politburo; and the practical mechanisms by which “intraparty democracy” will be strengthened in a way that outsiders could verify. The full text of the Resolution has not yet been studied in detail by independent analysts. We will update this analysis as it becomes available.
8. Why this matters for the anti-imperialist movement
First, because the world’s second-largest economy is governed by a party whose stated purpose is socialism, and what that party decides about its own cohesion shapes the horizon of the entire multipolar world. Second, because the debates raised here are not exotic. Democratic centralism, the relationship between party and masses, the fight against bureaucratism, and the danger of a ruling party detaching from the people are the classical problems of every revolutionary movement, from the Bolsheviks to Cuba to Latin America’s own revolutionary left.
To study the Fifth Plenum is to study, in a living case, how a communist party wrestles with its own contradictions. That is worth doing with rigour, with solidarity, and without either uncritical celebration or reflexive hostility.
Glossary
- Plenum (plenary session): a full meeting of the Central Committee, convened between Party Congresses to decide major questions.
- Four tests / four dangers: the Party’s standard shorthand for the challenges of long-term rule (the tests of governance, reform and opening up, the market economy and the external environment) and the dangers it must guard against (lack of drive, insufficient capacity, detachment from the people, and inaction and corruption).
- Eight-point decision: the 2012 rules on work conduct, aimed at curbing extravagance and formalism among officials.
- Democratic centralism: the principle of free discussion followed by unified, binding action.
Sources: the official communique of the Fifth Plenary Session as published by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Xinhua and CPPCC reporting on the opening of the session; wire coverage of the close; and background on previous plenums. This is a developing story and will be revised as further documents are released.
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