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.

The project, however, remains unfinished. 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.

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,........

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