THE NEW YORK TIMES: Why does Xi keep purging loyalists? Look to Stalin and Mao for the answer

No matter what Americans think of their politics, the United States still operates in the open. When the most powerful politician and the richest businessman fell out, the public got the full spectacle: barbed posts on social media and sniping in speeches.

China is the opposite. The country still doesn’t know why former President Hu Jintao was abruptly escorted out of the 2022 Communist Party congress, or what really happened when former Premier Li Keqiang died at 68 in 2023.

And decades later, the full story of Lin Biao, Mao Zedong’s chosen successor, who fled China and died in a plane crash in 1971, is still unknown.

The secrecy has spawned a niche industry of “bedside eavesdroppers” — Chinese online commentators who parse rumours and fleeting clues for signs of political shifts.

Their YouTube videos dissect the gait, complexion or media appearances of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and can draw millions of views from outside the country’s internet firewall.

The bedside eavesdroppers have had a busy summer. Xi has purged a number of military and political leaders this year, all of whom he had appointed. The eavesdroppers have contrived a timeline of Xi’s exit, a combative meeting between Xi’s bloc and that of the party elders and even the military’s secret plan to topple his rule.

The chatter was joined by American voices: a former US national security adviser, a former diplomat and Washington think tanks that suggested there was a fracture in his power structure. Political risk consultancies and investment funds rushed to brief clients: Why is Xi doing this? Does it signal strength or weakness?

Chinese politics remains a black box, and few credible observers are willing to be seen as indulging in rumour. Yet the questions themselves are legitimate. And they have deep historical echoes.

Xi’s purges follow in the tradition of Josef Stalin and Mao, and they serve as tools to discipline the elite and cement the absolute authority of one man.

The campaign by Xi, who rose to the top over 12 years ago, underscores the difficulty of managing a vast system, even for a leader with seemingly unchallenged power. The feverish rumour mill may be a symptom of growing tension between Xi and the Communist Party elite.

In the 1930s, Stalin’s Great Purge eliminated 70 per cent of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee and more than half of the 1,966 delegates to its 1934 congress. Vast swaths of the Soviet military leadership were executed.

“This is one of the most amazing things of communism — that it kills its own loyalists,” said Stephen Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two volumes of a planned three-book Stalin biography. “People who don’t waver in their loyalty are nonetheless targeted by the regime in its paranoia and its paroxysms.”

Nearly a century later, Xi’s campaign is neither as sweeping nor as bloody, but it’s the most far-reaching since the Cultural Revolution, when Mao sidelined or destroyed most of his top lieutenants, including Deng Xiaoping and Xi’s own father, Xi Zhongxun.

In 2024, the Communist Party disciplined 889,000 members, including 73 at or above the provincial or ministerial level, according to official statistics. Since late 2022, about 10 per cent of the party’s Central Committee, its top decision-making body, has been purged, sidelined or conspicuously absent from key meetings, Stanford political scientist Wu Guoguang estimates.

The military has been hit the hardest. At least 45 officials in the People’s Liberation Army and China’s military-industrial complex have been removed since 2023, according to the Jamestown Foundation. Two defence ministers were charged, on the same day in 2024, with corruption and with deeds that amounted to a betrayal of Xi Jinping.

All of this came after Xi secured a third term in 2022 and filled the leadership ranks with his allies. Why can’t he stop?

Paranoia is a main driver. In authoritarian regimes, control over military and security forces is existential, said Kotkin at Hoover, but even loyalists develop their own interests and networks, posing risks for the leader.

Xi, like other strongmen, faces the immense challenge of controlling a vast system that far exceeds the reach of his personal network, Kotkin said. Xi has had to reshuffle and purge and pit officials against one another and manipulate rivalries.

“My point is not that Xi Jinping is in trouble,” Kotkin said. Rather, it’s about the difficulties anyone would have managing such a big system.

Wu of Stanford sees a recurring cycle in Stalin, Mao and now Xi: Political purges follow governance failures and further centralise power. Stalin’s Great Purge followed a horrifying famine that his policies helped cause.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution came after China’s own Great Famine, which was a result of his disastrous decisions. Xi’s current campaign follows the “zero COVID” debacles, regressive economic measures and contentious foreign policy moves.

“There is a spiralling, mutually reinforcing relationship between highly centralised power and governance disasters,” Wu said. “The key link between governance failures and a dictator’s further consolidation of power is the purge.”

In other words, the worse the governance, the greater the purge; and the greater the purge, the tighter the grip. Wu calls that cycle the “Stalin logic.”

One distinction between Stalin’s rule and Xi’s is that the vast majority of Russians under Stalin, out of both fear and conviction, believed that he was protecting his country and upholding communism. The same can be said about Mao, but probably not Xi.

No one is predicting the demise of Xi’s rule. But the speculation about his grip on power may be a sign of deepening tensions between him and the Communist Party elite.

The elites tolerated Xi as he consolidated power through anti-corruption campaigns, revised the constitution to eliminate term limits and cracked down on the private sector, said Cai Xia, a retired professor at the Central Party School who has become a party critic. They stayed silent because he didn’t touch their privileges, she said.

But now his purges and China’s economic problems are hitting closer to home. “If this continues, it could lead the party elites to believe that it won’t be Xi who falls, but the party itself,” Cai said.

Xi could rule for another decade or two, if his health permits, but only if he maintains the loyalty of the party’s leaders. “One of the great vulnerabilities of the regime is when the elite begins to have doubts,” Kotkin said.

The CIA sees potential cracks it is trying to exploit. In May, it released two Mandarin recruitment videos aimed at Chinese officials.

“As I climbed the ranks within the party, I watched my higher-ups fall suddenly into disgrace,” one fictional party official narrates. “Now I realised my destiny is just as precarious as theirs.”

Recruitment is not really the point. The US government is trying to convey a message that it believes there is disaffection in elite ranks.

It’s not clear how effective Xi’s purges will be, though there is no end in sight.

“Xi Jinping’s new model of totalitarianism clashes with the crony-capitalist model favoured by CCP elites under his two predecessors, Jiang Zeming and Hu Jintao,” Wu of Stanford said.

He added, “This is not a conflict that Xi can resolve simply by replacing 1,000, 2,000 or even 10,000 cadres.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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