China's Communist Party spent four days this week at a hotel in Beijing discussing party discipline. The meeting was a success. You could tell by all the empty chairs.
I've covered a lot of political conventions. This is the first one where the attendance sheet doubled as the arrest record.
Here's what's real, per the BBC, The Guardian, The Straits Times and the official communique from Xinhua. The fifth plenum of the 20th Central Committee ran Oct. 26 to 29. Just 279 full and alternate members showed up. The committee started its term in 2022 with 376. Last October, 315 came. In July 2024, 364.
That's not a downward trend. That's a guest list being read aloud by a prosecutor.
The plenum confirmed the expulsion of a record 33 members, 16 of them from the military, for what the party calls "grave violations of discipline and the law." It did not say what those violations were. In China, that's the kind of detail you find out about in person, once.
Among the expelled: former Xinjiang party chief Ma Xingrui, former top general Zhang Youxia and former diplomat Liu Jianchao. Zhang used to be vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, the body that runs China's armed forces. According to the BBC, that commission had seven members. It now has two. One of them is Xi Jinping.
A seven-man military command down to two. That isn't a commission anymore. That's a man and his witness.
The meeting adopted a resolution on "persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance." The party's own phrase for this is "turning the knife inwards." Translated from Communist, that means: we checked the chairs, and a lot of them were empty because we emptied them.
A disciplinary official told reporters more than two million people have been disciplined since 2012 for, among other things, "bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance." I'd love to see the hedonism files. I assume one of them is a guy who took a second dumpling at a budget meeting.
The party also set the next national Party Congress for the second half of 2027. That's when Xi, who has run the place since 2012, is widely expected to pick up a fourth term. An analyst told The Straits Times the record expulsions help lay the groundwork for that fourth term. The election is in 2027. The voters are being removed now.
To be fair, the empty seats did get filled. The communique says 10 alternate members were promoted to the full committee. Somewhere in Beijing tonight, 10 officials are celebrating a promotion by quietly checking who used to sit in their chair.
On the sewer scale, I give the fifth plenum four rats out of five. One rat for the 97 seats that disappeared in four years. One rat for "grave violations," a charge that fits every case and explains none. One rat for a military commission you could now fit in a golf cart. And one rat for a party that calls this "self-governance," when the only self doing any governing is one guy.
And here's your bill: diesel averaged $6.32 a gallon on Oct. 30, per AAA, up from $3.69 a year ago, and that's what it costs to truck the imports from the port to your store, where you'll find the chairs are still made in China.
This article is satire. The Demorat is a parody news site; real facts are drawn from the linked sources, and jokes, invented scenes, and fictional characters are not real.
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