Thursday, February 27, 2025 – The Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) and ChinaFile have jointly published “Xi Jinping’s Purges Have Escalated. Here’s Why They Are Unlikely to Stop.” The paper, written by CCA Senior Fellow on Chinese Politics Guoguang Wu, examines the ways in which Xi Jinping’s methods of exercising power, in particular his purges of handpicked allies, mirror those of his Communist forebears.

“To be sure, purges have been a feature of Xi’s entire tenure. And yet, the most recent bout of investigations and ousters differs from those that came before in several ways worth pondering,” writes Wu. Many of the cadres purged were widely viewed as his protégés, as it was under Xi that they were promoted in the first place.

Wu draws a pattern between Xi’s purges and those that occurred under the leadership of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. “In this pattern, when leaders of the Communist Party first come to power, they purge political opponents, as Xi Jinping did with his anti-corruption campaign during his first two terms, and once they obtain unrivaled power with no restrictions, they turn to purging their allies and even their protégés. Many of them were also purged soon after their initial appointments,” writes Wu.

According to Wu, Xi’s tactics in doing so more closely resemble Stalin’sthan Mao’s, in that Mao relied on mass mobilization while Xi, like Stalin, deploys internal state apparatuses including the police, state security, and Party organs for discipline enforcement to topple his targets.

Recent purges follow years of societal discontent from Xi’s “Zero-COVID” strategy and policies that have slowed China’s economic growth. “When a policy failure, or even an outright disaster, occurs against the backdrop of a leader’s concentration of power, the Great Leader may justifiably worry that cadres will express discontent in a way that might diminish his power. Purges address this vulnerability by creating an atmosphere of fear that silences potential challenges or criticism,” writes Wu.

“This does not necessarily imply the unchallengeable endurance of Xi’s power, nor of his regime’s longevity. Instead, it reveals the deep-seated vulnerability of both Xi and his regime. Behind the vicious cycle of policy lapses and purges lies Xi Jinping’s incurable insecurity,” he notes.

Read the full paper here. Members of the media interested in contacting Wu should email [email protected].