Chinese state media reported on Tuesday that 66-year-old Ma Xingrui has been expelled from the Politburo, the 24-member ruling body of the Chinese Communist Party.
Ma is the third member of the current Politburo to be expelled on vague charges of corruption, and he does not appear to be coming in for what China experts call a “soft landing.”
The Politburo, more formally known as the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, is the top-level executive committee of the bureaucracy-crazed Chinese regime. One of its seats is reserved for the General Secretary of the Party, namely China’s dictator Xi Jinping. The others are ostensibly a council of wise men elected by the other party elders to make important decisions about economic, military, and social policy.
This powerful ruling committee has its own powerful ruling committee, in the form of seven elite members who comprise the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Each session of the Politburo sits for five years, with the current one running from 2022 to 2027.
Some Politburo members are generals in the People’s Liberation Army of China (PLA), while others are civilian political leaders. Ma Xingrui fell into the latter category, working as a successful aerospace engineer before climbing the political ladder to hold positions such as governor of Guangdong and Communist Party secretary of “Xinjiang” (East Turkistan), the Chinese-occupied homeland of the oppressed Uyghurs.
Ma was one of the most respected leaders in China, hailed by state media in his salad days as “the young marshal of the aerospace industry” for helping to launch satellites and manned space missions. He seemed like he might be in trouble after the massive anti-lockdown protests erupted in East Turkistan on his watch in 2022 and swept across China, ultimately forcing Xi to back down from his deranged coronavirus lockdown policies, but Ma took a pugnacious stance against the protesters and kept his Politburo perch.
The first hint of the storm that would sweep Ma from power came last July, when Ma suddenly lost his post as party secretary for Xinjiang, supposedly “to be appointed to another position.” Several other Xinjiang officials were under investigation for corruption at the time, and Ma’s replacement was a hardliner, leading to speculation that Ma had been deemed too soft on the Uyghurs during the lockdown crisis.
Ma’s former chief of staff Guo Yonghang — who rose to power alongside Ma in Guangdong province in the mid-2010s — was investigated on corruption charges in March 2026. Guo was allegedly linked to the financial scandals swirling around China’s real estate mega-corporation, the Evergrande Group.
China watchers noticed that Ma had not appeared in public since his supposed lateral transfer out of the Xinjiang party secretary job in July, although he was still formally a member of the Politburo — a position that was once thought to be unassailable, but Xi Jinping changed those rules and had already purged two Politburo members before Ma got in trouble.
In April, the disciplinary body of the Chinese Communist Party announced that Ma was under investigation for “suspected violations of discipline and law,” the Party’s all-purpose term for corruption. The same vague charge was leveled against Ma’s protege Guo Yonghang. Few Chinese political careers survive such an “investigation.”
On Tuesday, Chinese state news service Xinhua ran an unusually harsh report on Ma, referring to his Politburo membership in the past tense and accusing him of not only abusing his position for personal gain, but also indulging many of his staff members in corrupt activities.
The report accused Ma of “improperly accepting gifts and money,” “helping relatives purchase houses at low prices,” and taking part in “power-for-sex and money-for-sex transactions.” He allegedly “lost his ideals and beliefs,” along with his “political conviction,” and “betrayed the party’s principles and original mission.”
Ma was further accused of “illegally accepting huge amounts of money and property” through his family members, neglecting to “supervise and manage serious violations of discipline and law and crimes committed by his staff,” and “improperly arranging jobs for others.”
Ma’s offenses were described as “extremely serious in nature,” a phrase that is very rarely deployed against such a high-ranking official. Xinhua said his “ill-gotten gains” would be confiscated before he was handed over to the judiciary for prosecution.
“It used to be that if you reached the rank of Politburo it would have to be something very, very, very serious before you were taken down. This was changed by Xi. Now, Politburo members drop like bowling pins,” SOAS China Institute director Steve Tsang remarked to the leftist New York Times on Tuesday.
“A decision to purge someone of Ma Xingrui’s rank is taken at the very top, with Xi Jinping’s backing,” Chinese studies professor Jean Christoopher Mittelstaedt of the University of Zurich told Reuters.
Mittelstadt noted that Ma was accused of helping members of his family commit corruption offenses, which means he will probably face stern prosecution instead of being allowed to quietly fade away. It was also noteworthy that he was investigated and charged so close to the next Chinese Communist Party Congress, which could have given him a more dignified exit.
While some wondered if Ma’s history in Xinjiang was his undoing, others noted his background in the aerospace industry, which has been under intense scrutiny as Xi consolidates his power over the military — and perhaps hunts for scapegoats to take the blame for under-performing Chinese weapons. Many of the officials caught up in Xi’s latest “anti-corruption” crackdown have been linked to the defense sector.
The other two recently expelled Politburo members were He Weidong, vice-chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and CMC vice-chair Zhang Youxia. The Politburo is down to 21 members with Ma’s expulsion.
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