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China’s top Communist Party officials are meeting in Beijing this week to talk about tightening discipline in the party, with nearly a quarter of their own members missing after years of purges under President Xi Jinping.

Getting into it: The meeting, called the fifth plenum, is closed to the public. It started Monday and runs through Thursday at a military hotel under tight security. Roughly 300 members of the party’s Central Committee are expected to discuss a draft policy on what the party calls “full and rigorous party self-governance,” which is basically code for discipline, loyalty and fighting corruption.

About 23% of the committee is absent, the worst attendance at any plenum since 1976, the year Mao Zedong died. Eight seats are empty and another 15 members are under investigation. It’s probably the final big meeting before next year’s Party Congress, where Xi, 73, is expected to stay on as party leader for another five years, which would be his fourth term.

Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has run since he took power in 2012, and it hasn’t slowed down. Last year alone, more than 1 million people came under investigation by party discipline authorities, and over 100 of them held ministerial or provincial rank or higher. The military has been hit hardest. The Central Military Commission, the party’s top military body, started this term with seven members and now has two, Xi and the commission’s discipline chief, after China’s top general, Zhang Youxia, was investigated in January and expelled from the party last month.

Only two of the 44 military officials who won full seats on the Central Committee in 2022 are still around. The rest have been purged or vanished. In a January speech, Xi warned against what he called “two-faced” officials who appear loyal but quietly ignore orders.

The purges have created a problem for Xi heading into next year. He’ll need to fill a lot of top jobs from a shrinking pool of experienced officials, and if the party sticks to its usual age limits, five of the seven members of its top leadership body could step down.