By Chun Han Wong
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ousted a third member of the Communist Party's elite Politburo in less than six months, extending a withering purge that has scythed through the top echelons of power in Beijing.
Ma Xingrui, the top official in China's far-western region of Xinjiang from late 2021 to July last year, has been placed under investigation on suspicion of severe violations of party discipline and state laws, according to a brief statement issued by the party's top internal watchdog on Friday.
The statement didn't elaborate on Ma's alleged wrongdoing. Ma, 66, couldn't be reached for comment.
Beijing ousted two other Politburo members, both senior generals who were Xi's top military deputies, in October and January. The probe against Ma marks the first time the party has purged more than two Politburo members in the same term of office since the Mao Zedong era.
The Politburo now has 21 active members, down from the 24 men who started the current term in 2022.
Ma is also the latest in a series of senior officials with an aerospace background to be targeted in probes that have rocked China's defense industry over the past two years.
Xi's crackdown on corruption and disloyalty helped secure his standing as China's most dominant leader in decades, providing means for him to elevate loyalists, sideline subordinates who owed their rise to predecessors and, more recently, remove some of his own protégés.
First launched to combat rampant corruption when Xi took power in 2012, the campaign has become an entrenched series of purges aimed at keeping officials loyal and on their toes. Party authorities disciplined 983,000 people last year, up 10.6% from 2024 and the highest annual total since the party started releasing such data about two decades ago.
Xi has signaled no letup in the crackdown. "The struggle against corruption remains grave and complex," he told the party's top discipline enforcers in January. "The task of eradicating the soil and conditions that breed corruption is still arduous."
Ma's career had flourished under Xi. An aerospace scientist with an engineering doctorate, Ma was a key figure in China's space program before politics watchers linked him with the so-called "aerospace clique" or "cosmos club" -- a loose grouping of officials who worked in state-run aerospace contractors before rising to senior roles in the Xi administration.
Analysts say the emergence of the "cosmos club" reflected Xi's views on the aerospace sector's importance to his efforts to make China a technology and military superpower, as well as the merits of promoting officials with strong records in managing complex and challenging projects.
Some of these technocrats have been purged in the past two years amid a crackdown on graft in China's military and defense industry. Xu Dazhe, an aerospace-sector veteran who succeeded Ma as head of China's space agency before becoming a provincial leader, was dismissed from China's national legislature in October -- an indication of political trouble.
Beijing removed Ma as Xinjiang's party secretary in July, installing a senior ethnic-affairs official to lead the Central Asian frontier region where about 12 million Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs live. The party said at the time it had other assignments for Ma, without specifying.
In Friday's statement, party authorities described Ma as a Politburo member and deputy head of a party body overseeing rural policy.
Ma's downfall coincided with investigations against officials with whom he had worked previously, including in Xinjiang and the southeastern metropolis of Shenzhen.
Authorities announced probes against two senior Xinjiang officials in November, including an executive vice chairman of the regional government. The party also placed some of Ma's former subordinates in the Shenzhen municipal government and the chairman of a major property developer in the city under investigation in recent months.
Speculation over Ma's fate intensified in recent months after he missed a series of high-level meetings -- an unusual spell of absence for an official of his rank.
Ma spent his early career in academia, rising to vice president at the Harbin Institute of Technology before entering the aerospace industry. He was appointed as general manager at China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., a manufacturer of space rockets and satellites. He then served as head of the national space agency in 2013, overseeing a lunar exploration mission that culminated in China's first moon landing with an unmanned vehicle.
Beijing moved Ma into regional politics in late 2013, naming him law-enforcement chief and deputy party secretary for the prosperous southeastern province of Guangdong. He went on to serve as Shenzhen's party boss and Guangdong governor, the province's No. 2 leader.
In 2021, Ma was appointed the party boss of Xinjiang, where separatist sentiment has simmered among Uyghurs for decades and occasionally flared into deadly attacks against symbols of Beijing's authority and the country's Han Chinese majority.
Ma's predecessor Chen Quanguo, who took charge of Xinjiang in 2016, had overseen the creation of a high-tech security and surveillance dragnet across the region and directed a forced-assimilation campaign targeting Muslim minorities. The security campaign also featured mass-internment camps for political indoctrination, restrictions on religious practices, and policies that resulted in forced labor and family separations.
Under Ma, Xinjiang shifted focus toward economic development, such as by soliciting investment from other parts of China and abroad.
Ma's removal from his Xinjiang post came amid a shake-up in Beijing's approach to ethnic policies over the past year, marked by personnel changes, probes against some senior ethnic-minority officials, and the preparation of a new law, adopted in March, on "promoting ethnic unity and progress." Xi himself visited Xinjiang and Tibet in 2025 to mark major anniversaries of Beijing giving some nominal political autonomy in those areas.
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 03, 2026 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
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