Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-24
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political power is acquired and sustained in authoritarian regimes has occupied scholars of comparative politics for decades, yet the mechanisms of elite selection in China remain among the most contested and consequential puzzles in contemporary political science. As Beijing's influence expands across global development finance, multilateral institutions, and bilateral aid architecture, understanding how Chinese officials ascend to positions of power carries implications far beyond the country's borders. The governance quality of Chinese state actors — whether they are selected for competence, loyalty, or corrupt complicity — directly shapes the nature of China's engagement with partner governments in the Global South, the conditionalities attached to infrastructure investment, and the institutional norms that travel with Chinese capital. This article, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, intervenes in this debate by proposing bribery as what it terms a "third path" to political advancement, distinct from both meritocratic performance and patronage networks, and in doing so, it opens a productive analytical space for reassessing the inner logic of Chinese political economy.
The dominant frameworks for understanding political selection in China have historically centered on two explanatory poles. The first is the performance legitimacy thesis, associated prominently with scholars like Andrew Walder and Susan Shirk, which holds that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rewards officials whose jurisdictions demonstrate measurable economic growth, infrastructure development, or social stability. Under this framework, the party functions as a rational principal seeking capable agents, and promotion follows demonstrated administrative competence. The second framework foregrounds factional patronage — the idea that advancement depends not on what officials deliver but on whom they know, specifically their proximity to senior patrons within the party's labyrinthine internal networks. Both frameworks have generated considerable empirical support, yet neither fully explains the persistent scale of corruption documented in China's own anti-graft campaigns or the patterns of advancement that observers have noted among officials later investigated for graft. By proposing bribery as a structurally distinct third mechanism, the article challenges the implicit assumption that corruption in Chinese politics is merely noise around an otherwise functional selection system. Instead, it suggests that bribery may itself be institutionalized — a recognized, if covert, currency through which officeholders purchase advancement.
This argument has profound implications for how we understand the relationship between corruption and governance capacity in China's political economy. If bribery operates as a genuine pathway to power, then the officials who succeed through this route are selected not for their administrative talent or their ideological alignment with senior patrons, but for their willingness and ability to participate in rent-extraction networks. This creates perverse incentive structures at every tier of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Officials who purchase their positions must recover their investment, which typically involves extracting rents from the jurisdictions they govern — through construction contracts, land deals, licensing fees, or regulatory forbearance. The consequence is a self-reinforcing cycle in which corruption at the point of selection generates corruption in the exercise of office. This dynamic maps onto what scholars of political economy such as Mushtaq Khan have called "rent-seeking in factional equilibria," where the internal logic of elite competition produces systemic governance deficits that are difficult to disrupt through conventional anti-corruption enforcement. President Xi Jinping's sustained anti-corruption campaign, launched with significant fanfare after 2012 and resulting in the investigation of hundreds of thousands of officials, may thus be understood not merely as a political purge of rivals — as some analysts have argued — but also as an attempt to recalibrate the selection mechanism itself, to restore the primacy of performance and ideological loyalty over transactional bribery.
The broader regional and global context amplifies the significance of this analytical intervention. China's role as a development financier and political actor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America means that the quality of its domestic governance institutions is not a purely internal matter. Research by scholars including Deborah Brautigam and Axel Dreher has demonstrated that Chinese official development finance tends to be channeled through state-owned enterprises and state banks rather than civil society organizations or multilateral channels, creating governance structures in recipient countries that mirror the opacity of Chinese domestic administration. Where officials who have advanced through bribery networks manage these outward-facing relationships, the risk of illicit transactions, inflated contract values, and elite capture in partner countries increases accordingly. This concern is not merely theoretical: investigative journalism and parliamentary inquiries in multiple African and Southeast Asian countries have documented instances in which Chinese project financing appears to have been structured to benefit politically connected intermediaries on both sides of the transaction. Understanding the selection mechanisms that produce China's external-facing bureaucracy is therefore a prerequisite for designing effective governance safeguards in ODA partnerships that involve Chinese state actors.
From a policy and research standpoint, the article's contribution is to disaggregate what has sometimes been treated as a monolithic corruption problem into analytically tractable components. If bribery, performance, and patronage each constitute distinct pathways that can operate simultaneously, then reform strategies must be calibrated accordingly. Suppressing one pathway without addressing the others may simply redirect elite competition rather than reducing it. For researchers working on civil society and democratic governance, the article also raises the uncomfortable possibility that without independent institutions capable of monitoring elite selection — free press, autonomous judiciary, civil society watchdogs — corruption in political advancement is not merely difficult to detect but structurally incentivized. This is a lesson with resonance well beyond China: across a range of hybrid and authoritarian regimes that are increasingly significant actors in global development finance, the internal selection mechanisms of ruling parties shape the character of governance in ways that external accountability mechanisms struggle to reach. As the architecture of global development continues to diversify away from the OECD-DAC consensus model toward a more pluralized landscape of bilateral and South-South cooperation, the capacity to understand and engage with these internal political logics will be among the most valuable analytical tools available to practitioners, researchers, and policymakers committed to effective and equitable development outcomes.