Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-01
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political power is won, consolidated, and sustained in authoritarian regimes has long occupied scholars of comparative politics and development. In the case of the People's Republic of China, the debate has been structured primarily around two competing explanations: a performance-based meritocracy thesis, in which cadres who deliver measurable economic outcomes rise through the system, and a patronage or factional network thesis, in which loyalty to powerful political patrons determines advancement. A new contribution in the Journal of Contemporary Asia disrupts this binary by proposing a third pathway — bribery — as a structurally embedded mechanism of political selection in China. The implications of this intervention extend well beyond the confines of Chinese domestic politics. For researchers and practitioners working on governance, development finance, civil society, and international aid architecture, the article raises urgent questions about the relationship between informal power markets, institutional legitimacy, and the durability of authoritarian states in the current global order.
The performance thesis has been among the most influential frameworks in the comparative study of China's political economy. Scholars such as Andrew Walder and Susan Shirk, and later Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert, have argued that China's cadre evaluation system creates strong incentives for local officials to prioritize GDP growth, fiscal revenue, and infrastructure delivery, because these outputs serve as legible signals of competence to superiors. This logic fits neatly with China's decades of exceptional economic expansion and has been used to explain why authoritarian China outperformed many nominally democratic developing states on economic indicators. The patronage thesis, in contrast, argues that informal ties — alumni networks, regional solidarities, bureaucratic lineages traced to powerful central figures — are what truly determine who rises. Empirical research on factional politics under Hu Jintao, and to a lesser but real extent under Xi Jinping, has supported the view that organizational affiliation and personal loyalty are not merely supplementary but often primary determinants of career trajectories. The article under review proposes that neither framework is sufficient on its own, and that bribery — the direct exchange of money or material benefits for political advancement — operates as an analytically distinct channel that has been systematically underestimated in the scholarly literature.
This intervention is theoretically significant for several reasons. First, it challenges the assumption that corruption in Chinese officialdom is primarily predatory — that is, that officials extract rents from subordinates, businesses, and citizens after attaining positions of power. The argument that bribery functions upstream of power, as a mechanism of selection rather than merely a consequence of it, inverts the standard causal arrow and has profound implications for how we model principal-agent relationships within the Chinese party-state. If subordinate officials are effectively purchasing positions from superiors, then the incentives of those superiors are structurally altered: the criteria for advancement become partially monetized, and the party's formal evaluation metrics — however sophisticated — are contaminated by a shadow market operating in parallel. Second, this framing connects to broader scholarly debates about the nature of corruption in hybrid and authoritarian regimes. Work by scholars like Mushtaq Khan on rent-seeking in developmental states, and by Bo Rothstein and Jan Teorell on the systemic character of corruption, suggests that when corruption becomes institutionalized as a selection mechanism, it cannot be addressed through marginal anti-corruption interventions. It becomes load-bearing infrastructure for the political system itself.
The timing of this article — published in 2026, more than a decade into Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign — gives it particular salience. The campaign, launched formally in 2012 and institutionalized through the National Supervisory Commission in 2018, has resulted in the investigation or punishment of well over a million officials at all levels of the party-state apparatus. The official framing has been one of institutional purification — eliminating corrupt elements to restore the party's legitimacy and effectiveness. Yet critics and scholars have noted that the campaign has also served selective political purposes, removing factional rivals and consolidating power in Xi's own network. The article's focus on bribery as a structural feature of political selection rather than a deviant behavior of individual bad actors implicitly raises a question the party has not publicly confronted: whether the conditions that generate bribery-based selection — opacity in promotion criteria, enormous discretionary authority in the hands of senior officials, insufficient external accountability — have been structurally addressed, or whether the campaign has primarily altered who benefits from the shadow market rather than dismantling the market itself. This question matters enormously for assessing the long-term trajectory of Chinese governance and for international actors who engage with Chinese institutions through development cooperation, trade agreements, and multilateral frameworks.
From a regional and global development perspective, the article speaks to a broader crisis in governance frameworks built on the assumption that technocratic performance metrics and formal accountability mechanisms are sufficient to align public officials' incentives with developmental outcomes. In many developing and middle-income contexts — across Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Latin America — donors and multilateral institutions have invested heavily in public financial management reform, cadre training, and evaluation system design, often treating corruption as a residual problem to be managed at the margins. The Chinese case, as analyzed here, suggests that when bribery penetrates the selection stage of the political career, these downstream interventions encounter a system that has already been compromised at its generative logic. Officials who bought their positions face immediate financial pressure to recoup their investment, and the superiors who sold those positions have their own incentives to maintain the opacity that enables the market. Civil society organizations, which in other contexts serve as watchdogs over official conduct, operate in China under severe constraints on independent monitoring, investigative reporting, and public advocacy — constraints that are themselves politically functional, in that they limit the transparency which would make bribery-based selection more costly and detectable. The article thus inadvertently illuminates why China's governance model is not easily separable from its treatment of civil society: the absence of independent oversight is not incidental to the political selection system but structurally complementary to it.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this article is consequential for both scholars and practitioners. For researchers, the challenge is primarily methodological: measuring bribery as a selection mechanism requires access to data that is by definition hidden, and triangulating across leaked documents, judicial records from anti-corruption proceedings, memoir literature, and elite interview methods will be essential for building an empirically robust account. The article's framing also invites comparative work — to what extent do bribery-based selection mechanisms operate in other single-party or dominant-party systems in Asia and beyond, and what institutional features predict their presence or absence? For practitioners working in governance reform, development finance, and international engagement with China, the implications are more immediately practical. If political selection in China is partially determined by a monetized shadow market that operates alongside formal meritocratic and patronage channels, then the internal coherence and predictability of Chinese institutions — central assumptions underlying foreign investment decisions, diplomatic partnerships, and ODA co-financing arrangements — need to be assessed against a more complex and less stable institutional reality. The durability of the Chinese model has often been attributed to its capacity to discipline officials through performance evaluation and campaign-style enforcement. The proposition that bribery constitutes a third, structurally embedded pathway to power suggests that the system's resilience may coexist with deeper accountability deficits than its formal architecture implies — a finding with enduring relevance for anyone seeking to understand China's role in the twenty-first-century international order.