Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-03
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political power is acquired and consolidated within authoritarian systems has occupied scholars of comparative politics for decades, and nowhere has this inquiry grown more consequential than in China. As the People's Republic assumes an increasingly central role in global governance, development finance, and multilateral institutions, understanding the internal mechanics of its political order becomes essential not only for academics but for practitioners working in international development, civil society, and foreign policy. The assumption that Beijing's cadre system operates as a meritocratic ladder — rewarding officials who deliver GDP growth, social stability, and policy compliance — has long anchored Western analyses of Chinese governance. Yet this framework increasingly struggles to account for the sheer scale of corruption uncovered since Xi Jinping launched his anti-corruption campaign in 2012, a campaign that has ensnared over a million officials and reached into the highest echelons of the party-state. A recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage," intervenes in this debate with a provocative thesis: that bribery constitutes a distinct, structurally embedded mechanism of political selection — not merely an aberration within an otherwise meritocratic or patronage-based system, but a parallel pathway through which officials actively purchase upward mobility.
The scholarly literature on Chinese political selection has long been divided between two dominant paradigms. The first, associated with scholars such as Victor Shih and Susan Shirk, emphasizes factional politics and patronage: officials rise by cultivating relationships with powerful patrons, delivering loyalty and coalition support in exchange for promotion. The second paradigm, championed by researchers including Pierre Landry and Hongbin Li, argues that performance metrics — particularly economic growth at the sub-national level — drive promotion decisions in a form of cadre accountability that functions as a substitute for electoral democracy. Both frameworks capture genuine dynamics, yet both have faced mounting empirical challenges as the anti-corruption campaign has revealed systemic venality that cuts across factional lines and persists regardless of local economic performance. The contribution of the Journal of Contemporary Asia article lies in synthesizing these observations into a tripartite model: meritocracy, patronage, and bribery each operate as distinct selection mechanisms with their own internal logic, constituencies, and structural conditions. Bribery, in this framing, is not a corruption of political selection — it is one of its operating systems.
This argument carries significant implications for how we understand the relationship between governance quality, political economy, and development outcomes in China and across the authoritarian world. The insight that officials can effectively purchase positions in the hierarchy helps explain several puzzling empirical patterns. It accounts for why economic performance at the local level often fails to predict promotion outcomes with the reliability that meritocracy theories would predict. It illuminates why anti-corruption crackdowns, even when genuine, tend to produce political consolidation rather than institutional reform: eliminating bribery networks disproportionately disadvantages officials outside the dominant faction, thereby concentrating power in the hands of those whose advancement was secured through patronage rather than venality. Perhaps most importantly, the bribery-as-selection-mechanism framework clarifies why Chinese governance exhibits what might be called a dual accountability paradox — impressive aggregate performance in infrastructure delivery and poverty reduction coexisting with pervasive rent extraction at every level of the administrative hierarchy. Officials face incentives to perform and incentives to extract simultaneously, because both activities serve distinct promotional logics that operate in parallel.
For the international development community and scholars of ODA, these findings have direct and underappreciated relevance. China's emergence as a major development finance actor — through the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and bilateral lending arrangements — has generated extensive debate about the governance conditionalities, or lack thereof, attached to Chinese aid and investment. Critics argue that Chinese development finance enables kleptocratic regimes by removing Western-style governance requirements; defenders counter that China's non-interference principle respects recipient-country sovereignty. Both positions, however, rest on assumptions about what "governance" means in the Chinese context itself. If bribery functions as a legitimate, structurally embedded pathway to political power within China's own system, then the export of Chinese development finance norms takes on a different character: it is not simply the absence of governance conditions, but the potential diffusion of an alternative governance model in which transactional politics is normalized as an organizational principle. Civil society actors and development researchers working in countries with significant Chinese financial exposure should therefore attend carefully to how local political selection dynamics interact with the institutional forms that Chinese investment tends to produce.
Looking forward, the analytical framework proposed in this research opens several productive avenues for scholars and practitioners alike. Empirically, it invites comparative work that tests whether the tripartite model applies beyond China to other party-state systems in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa where single-party or dominant-party regimes manage large bureaucracies amid growing development finance flows. Theoretically, it challenges the binary framing of corruption as either systemic or incidental — a framing that has long distorted both academic analysis and policy design in governance reform programs. For practitioners, the implication is sobering: reform strategies that target corruption without addressing the structural incentives that make bribery a rational investment for office-seekers are unlikely to produce durable change. The anti-corruption campaign under Xi has demonstrated that intense enforcement can restructure the bribery marketplace without eliminating it, concentrating risk and raising prices while leaving the underlying demand intact. As China's political economy continues to shape the contours of global development, the capacity of the international research community to engage rigorously with these internal dynamics — rather than relying on stylized models of either efficient meritocracy or crude kleptocracy — will determine how well equipped we are to understand the institutions that will define the coming decades of the global order.