Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political elites ascend to power in authoritarian systems has occupied scholars of comparative politics for decades, yet the mechanisms governing elite selection in China remain among the most contested in the field. China presents a particularly compelling case precisely because it has sustained remarkable economic growth and administrative capacity over several decades, prompting some scholars to credit a meritocratic selection system that rewards capable technocrats with upward mobility. Others have countered that patronage networks — factional affiliations, hometown ties, and mentorship chains — more accurately explain who rises and who stagnates within the Chinese Communist Party. A recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia introduces a provocative third hypothesis: that bribery itself constitutes a distinct, structurally embedded pathway to power in China, operating not merely as an aberration from either meritocracy or patronage, but as its own recognizable logic of political selection. This argument challenges foundational assumptions about the coherence of the CCP's governance model and carries significant implications for how we understand authoritarian durability, institutional corruption, and the limits of top-down anti-corruption campaigns.
The conventional scholarly framework for analyzing CCP elite selection has long oscillated between two poles. The meritocratic thesis, associated with scholars such as Daniel Bell and Yuen Yuen Ang, holds that China's cadre evaluation system — with its emphasis on GDP growth, poverty reduction benchmarks, and stability metrics — functions as a genuine filtering mechanism that elevates competent administrators. This view draws credibility from the undeniable developmental achievements of the Chinese state over the reform era, and from the observable fact that many senior officials have accumulated genuine policy expertise and track records of administrative success. The patronage thesis, advanced by scholars including Andrew Nathan, Cheng Li, and Victor Shih, argues that factional alignment — particularly affiliation with the Shanghai clique, the Communist Youth League faction, or more recently networks tied to Xi Jinping's Zhejiang and Fujian networks — is the more reliable predictor of promotion. The contribution of the present article is to argue that neither framework fully captures the observed variance in elite outcomes, and that bribery — the direct exchange of money and valuables for official appointments — constitutes a sufficiently systematic and widespread practice to warrant analytical treatment as a third pathway, not merely a corruption of the first two.
This framing is theoretically significant because it reframes corruption not as market noise within an otherwise functional selection system but as a parallel market for political office. The literature on autocratic governance has long recognized that authoritarian regimes face distinctive principal-agent problems: unlike democratic systems, they cannot rely on electoral accountability to discipline local officials, and information asymmetries make it difficult for central principals to distinguish genuine performance from statistical manipulation. In this context, the willingness of a local official to pay for a position may itself function as a credible signal — of loyalty, of risk tolerance, and of the capacity to generate rents that will be shared upward through the hierarchy. If this logic holds, bribery does not simply undermine meritocracy; it competes with it on terms that the system's own incentive structure can sustain. This is a sobering finding for those who have placed hope in Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign as a mechanism for institutional reform rather than political consolidation.
The implications extend well beyond China's borders, touching directly on questions relevant to ODA practitioners, civil society researchers, and international development institutions. Bilateral and multilateral donors operating in contexts of complex governance — whether in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Central Asia — frequently confront the question of how to engage with partner governments whose institutional performance is shaped by elite selection dynamics that diverge sharply from Weberian ideals. The Chinese governance model has been actively promoted through Belt and Road Initiative partnerships as a development template, with Chinese officials and scholars emphasizing the efficiency of technocratic selection and long-term planning horizons over the short-termism of electoral democracy. If the empirical foundation of that model is more contested than its proponents acknowledge — if bribery is not an anomaly but a structural feature — then the development community's engagement with governance reform must be recalibrated accordingly. Capacity building programs premised on the assumption that better training produces better governance outcomes will be systematically undercut if the officials being trained were selected for their capacity to pay, not their capacity to govern.
Looking forward, the most pressing research agenda suggested by this framework concerns the interaction effects between the three pathways. Are they substitutes, complements, or sequential stages? Does a candidate without strong factional backing compensate through bribery, or does patronage serve as the entry condition that makes bribery markets accessible in the first place? How does the geography of Chinese political economy — the massive difference between resource-rich inland provinces and globally integrated coastal cities — shape the relative weight of each mechanism? And critically, how has the post-2012 anti-corruption campaign, which has removed more officials than any comparable episode in CCP history, reshuffled the balance? The elimination of competing factions under Xi may paradoxically have made bribery more rather than less important at lower levels of the hierarchy, as the attenuation of patronage networks leaves ambitious cadres without reliable sponsors and thus more dependent on market-like mechanisms for advancement. For scholars of authoritarian resilience, civil society researchers monitoring the shrinking space for non-state actors in China, and policymakers designing governance conditionalities, the systemic analysis of bribery as a selection mechanism — rather than a simple corruption problem to be prosecuted — represents an urgent and underexplored frontier.