Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political power is acquired, consolidated, and sustained within single-party authoritarian states has long occupied comparative political scientists and scholars of development. In the case of China, the world's most populous country and second-largest economy, the mechanics of elite selection carry consequences that extend far beyond Beijing's Zhongnanhai compound. They shape the incentives of millions of local officials who mediate between state and society, determine which policy priorities receive administrative energy, and ultimately influence how the country's enormous state capacity is deployed — whether toward public goods provision, infrastructure development, or narrower predatory extraction. As China's engagement with the developing world deepens through the Belt and Road Initiative and expanding ODA-adjacent financing, understanding who rises through its political system and why becomes a matter of global significance, not merely a question of Sinological curiosity.
The conventional scholarly literature on Chinese political selection has organized itself around two dominant explanatory frameworks. The first is the performance model, associated most prominently with the work of Susan Shirk and later formalized by scholars such as Victor Shih, Christopher Adolph, and Mingxing Liu. Under this account, the Chinese Communist Party functions as a meritocratic selection machine: officials who deliver measurable outputs — GDP growth, fiscal revenue, social stability indicators — are rewarded with promotion, while underperformers are passed over or demoted. This model gained considerable traction in the 2000s and early 2010s, when China's sustained high growth rates seemed to validate the notion that political incentives were effectively aligned with economic performance. The second framework emphasizes patronage and factional networks. Scholars including Bo Zhiyue, Cheng Li, and Andrew Nathan have documented how ties to powerful seniors — membership in the "Shanghai Gang," the Communist Youth League faction, or more recently the networks surrounding Xi Jinping himself — can determine career trajectories independent of measurable achievement. These two models have often been presented as competing or complementary, generating a substantial empirical literature attempting to adjudicate between them using promotion data, biographical records, and regional economic statistics.
The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, advances a theoretically provocative intervention by proposing a third pathway: bribery. Rather than treating corruption as noise in the signal of an otherwise meritocratic or patronage-driven system, the argument appears to be that the payment of money — to superiors, to selection committee members, to gatekeepers of advancement — constitutes a structurally distinct route to power, one that operates with its own logic, its own market-like properties, and its own implications for governance quality downstream. This is not merely the observation that corruption exists in China, which no serious scholar disputes, but rather the stronger claim that bribery functions as a selection mechanism in its own right, sorting candidates by willingness and ability to pay rather than by administrative competence or political connectivity. If this argument holds empirically, it has significant implications for how we understand the relationship between political selection and state capacity, since officials who purchased their positions face distinct pressures — specifically, the need to recoup their investment through subsequent extraction — compared to those who were promoted on performance or factional grounds.
The analytical contribution connects to several broader debates in comparative politics and development studies. The first concerns authoritarian resilience and the conditions under which single-party regimes maintain coherence and effectiveness over time. A substantial literature, drawing on the work of Milan Svolik, Jennifer Gandhi, and others, has emphasized that elite management — keeping potential rivals cooperative, aligning the interests of the bureaucracy with regime survival — is central to authoritarian durability. If bribery for office becomes widespread, it may paradoxically strengthen regime cohesion in the short run by creating mutual complicity among officials, while generating corrosive pressures on service delivery and state legitimacy over longer time horizons. The second debate concerns Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, the most sweeping since the Maoist era, which has formally disciplined over a million officials since 2012. Scholarly interpretations of the campaign range from genuine institutionalization of anti-corruption norms, to a factional purge dressed in anti-corruption language, to a selective enforcement tool that creates compliance through fear. The "bribery as third path" framework offers a different lens: if corruption-based selection has become sufficiently systematic, the anti-corruption campaign may simultaneously disrupt a functioning, if illegitimate, selection equilibrium, creating uncertainty about the rules of advancement precisely when Xi seeks to consolidate party discipline.
For practitioners engaged in ODA, development finance, or civil society programming in environments where Chinese state actors are counterparts or competitors, these dynamics carry practical weight. Development economists have long recognized that the quality of local governance — specifically the incentive structures facing frontline officials — is a primary determinant of whether aid and investment translate into development outcomes. If subnational officials in recipient countries are themselves embedded in political economies where position-buying logic prevails, and if Chinese counterpart institutions export similar selection cultures through partnerships and capacity-building programs, the governance implications ripple outward. Civil society organizations operating in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian contexts similarly need calibrated understandings of which officials face which incentive structures, since the space for engagement, the risks of association, and the likelihood of policy implementation all vary depending on how officials secured their positions.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this article points in several productive directions. Empirically, the challenge of identifying bribery as a distinct causal mechanism — rather than a correlate of patronage or a marker of weak institutional constraints — is formidable given the obvious measurement difficulties around clandestine transactions. Methodological creativity will be required, drawing perhaps on anti-corruption case records, variation in the reach of enforcement campaigns across localities, or experimental approaches that probe official behavior in contexts where extraction incentives are plausibly linked to the cost of office acquisition. Theoretically, the field would benefit from integration with the political economy of public finance, examining whether officials with different selection trajectories demonstrate systematically different patterns in local fiscal behavior, public goods provision, or regulatory enforcement. For China watchers specifically, understanding how the current anti-corruption regime — which has itself become a form of political selection, determining who is safe and who is vulnerable — reshapes the relative attractiveness of the three paths will be essential to anticipating the character of Chinese governance in the decade ahead. The article's core provocation, that bribery is not merely a distortion of political selection but a constitutive element of it, deserves sustained empirical scrutiny and, if it survives that scrutiny, will require a significant revision of how both scholars and practitioners model the relationship between elite incentives and state performance in China.