Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political elites ascend to power in authoritarian systems has long occupied comparative political scientists, and nowhere is that question more consequential than in the People's Republic of China. With the world's largest bureaucratic apparatus governing over 1.4 billion people, the mechanisms through which the Chinese Communist Party selects its cadres shape not only domestic governance outcomes but also the international behavior of an increasingly assertive great power. In an era when China's political model is being scrutinized — and in some quarters emulated — by governments across the Global South, understanding the internal logic of CCP political selection carries implications that extend well beyond the borders of the country itself. Against this backdrop, a new contribution in the Journal of Contemporary Asia titled "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage" intervenes in a debate that has animated China scholarship for decades, proposing that the conventional binary of meritocracy versus factional loyalty is insufficient to explain the full range of observed promotion outcomes within the party-state.
The dominant frameworks in the study of Chinese elite politics have long oscillated between two poles. On one side stands the performance thesis, associated most prominently with work by Yasheng Huang, Pierre Landry, and their interlocutors, which holds that CCP cadres advance through the ranks principally on the basis of measurable governance outcomes — GDP growth, revenue generation, social stability indicators — that their superiors monitor and reward. On the other side stands the patronage thesis, which emphasizes the role of factional networks, personal connections to senior patrons, and shared institutional or regional backgrounds as the primary drivers of promotion. Both accounts have accumulated substantial empirical support, and both have also attracted serious criticism. The performance thesis has struggled to explain why demonstrably competent officials are passed over while others with more modest records advance, while the patronage thesis has difficulty accounting for instances in which officials outside established networks achieve rapid upward mobility. The article under consideration proposes a third explanatory variable: bribery, understood not as an incidental distortion of otherwise meritocratic or network-based systems but as a structurally embedded mechanism through which aspiring cadres directly purchase advancement from those with the authority to confer it.
This framing carries significant analytical weight. If bribery constitutes a genuine "path to power" rather than merely a supplementary lubricant applied to processes already determined by performance or patronage, it implies that the Chinese promotion system is characterized by a form of market logic operating beneath its formal meritocratic surface. The implications are layered. First, it suggests that the relationship between anti-corruption enforcement and political selection is more complex than is often assumed. Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, launched with considerable fanfare following the 18th Party Congress in 2012, has resulted in the disciplining of hundreds of thousands of officials, including figures of "tiger" seniority such as former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang and former CMC Vice-Chairs Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong. Observers have debated whether the campaign represents genuine institutional reform, a factional purge conducted under the cover of anti-corruption rhetoric, or some combination of both. The proposition that bribery functions as a third path to power suggests a still more complicated picture: the campaign targets a practice that is not merely corrupt in the conventional sense but is woven into the reproductive logic of the system itself, which would help explain both the campaign's extraordinary scale and the persistent resistance it has encountered within the bureaucracy.
Second, the argument connects to a broader set of questions about governance quality and principal-agent problems in hierarchical political systems. A promotion market in which advancement can be purchased creates a specific set of incentive distortions. Officials who buy their positions must subsequently recoup their investment through the rents available to them in office, creating pressure toward extractive rather than developmental behavior at precisely the levels of the administrative hierarchy where developmental capacity is most consequential. This dynamic has been observed in a range of authoritarian contexts beyond China — in the neopatrimonial systems of sub-Saharan Africa studied by scholars such as Nicolas van de Walle, in the Ottoman devshirme system's later degeneration, and in the venality of office that characterized early modern European monarchies. Locating China within this comparative frame is analytically productive: it suggests that the Chinese case, while distinctive in many respects, shares structural features with other systems in which the commodification of office has distorted the relationship between selection criteria and governance outcomes.
Third, the article's contribution has direct relevance to debates within the ODA and development policy community about institutional quality, governance conditionality, and the sustainability of growth in China-influenced development models. A substantial strand of policy discourse, particularly among governments in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia that have deepened engagement with Chinese infrastructure finance and development cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative framework, has pointed to China's apparent capacity to combine authoritarian political structures with sustained economic development as evidence that liberal democratic governance is not a prerequisite for developmental success. If the article's thesis holds — if bribery is indeed a structurally significant mechanism of political selection in China — it complicates this narrative considerably. Governance quality is not simply a function of formal institutions or aggregate performance metrics; it is also a function of the selection pressures that determine which individuals occupy positions of authority and what behavioral logics they bring to those positions. A system in which a meaningful share of officials has purchased advancement may produce development outcomes that are less sustainable, more extractive, and more prone to catastrophic failure than aggregate statistics suggest.
Looking forward, the implications of this line of research for both practitioners and scholars are considerable. For researchers, the challenge is methodological: bribery for promotion is by definition covert, and the principal sources of evidence — anti-corruption case files, defector testimony, financial forensics — are each subject to significant selection biases that make causal inference difficult. Advances in empirical methods, including the analysis of leaked financial disclosures and network mapping of disciplinary outcomes, may begin to address these limitations, but the field will require sustained methodological creativity. For policy practitioners engaged with China — whether in the context of multilateral diplomacy, ODA programming, or private sector investment — the article's core proposition counsels a more skeptical reading of official governance metrics and a greater attention to the structural incentives that shape bureaucratic behavior beneath the surface of measurable performance. As China's political model enters a period of heightened external scrutiny, scholarship that illuminates the gap between the system's formal architecture and its actual operating logic performs an indispensable service — not only for academic understanding but for the practical work of navigating a world in which China's internal politics increasingly shape global outcomes.