Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how authoritarian regimes select their leaders has long occupied scholars of comparative politics, and few cases are more consequential to global order than China. As the People's Republic consolidates its position as the world's second-largest economy and an increasingly assertive actor in international development finance and geopolitics, understanding the internal mechanics of its political system is not merely an academic exercise. The rules — written and unwritten — by which officials advance within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shape the quality of governance, the allocation of public resources, and ultimately the policy outputs that reverberate across Asia and beyond. Prevailing scholarship has centered on two dominant explanations for elite advancement in China: meritocratic performance, whereby cadres rise on the basis of measurable economic or administrative achievements, and patronage networks, whereby promotion is secured through loyalty to and sponsorship by senior officials. The article under examination in the Journal of Contemporary Asia challenges scholars to consider a third, empirically grounded pathway — the direct exchange of bribes — and in doing so, opens a more uncomfortable but necessary conversation about the structural underpinnings of Chinese political life.
The meritocracy thesis, associated most prominently with scholars such as Daniel Bell and Yuen Yuen Ang, holds that the CCP has developed a functional selection system in which local officials are evaluated against measurable targets, particularly GDP growth, and rewarded with promotion accordingly. This argument was compelling during the high-growth decades of the 1980s through 2000s, when cadre evaluation systems explicitly tied advancement to quantifiable economic performance. The patronage thesis, by contrast, draws attention to the relational and factional dimensions of Chinese politics, arguing that access to powerful sponsors within the party hierarchy is often more decisive than any objective metric. Both frameworks capture something real, yet neither fully accounts for the pervasive corruption that Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign — launched in 2012 and continuing to the present — has revealed at virtually every level of the party-state. The present article appears to argue that bribery must be theorized not merely as a deviation from otherwise meritocratic or relational norms, but as a structurally embedded, autonomous pathway through which ambitious officials actively purchase their own advancement. This reframing is significant because it implies that corruption in China is not epiphenomenal — not a byproduct of weak institutions or transitional uncertainty — but a rationalized strategy with its own internal logic, actors, and market dynamics.
The theoretical contribution of framing bribery as a "third path" connects to a broader literature on what Ang has termed "access money" — forms of corruption that grease the wheels of political markets rather than simply extracting rents from helpless populations. In the Chinese context, office-buying has historical antecedents stretching back to imperial dynasties, when formal mechanisms of venality allowed wealthy candidates to purchase bureaucratic positions. The persistence of this practice into the modern party-state era, now documented extensively through the CCP's own disciplinary proceedings and investigative journalism, suggests a kind of institutional path dependency. Officials at the county and prefectural levels, where competition for advancement is fierce and the gap between local political fortunes and central career trajectories is widest, face structural incentives to invest in their own promotion through monetary means when performance alone is uncertain and patronage networks are inaccessible or insufficient. This creates what amounts to a shadow market for positions, one that intersects with but is analytically distinct from both the meritocratic tournament and the factional patronage exchange. The article's framing invites researchers to take seriously the possibility that these three pathways operate simultaneously and sometimes in combination, producing a complex and partially opaque selection environment.
The implications for governance quality and, by extension, for China's overseas development activities are considerable. Officials who reach senior positions through bribery rather than performance or network loyalty may be less accountable to either their patrons or measurable outcomes, and more beholden to the private networks of economic actors who financed their advancement. This structural dynamic may help explain certain patterns in local governance failures — in environmental regulation, in public health infrastructure, in land management — that have periodically erupted into social crises despite central government directives to the contrary. From the perspective of ODA scholarship and civil society studies, these findings also have relevance for understanding Chinese overseas development finance, where the cadres and institutional actors involved in Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project implementation may themselves be products of the very selection dynamics described. A project manager or provincial official who has invested heavily in their own advancement through informal payments carries different incentive structures into overseas engagement than one who rose through documented performance metrics. This renders simplistic narratives of a monolithic "China model" of development statecraft analytically insufficient.
Looking forward, the article raises questions that neither the Xi administration's anti-corruption campaign nor external observers have fully resolved. The campaign has indicted hundreds of thousands of officials and dismantled numerous patronage networks, yet there is ongoing debate as to whether it has fundamentally altered the structural incentives that generate bribery-based advancement, or whether it has primarily served to concentrate disciplinary power in the hands of Xi and his inner circle, reshuffling the terms of factional competition rather than eliminating it. If bribery as a third path is indeed structurally embedded, then anti-corruption efforts alone — absent institutional reforms that render performance evaluation more credible and reduce the value of positional rents — are unlikely to eliminate the practice. For researchers, the methodological challenge is substantial: the very opacity of bribery networks makes them difficult to study systematically, and reliance on disciplinary records or post-hoc case studies introduces significant selection bias. Future work in this area will benefit from innovative data strategies, including analysis of asset disclosures, court records, and career trajectory databases, as well as from comparative framing that situates China's experience alongside other single-party or hybrid regimes where office-buying has been documented. For practitioners and policymakers engaging with China — whether in bilateral diplomacy, multilateral development forums, or civil society exchange — a more nuanced appreciation of the heterogeneous incentive structures shaping Chinese officialdom is not merely academically valuable; it is a precondition for realistic and effective engagement.