Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-17
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political leaders are selected in authoritarian systems has occupied scholars of comparative politics for decades, but the case of China presents a particularly vexing analytical challenge. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been celebrated — and critiqued — as a uniquely performance-oriented party-state, one in which cadres rise or fall based on measurable economic outcomes such as GDP growth rates, fiscal revenues, and infrastructure delivery. Yet this meritocratic narrative has always coexisted uncomfortably with documented realities of factional favoritism, personal loyalty networks, and outright corruption. A recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage," directly confronts this tension by positing that neither performance nor patronage alone can adequately explain the patterns of advancement observed within the CCP's vast cadre system. In doing so, it enters a debate with profound implications not only for our understanding of Chinese domestic politics but for the broader literature on authoritarian governance, anti-corruption reform, and the political economy of one-party states.
The dominant frameworks for analyzing Chinese political selection have rested on two pillars. The first is the tournament model associated with scholars like Yingyi Qian and Barry Weingast, which holds that local officials compete against one another on economic performance metrics, and that this competition generates the growth incentives which drove China's extraordinary development trajectory over several decades. The second is a patronage-centered account, emphasizing that personal ties to powerful factional leaders — particularly connections to the Shanghai Gang associated with Jiang Zemin or the Communist Youth League faction associated with Hu Jintao — determined who rose through the ranks. These two explanations were never fully reconciled, and the article under review appears to break significant new ground by arguing that bribery — the direct purchase of official positions through monetary transfers — operates as a structurally distinct mechanism that cannot be subsumed under either framework. Rather than treating bribery as a residual effect of weak institutions or a side effect of patronage relations, the article treats it as an analytically independent pathway to power with its own logic, conditions of possibility, and political consequences.
This is a theoretically bold claim, and its implications reverberate through several bodies of scholarship. In the political economy of corruption literature, bribery for office — what the Chinese call maiguan maiguan, literally "buying and selling office" — has long been documented ethnographically and journalistically, but has rarely been elevated to the status of a systemic selection mechanism. If the article's argument holds, it suggests that the CCP's internal labor market for political positions functions in part as a quasi-market in which monetary resources, not merely political loyalty or administrative performance, determine advancement. This would have significant consequences for theories of authoritarian resilience: a party-state in which positions are purchasable is more susceptible to adverse selection, since those who can pay the most are not necessarily those most capable of governing effectively or most loyally aligned with the center. The Xi Jinping administration's signature anti-corruption campaign, which has disciplined over a million officials since 2013, can be read in this light not simply as a factional purge or a genuine governance reform but as an attempt to recalibrate the selection mechanism — to reassert ideological and performance criteria over the market logic of bribery that had corroded the cadre system during previous decades.
The article's relevance extends well beyond Chinese domestic politics into the fields of development studies and official development assistance. China has become the world's largest bilateral creditor and a major provider of development finance across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The quality of its domestic governance, and particularly the integrity of its political selection processes, directly shapes how Chinese development institutions function abroad. A cadre system corrupted by position-buying is likely to export its pathologies: officials who purchased their domestic postings at considerable cost are incentivized to recoup those investments through rents extracted from overseas projects, infrastructure contracts, and aid-financed ventures. This creates a structural linkage between China's internal political economy and the governance outcomes observed in recipient countries of Chinese ODA and investment. International development scholars and practitioners who focus on the "China factor" in global governance must therefore engage seriously with the micropolitics of CCP cadre selection, as the article under review demands, rather than treating the Chinese party-state as a monolithic actor with uniform preferences and incentive structures.
From a policy and research standpoint, the article raises urgent questions about the effectiveness of anti-corruption campaigns as instruments of institutional reform. Xi's campaign has been widely praised by some observers and dismissed by others as selective enforcement targeting political opponents, but the "third path" framework suggests a more nuanced evaluation is warranted. If bribery has become structurally embedded as a selection mechanism — not merely a behavioral aberration — then prosecutorial campaigns alone cannot restore integrity to the cadre system without addressing the underlying incentive structures that make position-buying rational in the first place. These include the enormous discretionary power held by local officials, the opacity of promotion criteria, and the absence of meaningful lateral accountability mechanisms. For scholars of civil society and governance, this suggests that the internal dynamics of the CCP are not simply a matter of elite politics divorced from societal implications, but are deeply consequential for the delivery of public goods, the legitimacy of local governance, and ultimately for China's capacity to serve as a stable partner in international development frameworks.
Looking forward, the analytical framework proposed in this article could prove generative for comparative research across other authoritarian or hybrid regimes where similar tripartite dynamics — performance, patronage, and bribery — may operate simultaneously at different institutional levels or in different historical periods. The case of China, with its unusually rich datasets drawn from anti-corruption investigations, cadre personnel records, and regional economic statistics, offers rare empirical leverage on questions that are notoriously difficult to study in closed political systems. As Xi Jinping moves into his third and likely indefinite term in power and continues to reshape the CCP's organizational culture, the trajectory of political selection mechanisms will remain one of the most consequential and under-examined dimensions of Chinese politics. Researchers at the intersection of comparative authoritarianism, development finance, and civil society studies would do well to treat this article not as a narrow contribution to China studies but as a theoretical provocation with broad applicability — and to build on its framework in ways that illuminate the political underpinnings of governance quality in the world's most consequential one-party state.