Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political systems select their leaders sits at the heart of modern governance studies. In authoritarian and hybrid regimes, the mechanisms by which officials advance through bureaucratic hierarchies have profound consequences not only for domestic governance but for the foreign policy postures, development priorities, and international partnerships that such states project outward. China, as both the world's second-largest economy and one of the most consequential donors and investors in the global South, commands particular scholarly attention in this regard. Understanding who rises within the Chinese Communist Party — and by what means — is therefore not merely an exercise in Sinological inquiry; it bears directly on how practitioners of development cooperation, civil society engagement, and multilateral diplomacy should understand their interlocutors and anticipate institutional behavior. Against this backdrop, recent scholarship in the Journal of Contemporary Asia introduces a conceptually ambitious argument: that bribery may constitute a systematic, structurally embedded "third path" to political advancement in China, operating alongside — and at times displacing — the two frameworks that have long dominated academic debate.
For decades, the literature on cadre promotion in China has been organized around two competing logics. The first, broadly associated with the "political tournament" school developed by economists including Li Hongbin and Zhou Li-An, holds that Chinese officials are selected primarily on the basis of measurable performance, above all economic growth figures. In this account, the party functions as a kind of meritocratic engine: local officials compete against one another for promotion, and those who deliver the best outcomes — GDP growth, investment attraction, infrastructure expansion — ascend the hierarchy. This framework gained considerable traction in explaining China's developmental trajectory through the 1990s and 2000s, when the cadre evaluation system formally weighted economic metrics heavily. The second dominant framework emphasizes patronage: the idea that personal ties to powerful senior officials, factional loyalties, and the cultivation of patron-client networks determine who rises and who stagnates. This approach draws on an older political sociology of Leninist party states and finds empirical support in the recurring observation that major leadership transitions in China tend to produce cohorts of promoted officials whose careers trace back to those of the newly elevated leaders. The contribution of the present article lies in its refusal to accept this dyad as exhaustive. The authors argue that bribery — understood not simply as venality or personal enrichment, but as a rational, instrumentalized investment strategy by office-seekers — operates as a third, analytically distinct pathway through which political selection occurs. Officials, on this account, do not merely accept bribes as a windfall; they pay bribes upward, strategically purchasing favorable evaluations, desirable postings, and ultimately promotions. The result is a market for political positions that exists in complex interaction with both performance signals and patronage networks.
This argument has significant analytical purchase because it reframes what corruption means in the Chinese political context. Where corruption has often been theorized as either a cultural residue, a collective action problem, or a symptom of weak institutions, the "third path" framework suggests it can be a structurally generative phenomenon: a selection mechanism that shapes, rather than merely distorts, the composition of the political elite. This reframing connects to a broader body of comparative political economy literature on authoritarian regimes, including work by scholars such as Victor Shih on factional resource allocation and by Minxin Pei on the political economy of crony communism. If bribery functions as a selection mechanism, it is not simply a parasite on the state but partly constitutive of it. The implications extend to questions about the internal coherence of the party-state: when position-buying is widespread, officials who rise through this route carry with them obligations and vulnerabilities that may differ systematically from those who rise through performance or patronage. Their incentive structures, their loyalty patterns, and their relationship to institutional rules are all potentially transformed. This matters for understanding the durability of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which since 2012 has processed over a million officials and removed figures of extraordinary seniority. If bribery was a structural selection mechanism, anti-corruption enforcement does not merely remove bad actors; it alters the composition of the elite in ways that reshape factional balances, bureaucratic cultures, and the distribution of risk across the system.
From a regional and global development perspective, the stakes of political selection in China are substantial. China's overseas development assistance, channeled increasingly through the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and bilateral lending by policy banks, is administered by officials whose career trajectories and incentive structures are shaped by exactly the dynamics the article investigates. Research on BRI project implementation has documented patterns of cost inflation, renegotiation, and governance opacity that are consistent with the presence of rent-seeking officials at multiple levels of the Chinese administrative hierarchy. If the officials overseeing major infrastructure loans or aid projects in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America are themselves the product of a selection process in which bribery played a formative role, this has implications for project quality, fiduciary integrity, and the reliability of commitments made to partner governments and civil society actors. Development practitioners operating in environments where Chinese state entities are significant financiers or contractors would benefit from a more granular understanding of how the officials they engage came to occupy their positions and what obligations those positions carry.
The policy and research implications of this framework ramify in several directions. For scholars of authoritarian governance, the article invites a more disaggregated approach to corruption — one that distinguishes between corruption as extraction, corruption as lubricant for bureaucratic processes, and corruption as investment in political careers, recognizing that each form has distinct systemic effects. For civil society researchers, the framework raises questions about the kinds of state interlocutors that civil society organizations — both domestic and international — encounter in China. An official who rose through performance is likely to have different dispositions toward accountability, transparency, and civil society engagement than one who rose through position-buying; understanding this differentiation is analytically and practically important. For those engaged in anti-corruption work, whether through multilateral frameworks like the UNCAC or through bilateral conditionality, the argument suggests that anti-corruption campaigns in contexts like China may be more politically complex and strategically mediated than reformist narratives acknowledge. The selectivity with which enforcement proceeds — documented extensively in accounts of the Xi campaign — may itself reflect the intersection of all three pathways: performance credentials, factional positioning, and the historical record of bribery activity all shaping who is prosecuted and who is protected.
Looking forward, the conceptual framework introduced in this article opens a productive research agenda that scholars of China, comparative authoritarianism, and development governance would do well to pursue. Empirically, the challenge is to trace the causal mechanisms by which position-buying operates — how prices for particular postings are determined, how transactions are structured given the acute risks of exposure, and how the presence or absence of each pathway varies across regions, administrative levels, and historical periods. Methodologically, this requires innovative use of the growing body of data generated by China's anti-corruption prosecutions, which, while politically curated, contain rich if partial information about the structure of corrupt transactions. Theoretically, the framework invites dialogue with work on elite bargaining in authoritarian systems, institutional erosion, and the micro-foundations of regime stability. For IOCSS and the broader research community concerned with civil society and development in the global South, this work is a reminder that the governance of the states with which development actors engage is neither reducible to formal institutional design nor fully explained by cultural accounts of corruption. The selection of political elites is a constitutive process, and understanding it with precision remains one of the most consequential tasks of contemporary political economy.