Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-28
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political leaders rise to power within authoritarian systems has occupied scholars of comparative politics for decades, yet it has taken on renewed urgency in an era defined by democratic backsliding, intensifying geopolitical competition, and the widening influence of state-capitalist models across the developing world. China, as the world's second-largest economy and the most consequential single-party state in the international order, occupies a special place in this debate. How the Chinese Communist Party selects its officials — and what criteria, formal or informal, govern advancement through its vast bureaucratic hierarchy — is not merely an academic question. It has direct implications for governance quality, economic performance, foreign policy behavior, and the long-term resilience of the regime itself. The emerging scholarly literature on Chinese political selection increasingly challenges earlier optimistic accounts that depicted the party as a meritocratic technocracy, capable of rewarding competent administrators and thereby compensating for its democratic deficits through effective governance. A recent contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Asia intervenes in this debate by proposing that bribery constitutes not merely a corrupt exception to formal selection criteria, but an institutionalized third pathway through which officials secure political advancement — alongside the better-documented mechanisms of performance and patronage.
The dominant frameworks for understanding political selection in China have, until recently, operated within a binary logic. On one side stands the meritocracy hypothesis, most forcefully articulated in work by scholars such as Daniel Bell and Yuen Yuen Ang, which holds that the party's internal promotion criteria reward economic performance, policy innovation, and administrative competence. Promotions, on this view, are broadly correlated with outcomes — GDP growth rates in a governor's jurisdiction, successful poverty reduction, or the management of public goods — thereby producing a competitive internal labor market that mimics certain functional properties of electoral accountability without requiring multiparty democracy. On the other side stands the patronage hypothesis, which emphasizes factional ties, personal loyalty networks, and the strategic placement of trusted subordinates by senior patrons. This interpretation, associated with scholars such as Victor Shih and Andrew Wedeman, treats advancement as primarily a function of political connectedness rather than administrative output. The present article's central contribution is to argue that neither framework alone — and certainly not their combination — adequately accounts for the systematic role of bribery as a self-sustaining mechanism of selection. Rather than treating corruption as noise around a signal of either merit or patronage, the argument treats it as signal itself: a structured, predictable, and increasingly recognized pathway through which officials invest in their own careers by purchasing advancement from superiors.
This reframing carries significant analytical weight. If bribery operates as a genuine third pathway rather than a residual category, then several important implications follow. First, the information problem central to principal-agent theories of authoritarian governance becomes substantially more complex. Anti-corruption campaigns — including the sweeping campaign launched under Xi Jinping after 2012 — cannot be understood purely as efforts to discipline underperforming or disloyal subordinates. They also represent the central leadership's attempt to regulate, selectively suppress, or strategically redirect a market for political advancement that has developed its own pricing mechanisms, norms of reciprocity, and network structures. The periodic targeting of high-profile officials must be read not only as a signal of the leadership's commitment to clean governance, but as an exercise in recalibrating which pathway to advancement is permissible in a given political moment and for which tier of the hierarchy. Second, the co-existence of three pathways creates acute uncertainty for mid-level officials navigating their careers. An official who pursues advancement through genuine performance may find that a rival who invests in patronage or bribery overtakes them; conversely, one who invests heavily in a patron may be exposed if that patron falls from grace. This uncertainty has potentially distortionary effects on bureaucratic behavior, incentivizing officials to hedge across multiple strategies simultaneously, with attendant costs to policy coherence and implementation quality.
The broader regional and global context amplifies the significance of these findings for development studies and ODA practice. China's domestic governance architecture does not remain hermetically sealed from its external activities. The officials who manage China's Belt and Road Initiative projects, negotiate bilateral agreements, or oversee the state-owned enterprises that operate across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America are products of the same selection system under examination here. If bribery-as-pathway has become institutionalized within the domestic bureaucracy, it is reasonable to ask whether similar logics of informal payment and reciprocal obligation have been exported through China's engagement with partner-country officials. Several studies of BRI project governance have documented patterns of procurement irregularity, opaque contract terms, and evidence of side payments to host-country intermediaries, which may reflect not simply opportunistic corruption by Chinese firms, but a deeper structural orientation toward informal payment as a recognized currency of political-economic relationships. For scholars and practitioners working on anti-corruption frameworks within ODA contexts, this suggests that the challenge is not merely one of strengthening formal institutions in recipient countries, but of understanding and engaging with an exporting actor whose own internal governance logic may normalize the practices being targeted.
From a policy research standpoint, the article points toward a cluster of underexplored questions that warrant sustained scholarly attention. How does the relative weight of performance, patronage, and bribery as promotion criteria vary across different levels of the Chinese bureaucratic hierarchy? Are there jurisdictional or sectoral variations — between provincial and prefectural officials, between economic ministries and security agencies — that reflect different combinations of formal and informal selection pressures? And how has the balance shifted under Xi's consolidation of power, which has simultaneously intensified anti-corruption enforcement and weakened the semi-institutionalized factional competition that previously created some structural space for countervailing patronage networks? The answers to these questions matter enormously for development partners, international financial institutions, and civil society organizations that must calibrate their engagement with Chinese counterparts in multilateral forums and bilateral aid contexts. An interlocutor whose advancement depended on demonstrated policy competence brings different incentive structures to a negotiation table than one whose position was secured through patronage or purchase.
Looking forward, the analytical framework proposed in this article has considerable potential to inform comparative research beyond the Chinese case. Several other authoritarian and hybrid regimes — including those across Central Asia, the broader post-Soviet space, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa — operate selection systems in which formal performance criteria, informal patron-client networks, and outright purchase of positions co-exist in structured rather than purely random ways. A comparative research agenda that examines the relative institutionalization of each pathway across regime types and political economies would contribute substantially to the broader literature on authoritarian durability, governance quality, and the political foundations of developmental outcomes. For IOCSS and its partner research communities, this also points toward the importance of investing in field-based, practitioner-informed research that can access the informal dimensions of political selection in environments where official data systematically obscures them. The value of the Journal of Contemporary Asia's publication of work in this vein lies precisely in its willingness to engage with the ungoverned spaces of political economy — the transactions that do not appear in official records but nonetheless shape the institutions, incentives, and behavior of the officials who govern the lives of billions.