Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political power is allocated within authoritarian systems has occupied comparative politics scholars for decades, yet the specific mechanisms governing elite selection in the People's Republic of China remain among the most consequential and least fully understood in contemporary political science. China's model of political selection sits at an unusual intersection: it is neither a competitive multiparty democracy nor a purely hereditary autocracy, but rather a complex single-party system in which the Chinese Communist Party has historically presented itself as a meritocratic vanguard. The scholarly and policy stakes of understanding how officials actually rise through this system have grown considerably as China's domestic governance model is increasingly discussed as an alternative to liberal democratic frameworks, particularly across the Global South where Beijing's influence has expanded alongside its overseas development finance and foreign policy assertiveness.
The dominant frameworks in the academic literature on Chinese political selection have long revolved around two competing logics. The first is the performance-based promotion thesis, associated with scholars such as Pierre Landry and drawing on the theoretical work of economists Li and Zhou, which holds that Chinese officials are systematically rewarded for delivering measurable economic outcomes — most notably GDP growth — within their jurisdictions. In this model, the party functions as a large principal-agent system in which career advancement serves as a powerful incentive mechanism for local governance. The second framework emphasizes patronage and factional affiliation, in which promotion is mediated through loyalty networks, shared institutional backgrounds, or geographic ties to powerful patrons at higher levels of the hierarchy. These two models are not necessarily mutually exclusive; scholars such as Bo Zhiyue and Andrew Nathan have long argued that both performance signals and elite network membership shape who rises and who stagnates within the CCP's internal labor market. The contribution of the article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, is to probe whether there exists a third pathway — bribery — that operates alongside or in competition with these two established mechanisms, and to assess its relative significance in the broader architecture of political selection in China.
The conceptual stakes of this inquiry are considerable. Vote-buying within elite institutions — the practice of purchasing official positions from superiors or from personnel departments, known colloquially in Chinese as maiguan maiguan or "buying and selling offices" — has been acknowledged as a persistent feature of Chinese bureaucratic life for decades, and it featured prominently in the revelations accompanying Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-corruption campaign, which began in earnest after 2012. What has remained analytically underspecified is the systemic role of bribery: whether it functions as a marginal practice by officials who lack either strong performance records or patronage connections, as a complement to the other two pathways that amplifies the chances of already-well-positioned candidates, or as a genuinely autonomous mechanism that can substitute for both merit and factional backing. If bribery constitutes a true "third path" rather than a supplement, this would suggest that the CCP's internal selection system is more thoroughly corrupted at the structural level than the party's own official anti-corruption discourse acknowledges, with significant implications for the quality and incentive structures of Chinese governance more broadly.
The framing of bribery as a potential pathway to power also intersects with larger debates about authoritarian resilience, state capacity, and the relationship between corruption and political stability. Scholars working in the tradition of North, Wallis, and Weingast have argued that corruption in political systems can serve as a form of elite integration, creating distributional bargains that keep potential challengers incorporated rather than excluded. In the Chinese context, this perspective would suggest that the toleration of position-buying may have served regime-stabilizing functions by allowing officials outside core patronage networks to nonetheless secure advancement, thereby broadening the pool of stakeholders with interests in the system's continuity. Xi Jinping's unprecedented anti-corruption campaign, from this angle, represents not simply a moralistic effort to clean up governance but a deliberate redistribution of access and influence — using the selective prosecution of bribery cases to weaken rival networks while consolidating control through enhanced disciplinary mechanisms under the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Understanding bribery as a structural feature of the selection system, rather than simply as deviant individual behavior, thus reframes how analysts should interpret the anti-corruption campaign itself and its consequences for elite cohesion and intra-party politics.
For development scholars and practitioners concerned with China's international role, these domestic political dynamics carry meaningful downstream effects. The quality of officials produced by any given selection mechanism has direct bearing on the capacity and orientation of the bureaucratic apparatus that implements China's domestic development policies and manages its overseas engagements, including Belt and Road Initiative projects and bilateral ODA flows. If a non-trivial share of provincial and prefectural leadership in China has been selected through bribery rather than demonstrated administrative competence or ideological alignment, this has implications for governance quality, policy consistency, and the reliability of Chinese institutional counterparts in international partnership arrangements. It also bears on the question of how China's domestic governance model should be assessed as a reference point in global development discourse. The normative claim that China's system successfully combines political stability with effective developmental administration — a claim central to some influential arguments about the "China model" — rests on the assumption that selection mechanisms are sufficiently meritocratic to populate the bureaucracy with capable administrators. Evidence of bribery as a systematic third path complicates this claim in important ways and invites more granular empirical scrutiny of which levels of the hierarchy are most affected and what consequences follow for policy outcomes.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this line of inquiry suggests several productive directions. First, the interaction effects between the three pathways deserve closer examination: scholarship that can demonstrate empirically whether bribery substitutes for or complements performance and patronage signals would significantly advance both the theoretical models and the practical assessment of governance quality in China. Second, the temporal dimension warrants attention, given that the anti-corruption campaign has now run for over a decade under Xi and has demonstrably altered the incentive environment for officials — the question of whether bribery as a selection mechanism has declined, adapted, or simply moved underground is of considerable analytical importance. Third, comparative work placing China's experience alongside other cases of position-buying in authoritarian and hybrid regimes — from the cadre management systems of Vietnam to the nomenklatura legacies of post-Soviet states — could help specify which features of the Chinese case are distinctive and which reflect broader structural tendencies in single-party systems. For civil society researchers and international development professionals operating in or adjacent to Chinese governance frameworks, the practical takeaway is a note of interpretive caution: institutional performance in Chinese developmental contexts cannot be read straightforwardly from formal organizational charts or official promotion criteria, and a more textured understanding of how officials actually arrive in their positions is essential to accurate assessment of both risk and partnership potential in China-engaged policy environments.