Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Political corruption research in China has long orbited around two dominant explanatory poles: performance-based meritocracy, in which cadres rise through demonstrated competence and economic delivery, and patronage-based clientelism, in which factional loyalty and personal ties determine advancement. Jiangnan Zhu's study, reviewed in the Journal of Contemporary Asia and published in expanded form by Cambridge University Press, unsettles this binary by identifying a third, less visible mechanism of political selection: bribery itself, functioning not merely as a symptom of institutional decay but as an independent currency of advancement. This intervention arrives at a moment when the durability of one-party authoritarian governance, the internal logic of Xi Jinping's sustained anti-corruption campaign, and the broader question of how autocracies manage elite recruitment are all subjects of intense scholarly and policy scrutiny. Understanding whether officials buy their way into power — and under what structural conditions this becomes systemic rather than aberrant — speaks directly to how resilient, adaptive, or fragile the Chinese party-state's cadre management system actually is.
The core analytical move in Zhu's work is to disaggregate what is often lumped together as "corruption" into a more precise causal category: the purchase of office as a distinct pathway to power that operates in parallel with, and sometimes displaces, both meritocratic and clientelist logics. Her argument is that "loyalty via bribery" is not simply patronage wearing a different mask; it differs fundamentally from patronage rooted in shared origin, long apprenticeship, or ideological alignment, because it is transactional, monetized, and often devoid of the relational trust that traditionally underwrites factional loyalty in Leninist party systems. In this framework, China's provincial and municipal governance is best understood as the coexistence of three overlapping selection regimes — a meritocratic state that rewards competence and growth outcomes, a clientelist state built on networks of reciprocal obligation, and what Zhu terms an "investment state," in which bureaucratic office itself becomes a purchasable asset whose value is recouped through subsequent rent extraction. This tripartite model is significant precisely because it does not treat bribery-driven appointments as a corruption of an otherwise clean system, but as a structurally embedded, self-sustaining mode of political recruitment that can flourish under specific institutional conditions — weak upward accountability, opaque promotion criteria, and concentrated discretionary power among appointing superiors.
Situated within the broader literature on political economy and civil society in the region, this work resonates with long-standing debates about the sustainability of "developmental state" models across East and Southeast Asia, where technocratic competence and patron-client informality have always coexisted in uneasy tension. What Zhu's framework adds is a reminder that as authoritarian and hybrid regimes mature and their internal markets for power become more liquid — through privatization, land finance, infrastructure spending, and the vast discretionary budgets that Chinese local governments control — the informal economy of governance can evolve past personalistic loyalty into something closer to a commodified market for bureaucratic rank. This has clear echoes in other contexts examined by IOCSS's broader research agenda, from patronage-inflected civil service appointments in parts of Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa to the politicization of aid-disbursing bureaucracies in ODA-recipient states, where donor-funded capacity-building programs often collide with entrenched systems of purchased influence. The comparative implication is that anti-corruption reform framed purely as a technical or legal matter — strengthening audit institutions, raising civil-service salaries, professionalizing recruitment — may fail to address the deeper incentive structure when office itself has become a tradeable financial instrument whose price reflects anticipated future rents.
The policy implications of this reframing are considerable, particularly for how international observers, multilateral lenders, and bilateral donors assess governance risk in China and in comparable systems. If bribery functions as a genuine "third path" rather than a mere distortion of meritocratic or patronage channels, then anti-corruption campaigns that target individual transactions — arresting and purging corrupt officials — may only temporarily suppress a structurally reproduced market, since the underlying incentive to monetize discretionary appointment power persists so long as institutional oversight remains weak and rents remain lucrative. This has direct relevance for how research institutions and development agencies calibrate their governance indicators and risk models: a country's investment climate, its ability to implement development programs, and its administrative predictability are all shaped by which of these three selection logics predominates in a given sector or region at a given time. For scholars of civil society and ODA effectiveness, Zhu's framework offers a more granular vocabulary for explaining why some Chinese localities exhibit strong service delivery despite high corruption exposure — competence and purchase are not mutually exclusive — while others descend into extractive dysfunction once the investment logic crowds out both merit and loyalty as viable routes to advancement.
Looking forward, this line of research opens several productive avenues for both political scientists and development practitioners. Empirically, it invites more fine-grained subnational studies that can identify the structural triggers — fiscal decentralization, land-based revenue dependence, weak horizontal oversight — that tip a locality's selection regime toward the investment-state pattern, and whether Xi-era recentralization efforts have genuinely reduced this tendency or merely displaced it into less visible channels. Comparatively, researchers examining ODA governance and civil-society oversight in other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian contexts would benefit from testing whether an analogous "purchase of office" dynamic operates in aid-dependent bureaucracies, where donor funds themselves can become the rent base that inflates the price of appointment. For practitioners designing anti-corruption or governance-strengthening interventions, the central lesson is that institutional reforms aimed solely at improving performance metrics or breaking factional networks may leave the market for purchased office fully intact; durable reform likely requires attacking the liquidity of that market directly, by constraining the discretionary rents that make bureaucratic positions worth buying in the first place. In this sense, Zhu's tripartite framework does more than refine an academic debate over Chinese elite politics — it offers a diagnostic tool for anyone seeking to understand why corruption persists, mutates, and sometimes stabilizes into a durable feature of governance rather than a transient pathology awaiting eradication.
Sources: - [Bribery as a Path to Power in China? (JCA blog, review by Jonghyuk Lee)](https://journalofcontemporaryasia.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/bribery-as-a-path-to-power-in-china/) - [Professor Jiangnan Zhu published a new open access book — HKU Department of Politics and Public Administration](https://ppa.hku.hk/news-and-events/professor-jiangnan-zhu-published-a-new-open-access-book-bribery-as-a-third-path-to-power-with-the-cambridge-university-press/) - [Bribery as a Third Path to Power? — Cambridge University Press (Open Access)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/bribery-as-a-third-path-to-power/FEFAB3496796DB3851F0196B42FF151A)