[JCA] Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Bribery, Legitimacy, and the Architecture of Power in Xi-Era China
The question of how officials rise within China's one-party hierarchy has long occupied comparative political economists, not merely as a matter of domestic Chinese governance but as a lens onto the durability of authoritarian rule more broadly. For decades, the dominant scholarly framework rested on a binary: officials advanced either because they delivered measurable economic performance — the so-called "meritocratic" or tournament model associated with China's rapid growth — or because they cultivated patronage ties, embedding themselves in factional networks built on shared origin, mentorship, or personal loyalty to a superior. Jiangnan Zhu's recent work, Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage, published as a Cambridge Elements monograph and reviewed in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, unsettles this binary by introducing a third, previously undertheorized pathway: the direct purchase of office through bribery. At a moment when anti-corruption campaigns, elite purges, and questions about regime resilience dominate analysis of Chinese politics, Zhu's intervention is timely, offering a more granular and empirically grounded account of how power is actually allocated inside the party-state.
Zhu's core contribution is a tripartite framework — performance, patronage, and purchase — built on two original datasets: one tracking 280 high-ranking officials arrested between 2012 and 2022, and another analyzing 460 court judgments involving lower-level corruption cases. The scale of the finding is striking: 83% of the "big tigers" captured in Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign were found to have engaged in some form of office-selling, and the practice recurs across administrative tiers, from township cadres to vice-provincial leaders. Rather than treating bribery merely as a symptom of moral failure or an aberration corrected by enforcement, Zhu argues it functions as an institutionalized, parallel selection mechanism — one that can substitute for, compete with, or even reinforce the performance and patronage channels that scholars have traditionally emphasized. Particularly notable is her finding that prices for office vary systematically by sector, with positions tied to state-owned enterprises commanding the highest premiums, and that corrupt promotion practices cluster regionally, suggesting not isolated venality but localized institutionalization — pockets of the bureaucracy where money has become an accepted, almost normalized, currency of advancement.
This finding carries significant weight for how researchers and practitioners understand political economy in China and, by extension, in other single-party or dominant-party systems where formal accountability mechanisms are weak. The performance-patronage debate has historically shaped external assessments of Chinese governance quality — the meritocratic framing in particular has been mobilized, both by Chinese officials and by some Western scholars, as an implicit counterpoint to electoral democracy, suggesting that competitive promotion based on economic delivery could substitute for competitive elections in producing capable leadership. Zhu's "purchase paradigm" complicates that narrative considerably. If financial transactions can independently determine who reaches positions of authority — sometimes superseding both competence and loyalty — then the meritocratic legitimation strategy that has underpinned much of the party's domestic and international self-presentation rests on shakier empirical ground than previously assumed. This has direct relevance for how development institutions, investors, and civil society actors assess governance risk in China-linked projects, particularly those involving state-owned enterprises, where Zhu's data suggests bribery-driven selection is most concentrated.
Placed in a broader regional and global context, Zhu's findings resonate with a wider literature on the political economy of corruption in aid-dependent and semi-authoritarian states, where scholars have long debated whether corruption functions as "sand in the wheels," obstructing development, or as "grease," enabling transactions in institutionally thin environments. What distinguishes the Chinese case as Zhu presents it is the sheer institutional sophistication of the practice — it is not petty, ad hoc bribery but a structured market for office that intersects with the party's own personnel management apparatus, the very system designed to instill discipline and loyalty. This has implications for how ODA and governance-focused institutions evaluate reform partners: anti-corruption campaigns of the kind Xi Jinping has pursued since 2012 may reduce the visibility of office-selling without eliminating its underlying logic, since the campaigns operate through the same opaque, patronage-inflected personnel system that enabled the practice in the first place. For researchers studying civil society space and political accountability in China, this suggests that formal anti-corruption enforcement, however aggressive, cannot substitute for the kind of independent oversight, media scrutiny, and civil society monitoring that in other contexts constrain office-selling — mechanisms that remain tightly circumscribed within China's political system.
The policy and research implications extend well beyond China studies narrowly construed. For development economists and governance analysts working across Southeast, South, and Central Asia — regions where Chinese state-owned enterprises and Belt and Road-linked financing increasingly shape infrastructure and investment landscapes — Zhu's work offers a cautionary analytic tool: local personnel appointments within China-linked SOEs and provincial bureaucracies cannot be assumed to reflect either competence or reliable loyalty networks, but may instead reflect an underlying market logic that could affect project implementation, procurement integrity, and partner reliability. For comparative political scientists, the tripartite framework invites replication studies in other dominant-party or hybrid regimes — Vietnam, and parts of Central Asia and Africa — where similar informal markets for office may exist but have not yet been systematically documented with comparable rigor.
Looking forward, Zhu's monograph should prompt both empirical extension and methodological reflection. The reliance on prosecuted corruption cases as a data source is itself revealing but incomplete — it captures the fraction of the purchase market exposed by politically selective enforcement, likely undercounting the true scale of the phenomenon while overrepresenting cases where anti-corruption campaigns intersected with factional score-settling. Future research would benefit from triangulating court records with leaked internal party documents, survey-based elite studies, or comparative fieldwork in the SOE sectors Zhu identifies as price-setting hubs. For practitioners in the development and governance space, the study is a reminder that institutional narratives of meritocratic efficiency deserve continual empirical scrutiny rather than acceptance at face value, and that understanding how power is actually allocated — rather than how it is officially described — remains foundational to assessing political risk, institutional resilience, and the prospects for accountable governance in China and comparable systems.
Sources: - [Bribery as a Third Path to Power? — Cambridge Elements](https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/bribery-as-a-third-path-to-power/FEFAB3496796DB3851F0196B42FF151A) - [Bribery as a Path to Power in China? — Journal of Contemporary Asia review](https://journalofcontemporaryasia.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/bribery-as-a-path-to-power-in-china/) - [Professor Jiangnan Zhu — 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/)
Note for the record: the title/journal listed in the task (Journal of Contemporary Asia, as a journal article) actually corresponds to a Cambridge Elements open-access monograph by Jiangnan Zhu, which JCA reviewed rather than published as a standalone article — I grounded the piece in that verified source material rather than inventing findings for an unverified journal article.