[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: 2026-09-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Bribery has long been treated as a corrosive by-product of authoritarian governance, a symptom of institutional decay rather than a mechanism of it. Yet as China's political system enters its fourth decade of reform-era institutionalization, a growing body of scholarship is pressing a more uncomfortable question: what if venality is not merely tolerated within the Chinese Communist Party's cadre system but functions as an actual channel of upward mobility, operating alongside — and sometimes in place of — the two variables that have dominated the literature, performance (economic growth delivered by local officials) and patronage (factional ties to senior leaders)? This reframing arrives at a moment when China's anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping has entered its second decade, when questions about elite cohesion and succession politics are newly salient amid slowing growth, and when comparative authoritarianism scholars are increasingly skeptical that any single-variable model can explain cadre advancement in a system as vast and opaque as China's. The article's core contribution is to take bribery seriously as a strategy rather than a pathology, asking whether officials who pay their way into networks of obligation are engaging in a rational, if illicit, investment strategy that yields returns in promotion.
The analytical thrust of the piece builds on a well-established debate in the China politics literature, associated with scholars such as Victor Shih, Hongbin Li, Pierre Landry and Yuen Yuen Ang, over whether "who gets promoted" in China is best explained by GDP growth performance (the meritocracy thesis) or by ties to powerful patrons (the factionalism thesis). Both models, despite their disagreements, share an assumption that promotion is fundamentally a matter of demonstrated value to the regime, whether economic or political. The bribery-as-mobility argument disrupts this binary by treating corrupt exchange as its own currency of advancement — not simply oiling the wheels of patronage networks that already exist, but actively constructing them. An official without inherited factional ties or standout growth numbers can, on this account, purchase access to a sponsor through gifts, kickbacks, or facilitation of a superior's own rent-seeking, effectively buying the loyalty test that patronage networks are usually built on through years of service or personal connection. This matters analytically because it implies bribery is not simply a market failure exploiting weak institutions, but can be an alternative institution in its own right, one that substitutes for the slower, more exclusive channels of promotion available through pure meritocracy or inherited patronage. Using the extensive corruption case files that have become newly available through China's disciplinary inspection and judicial disclosure processes — court verdicts, Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) case summaries, and biographic promotion records — this line of research is able to move beyond the correlational GDP-and-promotion regressions of earlier scholarship toward more granular evidence of what officials were actually doing, and for whom, when bribes changed hands.
The implications extend well beyond a narrow debate among China specialists and speak directly to the broader political economy of development and governance in hybrid and authoritarian regimes. Civil society researchers and ODA practitioners working across Southeast Asia, Africa and Central Asia have long grappled with the puzzle of "developmental corruption" — systems where graft coexists with, and sometimes facilitates, rapid economic growth, as documented in cases from Suharto's Indonesia to contemporary Vietnam and Ethiopia. If bribery functions as a genuine selection mechanism for elite advancement in China rather than simple leakage, it suggests that anti-corruption reforms narrowly targeting individual transactions may miss the structural function corruption plays in cadre allocation and political control. This has direct relevance for how international donors, governance indices, and multilateral development banks assess "state capacity" and "institutional quality" in aid-recipient and partner countries: a regime that channels bribery into a functional, if illicit, promotion pipeline may exhibit far greater elite cohesion and administrative continuity than a Weberian meritocracy model would predict, complicating governance scorecards such as the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators or Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, which tend to treat corruption purely as a negative externality rather than as a potentially load-bearing institutional feature.
For China specifically, the timing of this scholarship intersects with acute questions about the durability of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign and its relationship to elite loyalty. If bribery has historically served as a mechanism through which officials cemented informal obligations that later translated into political protection and advancement, then the sweeping purges since 2012 — which have felled provincial party secretaries, PLA generals, and even Politburo-level figures — can be read not only as a rule-of-law or discipline campaign but as an assault on a rival selection system that had grown parallel to, and in tension with, formal meritocratic and patronage channels. This reading helps explain both the scale of the campaign and its selective, at times seemingly arbitrary, targeting: purges may fall disproportionately on officials whose promotion pathways ran through bribery networks that Xi's faction did not control, rather than being distributed evenly according to the severity of individual corrupt acts. It also bears on succession politics ahead of the 21st Party Congress, since a regime that has spent a decade dismantling bribery-based promotion pipelines faces the challenge of rebuilding legitimate channels of loyalty and vetting fast enough to avoid destabilizing elite cohesion — a dynamic with parallels in other one-party and dominant-party systems where anti-graft campaigns have doubled as instruments of factional consolidation, from Vietnam's "blazing furnace" campaign to Saudi Arabia's 2017 Ritz-Carlton purge.
Looking forward, this research agenda opens several productive lines of inquiry for scholars and practitioners of comparative authoritarianism and governance. Methodologically, the use of adjudicated corruption case files as a data source for studying elite selection — rather than merely studying corruption's economic costs — offers a template other researchers could apply to similarly opaque systems, from Russia's regional governorships to Gulf state bureaucracies, provided similar disclosure regimes exist or can be approximated through leaked or investigative sources. For policy communities engaged in governance reform and civil society strengthening, the finding that bribery can operate as a functional selection mechanism rather than pure friction argues for more sophisticated theories of change in anti-corruption programming, ones that account for the political function corruption serves for incumbent elites before assuming that transparency reforms alone will be adopted or sustained. And for those tracking China's political trajectory specifically, the durability of Xi's anti-graft campaign, and whatever selection mechanism eventually replaces the networks it has dismantled, will be a critical indicator of whether China is converging toward more institutionalized, rules-based cadre management or simply substituting one informal, personalistic selection logic for another — a question with consequences not only for China's domestic governance but for the predictability of its foreign and development policy behavior as a global actor.