[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: 2026-09-22
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage, forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2026, arrives at a moment when the durability of one-party rule in China is once again a live question for scholars of authoritarian governance and for practitioners tracking political risk in Asia. For over a decade, the dominant academic narrative has explained the Chinese Communist Party's cadre promotion system through two competing logics: a meritocratic "performance" model, in which local officials are promoted for delivering GDP growth and policy targets, and a "patronage" model, in which factional loyalty and personal ties (guanxi) to senior leaders determine advancement. By posing bribery as a possible "third path," the article's title signals an attempt to move the China governance literature past this performance-versus-patronage dichotomy and toward a more transactional account of how power is actually distributed inside the party-state. This matters well beyond China specialists: donor agencies, multilateral development banks, and civil society organizations that engage with China-linked development finance and Belt and Road-adjacent institutions all depend on accurate models of how Chinese officials are selected, since personnel incentives shape everything from local infrastructure approvals to environmental enforcement.
The analytical stakes of the article's framing are significant because they intersect with one of the signature policy initiatives of the Xi Jinping era: the anti-corruption campaign launched in 2012 and institutionalized through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and the National Supervisory Commission established in 2018. Official CCP discourse has long presented corruption and political promotion as opposites — bribery is framed as a pathology to be purged so that "clean" performance-based or loyalty-based selection can function properly. A study that instead treats bribery as a selection mechanism in its own right implicitly challenges this official narrative, suggesting that graft may operate not merely as rent-seeking on the margins of the system but as a functional, if illicit, currency through which officials signal loyalty, mobilize patrons, or purchase advancement when performance metrics are ambiguous or gameable. This reframing echoes strands of the China political economy literature associated with scholars such as Yuen Yuen Ang, whose work on "access money" corruption distinguishes profit-sharing bribery embedded in local growth coalitions from more predatory forms of extraction, and Victor Shih, whose research on factional politics and capital allocation has long argued that formal performance indicators understate the role of informal exchange in cadre careers.
Placed against broader regional and global trends, the article's China-specific inquiry resonates with a wider pattern researchers have documented across authoritarian and hybrid regimes in Asia and beyond, where formal institutions of merit or election coexist with informal markets for office. In China's case, the absence of competitive multiparty elections means that internal party promotion functions as the analog to electoral selection in democratic systems — which is precisely why the "election" keyword attached to this article is analytically apt even though no ballot is involved: cadre evaluation conferences, provincial party congresses, and Central Committee appointments are the functional equivalent of a selectorate process. For an institute like IOCSS that tracks civil society space and governance quality across the Global South, this has direct relevance, since many recipient countries of Chinese state-directed investment and aid operate under similarly opaque promotion systems, and the informal "bribery markets" documented in China's domestic cadre system have analogues in patronage-heavy public administrations from Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa, where anti-corruption conditionalities attached to ODA frequently collide with entrenched informal selection norms.
The policy implications extend to how Western and multilateral donors calibrate governance-conditional aid and how research institutions assess political risk in China-adjacent markets. If bribery functions as a genuine "third path to power" rather than a mere byproduct of weak institutions, then anti-corruption campaigns aimed narrowly at punishing individual transgressors — the model pursued through the CCDI's disciplinary inspections — may leave the underlying selection incentives largely intact, since officials who survive the campaign may simply be those who paid more skillfully or to better-protected patrons rather than those who governed more competently. This has a direct bearing on how organizations such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and bilateral donors interpret China's own governance indicators when negotiating co-financed projects, and it should inform how civil society researchers assess claims of "meritocratic" Chinese local governance that have sometimes been invoked, including by some Western scholars in the 2010s, as an alternative model of state capacity to liberal electoral democracy. A finding that bribery operates as a parallel selection channel undercuts arguments that authoritarian meritocracy offers a stable substitute for accountability mechanisms, reinforcing the case made by transparency-focused development institutions for embedding anti-corruption safeguards structurally rather than relying on top-down disciplinary campaigns.
Looking forward, this article's contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Asia invites further comparative and empirical work that IOCSS researchers and practitioners in the ODA and civil society field should watch closely: subsequent studies could test whether the "bribery as selection mechanism" model applies differentially across China's provinces with varying levels of fiscal decentralization, or whether similar dynamics appear in other one-party and dominant-party systems that supply development finance internationally, such as Vietnam. For practitioners designing governance safeguards in China-linked development cooperation, and for researchers building comparative models of authoritarian political selection, the central lesson is that formal anti-corruption enforcement and informal promotion markets must be analyzed as interacting systems rather than as a simple binary of clean governance versus graft — a distinction with consequences for how institutions like IOCSS evaluate the political economy risks embedded in China's expanding footprint across the developing world.