[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: 2026-09-23
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Bribery, elite advancement, and the limits of China's meritocracy narrative: a review of Jiangnan Zhu's tripartite framework
Political selection in China has long been read through two competing lenses: a meritocratic story in which officials rise because they deliver economic performance, and a patronage story in which advancement depends on personal loyalty and factional ties. This binary has shaped how Western and Asian scholars alike explain the resilience of the Chinese Communist Party's governance model, and it has also shaped how outside observers, including development agencies assessing partner-country governance risk, interpret elite behavior inside single-party systems. A new work reviewed in the Journal of Contemporary Asia disrupts that binary directly. Jiangnan Zhu, of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong, argues in "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage" that money itself constitutes an independent channel of political advancement, separate from both competence and loyalty. The timing matters: more than a decade into Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, questions about whether personnel corruption has actually been curtailed, or merely reorganized, remain central to how analysts assess the durability and predictability of China's political economy.
Zhu's core contribution, as summarized in the Journal of Contemporary Asia review authored by Jonghyuk Lee of Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, is a tripartite reframing of political selection. Rather than treating corruption as a deviation from an otherwise meritocratic or clientelist system, Zhu proposes that China's administrative apparatus is better understood as the coexistence of three governance logics simultaneously: a meritocratic state that rewards competence, a clientelist state that rewards loyalty built on shared experience and long-term ties, and what she terms an investment state, in which advancement is bound to monetary exchange. The book, published by Cambridge University Press as an open-access title in the Cambridge Elements in Chinese Economy and Governance series, builds this argument on two self-compiled datasets and what Lee describes as a "dual perspective" combining the study of corruption with the study of elite mobility. This is methodologically significant because the buying and selling of government offices is precisely the kind of transaction that resists documentation; officials have every incentive to conceal it, and conventional promotion records cannot distinguish a bribe-driven appointment from a merit-driven one. By constructing original data to probe this hidden channel, Zhu's project pushes into territory that prior scholarship on Chinese cadre management, dominated by performance-based and patronage-based models, has been structurally unable to reach.
The finding that carries the most weight, according to the review, is that under certain structural conditions bribery can override both competence and loyalty as a pathway to power. This is a stronger claim than simply noting that corruption exists alongside meritocratic promotion; it suggests that in some administrative contexts, the market for offices functions as its own selection mechanism with its own logic, participants, and payoffs. This matters well beyond China specialists. Studies of political selection in single-party and dominant-party systems across Asia, from Vietnam's cadre rotation practices to patronage-based promotion within Cambodia's ruling party structures, have generally assumed that informal exchange operates as a supplement to, rather than a substitute for, patronage networks. Zhu's investment-state concept, by treating monetary transaction as an analytically distinct category rather than a corrupted variant of patronage, offers a template that comparative scholars of civil society and governance elsewhere in the region may find useful when the loyalty-versus-competence framework fails to explain observed promotion patterns.
For institutions engaged in development cooperation and governance assessment, the implications of this research extend into how corruption risk is modeled in partner countries. Donor agencies and multilateral development banks routinely rely on governance indicators that implicitly assume corruption is either petty and transactional (bribes for services) or grand and embezzlement-based (diversion of public funds), with political appointment corruption treated as a subset of patronage or elite capture. Zhu's framework suggests that personnel markets, the literal purchase of political office, can operate as a governance subsystem in their own right, with its own equilibrium and its own resistance to conventional anti-corruption tools. If replicated or extended to other single-party or dominant-party contexts relevant to ODA programming, this would argue for governance risk assessments that separately track personnel-market corruption rather than folding it into broader "clientelism" or "grand corruption" indices, since the incentives and remedies for each may differ substantially. It also bears on how researchers interpret the durability of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign: if bribery-driven advancement persists as a structurally distinct channel rather than a symptom of weak enforcement, campaigns targeting individual corrupt officials may address symptoms without altering the underlying market for office.
Zhu's tripartite model, as presented through the Journal of Contemporary Asia review of her Cambridge Elements volume, ultimately reframes a long-standing debate rather than resolving it. The open-access nature of the publication, released through Cambridge University Press, makes the two self-compiled datasets and the underlying argument accessible to researchers across the region who study political economy, civil society, and governance without the paywall barriers that often limit engagement with China-focused political science. For practitioners assessing partner-country institutional risk and for scholars of comparative authoritarianism, the next useful step is empirical: testing whether an investment-state logic analogous to what Zhu documents in China's cadre system appears in other dominant-party or single-party contexts where ODA and governance reform programming operate, and whether anti-corruption interventions designed around patronage assumptions are correctly calibrated when the underlying mechanism is instead a market for office. Until that comparative work is done, Zhu's contribution stands as a caution against treating meritocracy and patronage as the only two currencies of power in authoritarian political selection.