[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: 2026-09-24
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Based on real information found via web search (not fabricated), here is the article:
Corruption within one-party political systems has moved from a peripheral concern to a central question in the study of authoritarian governance and global political economy, particularly as China's anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping has swept through the party-state apparatus since 2012. A new work reviewed in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in a piece published June 11, 2026 by Jonghyuk Lee of Sungkyunkwan University's Department of Political Science and Diplomacy addresses this terrain directly. The book under review, Jiangnan Zhu's Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage, published as an open-access volume in the Cambridge Elements in Chinese Economy and Governance series in May 2026, asks how officials actually rise within China's bureaucratic hierarchy once the conventional explanatory categories of merit and loyalty are set aside. For researchers and practitioners tracking governance quality in states that receive or administer development assistance, the question of how power is allocated inside a ruling party is not academic trivia — it shapes the reliability of counterpart institutions, the predictability of regulatory enforcement, and the incentives facing officials who interact with foreign aid, investment, and civil society programming.
Zhu, based at the University of Hong Kong, builds her argument on an unusually large empirical base. As detailed in her book, Dataset A comprises 280 senior officials — so-called "tigers" — arrested between 2012 and 2022, drawn from Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announcements and state media; of these, 234 individuals, or 83%, were found to have been involved in buying or selling government positions, with the group concentrated at the vice-provincial level. Dataset B extends the analysis downward, covering 460 court judgments collected from China Judgment Online between 2013 and 2022 and documenting more than 2,000 individual transactions among low- and mid-level officials across sectors including state-owned enterprises, public security, and education. On this foundation, Zhu proposes a tripartite framework in which performance (competence-based advancement), patronage (loyalty-based networks), and purchase (monetary acquisition of office) operate simultaneously rather than as competing, mutually exclusive logics. As Lee's review summarizes the central claim, "loyalty via bribery" functions as a mechanism distinct from conventional patronage rooted in shared background or long-standing relationships — under certain structural conditions, Zhu argues, money supersedes both competence and loyalty as the operative currency of advancement.
The granularity of Zhu's findings is what gives the argument its regional and comparative weight. Her data show striking price variation by sector: positions in state-owned enterprises commanded an average of RMB 261,632, compared with RMB 22,581 for posts in public health, indicating that office-selling functions as something closer to a differentiated market than a uniform practice of graft. Geographically, corruption intensity clusters in five central provinces — Hubei, Henan, Anhui, Shandong, and Jiangsu — a pattern that invites comparison with other developing and middle-income states where subnational governance capacity varies sharply by region, a recurring concern in ODA-related governance assessments conducted by institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. Zhu also documents network effects in which high-ranking officials simultaneously pay bribes to multiple superiors, described as "co-sellers," producing interlocking corruption networks rather than isolated bilateral transactions. Notably, the transactions catalogued extend well beyond promotion itself, encompassing lateral transfers, school admissions, favorable performance assessments, and even payments simply to retain an existing position — suggesting that "purchase" as a mode of political selection is embedded throughout routine bureaucratic life rather than confined to dramatic promotion battles.
For policy analysts and researchers working on civil society, governance, and political economy in Asia, the significance of Zhu's framework — as Lee's review frames it — lies in its refusal to treat bribery as a mere deviation from an otherwise meritocratic or clientelist system. Instead, the book describes a "coexistence and contestation of multiple state models": a meritocratic state prioritizing competence, a clientelist state built on loyalty networks, and what Zhu terms an investment state bound by monetary calculation. This has direct implications for how outside observers — including donor agencies, civil society organizations, and multilateral institutions engaging with Chinese counterparts or studying comparable one-party and dominant-party systems elsewhere in Asia — interpret the durability of anti-corruption campaigns. If office-purchase is as structurally embedded as Zhu's 83% figure among arrested "tigers" suggests, campaigns aimed at individual officials may address symptoms without altering the underlying market logic that produced 2,000-plus documented transactions in Dataset B alone. This reframing matters for research design as well: studies of political selection that rely solely on performance metrics or patronage-network mapping risk missing a substantial share of the actual allocative mechanism at work.
Looking forward, Zhu's tripartite framework opens several lines of inquiry that practitioners and scholars in development and governance studies would do well to track. One is methodological: the reliance on Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announcements and court judgments as primary data sources means the visible cases are, by definition, those the party-state chose to prosecute or publicize, and future research will need to grapple with how this selection bias shapes the picture of where and how office-purchase concentrates, including whether the five-province pattern identified by Zhu reflects genuine geographic concentration or differential enforcement intensity. A second is comparative: as Lee's review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia makes clear, the book's core contribution is to treat monetary exchange as an independent selection mechanism rather than a corruption of merit or loyalty systems, a distinction that invites testing against political selection processes in other one-party and dominant-party contexts across Southeast and South Asia where civil society organizations and aid programs must navigate similarly opaque bureaucratic advancement systems. For IOCSS's own research agenda on ODA, civil society, and political economy, Zhu's work is a reminder that governance risk assessments benchmarked purely against formal anti-corruption metrics may understate how deeply monetized advancement structures shape the incentives of the officials that development programs ultimately depend on.