[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: 2026-09-26
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Bribery, patronage, and merit have long been treated as competing lenses through which scholars explain who rises to power inside China's one-party state, but a growing body of research now argues that these categories obscure as much as they reveal. This tension sits at the center of Jiangnan Zhu's newly published work, "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage," released by Cambridge University Press in 2026 as part of the Cambridge Elements series on Chinese Economy and Governance. The timing matters: as China's anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping enters its second decade and as international donors and governance analysts continue to debate whether authoritarian systems can sustain competent administration, understanding the actual mechanics of elite selection inside the Chinese Communist Party has direct bearing on how outside observers assess the durability and quality of the country's governing institutions.
Zhu, a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong, builds her argument on an unusually large empirical base: more than 2,500 documented cases of office-purchase, the practice in which officials solicit or accept bribes from subordinates in exchange for influence over recruitment, appointment, or promotion decisions. From this dataset she constructs a tripartite framework — performance, patronage, and purchase — that reframes the long-standing scholarly debate over whether China's political system rewards competence or personal loyalty. Rather than treating money as a distortion layered atop meritocratic or clientelist systems, Zhu argues that "loyalty via bribery" constitutes a distinct mechanism of political selection, one that differs fundamentally from traditional patronage rooted in shared experience and long-term ties. In her account, three governance logics coexist within the same administrative apparatus: a meritocratic state that prioritizes demonstrated competence, a clientelist state that rewards loyalty built through personal networks, and what she terms an investment state, in which access to office is effectively purchased and career advancement becomes a return on capital outlaid to a patron.
This tripartite model speaks to broader questions that extend well beyond China's borders and into the comparative political economy of governance that institutions like IOCSS track across the developing world. Debates over whether "good governance" conditionalities attached to ODA and multilateral lending can meaningfully improve institutional quality have long assumed a binary between merit-based bureaucracies and patronage-driven ones; Zhu's insertion of a monetized third path complicates that binary considerably. If office-purchase functions as an independent selection mechanism rather than mere corruption at the margins of an otherwise meritocratic or clientelist system, then governance reform programs that focus narrowly on either strengthening performance metrics or breaking patronage networks may miss a structurally distinct channel through which power is allocated. This has resonance for civil society and anti-corruption researchers working across Asia and beyond, where personnel corruption — the buying and selling of government positions — remains a persistent but comparatively understudied phenomenon relative to procurement fraud or embezzlement, the forms of corruption that typically dominate donor-funded anti-corruption programming.
The policy and research implications are significant on two fronts. First, for scholars and practitioners assessing the effectiveness of China's own disciplinary and anti-corruption apparatus, Zhu's framework suggests that campaigns targeting individual bribe-takers may leave the underlying structural incentive for office-purchase intact so long as career advancement remains bound to informal exchange relationships rather than transparent, rule-bound processes. Second, for researchers studying political selection in other single-party or dominant-party systems, the book offers an analytical vocabulary — performance, patronage, purchase — that can be applied comparatively to examine whether similar investment-state dynamics operate in other contexts where formal meritocratic institutions coexist with informal markets for office. The book has already drawn scholarly attention outside its immediate field: a review by Jonghyuk Lee of Sungkyunkwan University, published via the Journal of Contemporary Asia in mid-2026, engages directly with Zhu's argument that monetary exchange can operate as an independent axis of political selection rather than a mere corruption of meritocratic or clientelist logics, underscoring the extent to which the book is reshaping how China specialists characterize the country's cadre management system.
Notably, Zhu's book was released as an open-access publication, a choice that reflects a broader shift among researchers working on sensitive governance topics inside China toward maximizing accessibility for policymakers, journalists, and civil society researchers who may lack access to costly academic publications. For practitioners engaged in governance and anti-corruption work in the region, the immediate takeaway is methodological as much as substantive: Zhu's reliance on a large, systematically coded set of office-purchase cases demonstrates that personnel corruption, often dismissed as anecdotal or impossible to study systematically given its clandestine nature, can in fact be documented and analyzed at scale. Future research building on this approach — whether applied to other provinces within China, other single-party systems, or hybrid regimes that combine formal civil service exams with informal patronage networks — will likely test whether the investment-state logic Zhu identifies is a distinctly Chinese phenomenon tied to the specific incentive structures of cadre promotion under the CCP, or a more generalizable feature of political systems wherever formal selection criteria leave room for informal, monetized exchange. Either way, the book's central contribution is to insist that observers of political selection stop treating bribery as noise around the meritocracy-versus-patronage axis and start treating it as a structural feature that demands its own explanatory account.