[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: 2026-09-27
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Corruption in China has moved from a peripheral irritant to a central axis of elite politics since Xi Jinping launched the anti-corruption campaign coordinated through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) in 2012, a campaign that has by now removed more than 100 provincial- and ministerial-level officials, including former Politburo members Zhou Yongkang and Sun Zhengcai. Against this backdrop, a 2026 article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage," asks a question that speaks directly to how outside observers should read the endless discipline-inspection announcements coming out of Beijing: are these purges simply punishing corrupt officials, or are they exposing an entrenched, third channel through which cadres actually rise — one that operates alongside, and sometimes displaces, the two mechanisms scholars have long treated as dominant. This matters for anyone tracking China's governance trajectory because the answer shapes whether reformers, investors, and foreign partners should expect meritocratic recruitment to reassert itself as Xi's tenure extends toward a prospective 21st Party Congress in 2027, or whether venal exchange has become a durable structural feature of cadre advancement that outlasts any single leader's disciplinary drive.
The article's title signals its intervention against two well-established paradigms in the study of Chinese elite politics. The first is the "performance" or meritocratic model, associated with the GDP-tournament thesis advanced by Hongbin Li and Li-An Zhou in their influential 2005 study, which argued that local officials in China are promoted substantially on the basis of measurable economic outcomes achieved in their jurisdictions, producing a form of policy-relevant competition among cadres. The second is the "patronage" or factional model, most closely associated with Victor Shih's work on factions and finance in the Chinese Communist Party, which holds that career advancement depends heavily on personal ties to powerful patrons and informal networks that persist across bureaucratic postings. By framing bribery as a possible "third path," the Journal of Contemporary Asia article implicitly argues that neither economic output nor factional loyalty fully accounts for observed patterns of promotion in China, and that direct monetary exchange — the sale and purchase of positions, sometimes documented in CCDI case files and court verdicts — constitutes an analytically distinct selection mechanism rather than a mere byproduct or corruption of the other two.
This reframing resonates with comparative political economy well beyond China. In Vietnam, where the ruling Communist Party has run its own parallel anti-corruption "blazing furnace" campaign under General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and his successors, researchers have similarly documented informal markets for provincial and ministerial appointments that coexist with formal cadre-evaluation systems. In Indonesia, studies of "money politics" in regional head elections describe candidates purchasing party nominations and local bureaucratic support, a dynamic that Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index has repeatedly flagged when ranking Southeast and East Asian governance quality. Positioning China's cadre market alongside these cases suggests that the sale of office is not an aberration confined to weakly institutionalized states but can emerge inside highly disciplined, single-party systems that maintain elaborate meritocratic and patronage apparatuses on paper. For civil-society and governance researchers, this is a reminder that formal personnel institutions — performance metrics, factional patronage networks — can operate simultaneously with informal, transactional markets rather than being cleanly supplanted by them.
The policy implications extend into how international donors, multilateral institutions, and development researchers evaluate governance risk in China and comparable one-party or dominant-party systems. Anti-corruption conditionality embedded in World Bank and Asian Development Bank governance indicators typically treats corruption as a drag on institutional quality to be measured and reduced, but the Journal of Contemporary Asia article's framing implies a more unsettling possibility: that bribery functions as an active selection mechanism shaping who governs, not simply a leakage that reduces the efficiency of an otherwise merit-based or patronage-based system. If cadres who purchase promotion behave differently in office — prioritizing rent extraction over the local economic performance that the GDP-tournament literature assumes officials pursue — then anti-corruption enforcement led by bodies like the CCDI is not only a disciplinary tool but a de facto instrument of political selection in its own right, retroactively reshaping which officials survive in the pipeline toward provincial and national leadership. This has direct relevance for how ODA-adjacent governance assessments and civil-society monitoring of China's provincial administrations should be calibrated, since standard performance-based proxies for official quality may be confounded by an unobserved bribery channel.
Looking forward, the article's contribution invites researchers and practitioners to treat China's cadre-promotion system as a three-mechanism equilibrium rather than a two-variable contest between output and connections, and to ask how the balance among performance, patronage, and bribery shifts across the personnel reshuffles that will precede the 21st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party expected in 2027. Practitioners tracking China's political economy — whether in academic institutions like the publishers of the Journal of Contemporary Asia, or in civil-society organizations monitoring governance quality across Asia — should watch whether Xi Jinping's discipline apparatus continues to expose venal promotion practices at the pace seen since 2012, and whether comparative cases such as Vietnam's parallel anti-corruption drive or Indonesia's money politics in regional elections offer transferable lessons about how a "third path to power" is eventually curbed, tolerated, or institutionalized. The broader research agenda this opens is whether bribery-based selection, once documented empirically rather than treated as background noise, forces a rewriting of the meritocracy-versus-patronage debate that has structured the study of authoritarian personnel politics for two decades.