[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: 2026-09-28
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
Jiangnan Zhu (University of Hong Kong, Department of Politics and Public Administration)의 저작을 다룬 Journal of Contemporary Asia 서평 정보를 확보하여 이를 토대로 사실에 근거한 분석 기사를 작성하겠습니다.
China's anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping, now well into its second decade, has disciplined more than a million officials since 2012, yet the question of how money actually moves people up the Communist Party's career ladder has remained curiously underexamined in political science. Into this gap steps Jiangnan Zhu, a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong, whose open-access book "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage" was published by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Elements in Chinese Economy and Governance series. The work is the subject of a review essay by Jonghyuk Lee of the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, published on the Journal of Contemporary Asia's platform on 11 June 2026. That a leading Southeast and East Asian studies journal devotes space to this question underscores how central elite selection has become to understanding whether China's governance model can sustain the performance legitimacy on which the Party has long staked its rule.
Zhu's central intervention is theoretical as much as empirical: she argues that political scientists studying Chinese cadre promotion have for decades organized their explanations around a binary of performance (meritocratic advancement based on economic and administrative results) versus patronage (advancement through personal loyalty and factional networks). Her book proposes a third, independent pathway — "purchase," meaning the direct or indirect buying of office through bribery — and insists this is analytically distinct from patronage rather than a mere variant of it. As Lee's review summarizes, Zhu frames this as "loyalty via bribery," a mechanism in which financial transactions themselves, not pre-existing personal ties, become the currency of trust between patron and client. Crucially, Lee notes that Zhu does not overreach: she stops short of claiming bribery has displaced competence or loyalty as the dominant selection logic, instead theorizing the conditions under which monetary inducement can supersede both. That caution is itself notable, since it resists the temptation — common in journalistic treatments of Chinese corruption — to reduce the entire cadre system to venality.
Methodologically, the study draws on two original, self-compiled datasets that allow Zhu to trace patterns of office-selling across China's administrative hierarchy, a design choice that matters for the broader field of comparative authoritarian politics. Much of the existing literature on Chinese elite mobility, including earlier work by scholars such as Melanie Manion on cadre management, has relied on aggregate promotion records or provincial GDP performance as proxies for meritocratic selection, leaving the actual mechanics of illicit payment largely invisible. Zhu's approach connects to a parallel body of research on grassroots bribery in China, including survey-experimental work published in the Journal of Contemporary China in 2022, which similarly sought to move beyond anecdote toward systematic measurement of corrupt exchange. Read together, these efforts signal a broader methodological shift in China studies: away from treating corruption as a residual or aberrant phenomenon and toward treating it as a structured, patterned feature of the political economy that can be modeled with the same rigor applied to formal institutions.
The implications extend well beyond China's borders, into the comparative political economy of governance that institutions like IOCSS track across the developing and middle-income world. Where bribery functions as a genuine pathway to power rather than a mere transactional cost of doing business, it reshapes the incentive structures facing officials who administer development programs, procurement, and — pertinent to ODA practitioners — the allocation of aid-adjacent resources such as infrastructure contracts and local implementation partnerships. Zhu's tripartite framework offers a vocabulary that researchers working on civil society and anti-corruption programming in other one-party or dominant-party systems — from Vietnam to parts of Central Asia — could adapt to ask whether their own "meritocracy versus patronage" debates have likewise overlooked a purchase-based third path. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's decision to platform this review situates the book within its long-standing mandate to examine political economy across Asia, placing Chinese cadre corruption alongside the journal's historical coverage of political selection dynamics elsewhere in the region.
For policy analysts and anti-corruption practitioners, the significance of Zhu's framework lies in its refusal of easy binaries: if purchase operates as a distinct and sometimes dominant channel under identifiable structural conditions, then anti-corruption reforms targeting only patronage networks — through, for instance, term limits, rotation policies, or restrictions on factional appointments — may leave the purchase pathway untouched or even inadvertently strengthen it by making informal loyalty ties riskier relative to straightforward payment. This has direct relevance for donor and multilateral institutions designing governance-conditionality programs, since interventions calibrated only to reduce nepotism will misdiagnose systems where money, not kinship or faction, is the primary currency of advancement. Lee's review, by taking Zhu's caution seriously rather than sensationalizing the "buying and selling of government offices" framing, models the kind of measured scholarly engagement that policy audiences should demand before translating academic findings into program design.
Looking forward, Zhu's book — and Lee's engagement with it in the Journal of Contemporary Asia — opens several lines of inquiry that researchers and practitioners alike would do well to pursue. Comparative replication of the two-dataset methodology in other Party-state or dominant-party contexts would test whether "purchase" is a China-specific artifact of its particular disciplinary and promotion architecture or a more generalizable feature of authoritarian elite selection. For practitioners in the ODA and governance-reform space, the immediate task is more modest but no less important: incorporating a purchase-aware lens into corruption risk assessments, rather than defaulting to the performance-patronage dichotomy that has structured both academic and donor-agency thinking for decades. As China's own disciplinary apparatus continues to prosecute officials under Xi Jinping's extended anti-corruption drive, Zhu's tripartite model offers a more precise diagnostic vocabulary for distinguishing which officials are being punished for incompetence, for disloyalty, or for having, in effect, purchased a career that competence and loyalty alone would not have earned them.