[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: 2026-09-30
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
이 요청은 학술 논문 정보를 바탕으로 한 분석 기사 작성이며, 등록된 스킬(oda-master-writer/oda-word-writer/oda-hwpx-writer/kofih-consulting-proposal, oda-ppt-design, plaud-meeting-report, call-meeting-records) 중 어느 것도 이 작업에 해당하지 않습니다. 맞는 스킬이 없어 바로 작성을 진행합니다.
The question of how individuals rise to power within China's single-party system has long occupied comparative political economists, and it carries renewed weight as global attention turns to the durability of authoritarian governance models in an era of intensifying great-power competition. A forthcoming article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage," directly engages this question by challenging the two dominant explanatory frameworks that have shaped the field for decades. For institutions like IOCSS that track the political economy underpinning development cooperation and civil society space, understanding how cadres are actually selected in China is not an academic curiosity but a practical necessity: China's own domestic governance architecture increasingly informs the institutional templates it exports through bilateral aid, infrastructure lending, and party-to-party diplomacy across the Global South.
The article's title signals its central intervention: it positions itself against the two canonical accounts of elite advancement in the Chinese Communist Party. The first, the "performance" or meritocracy thesis, holds that officials are promoted largely on the basis of demonstrable economic and administrative results, an argument long associated with scholarship on China's local cadre evaluation systems. The second, the "patronage" thesis, emphasizes factional ties, mentor-protégé networks, and personal loyalty to senior leaders as the primary currency of advancement. By proposing bribery as a "third path," the article implicitly argues that neither technocratic output nor political loyalty alone adequately explains the empirical pattern of promotions and demotions observed within China's political selection process, and that monetary exchange functions as an independent, structurally embedded mechanism for career mobility rather than a mere byproduct of the other two.
This framing sits squarely within a broader wave of scholarship reassessing the anti-corruption campaign that Xi Jinping launched shortly after assuming the presidency in 2012, a campaign frequently described through the "tigers and flies" slogan and institutionally anchored in the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI). More than a decade of CCDI-driven investigations has produced an unusually rich, if politically curated, dataset of officials sanctioned for corrupt practices, and it is precisely this kind of disciplinary record that allows researchers to move beyond survey-based proxies for meritocracy or patronage and instead examine bribery as a directly observable variable in career trajectories. The keyword pairing of "China" and "election" attached to this article situates it within a literature that treats internal party selection processes, rather than competitive multiparty elections, as the relevant unit of "political selection" analysis in a one-party context — a framing choice that itself reflects how comparative political scientists have had to adapt Western electoral-accountability concepts to fit non-democratic institutional settings.
The policy and research significance of reframing bribery as a structural third path, rather than an aberration layered atop meritocratic or patronage-based systems, is considerable. For governance and anti-corruption practitioners engaging with China-adjacent development contexts, the implication is that formal anti-corruption enforcement — embodied in mechanisms like the CCDI — may coexist with, rather than eliminate, a persistent market for official advancement, complicating assumptions that stronger discipline institutions straightforwardly improve the quality of political selection. This matters for comparative analysis across other single-party or dominant-party systems in Asia, including Vietnam, where the Communist Party of Vietnam has pursued its own high-profile anti-corruption drive, and where scholars increasingly ask whether similar "third path" dynamics operate alongside official meritocratic rhetoric. For civil society researchers and donor institutions assessing the credibility of governance reform commitments in such contexts, a finding that corruption functions as an alternative promotion channel rather than a deviation from the norm would counsel skepticism toward anti-corruption campaigns as reliable signals of institutional quality improvement.
Looking ahead, the significance of this article for both scholars and practitioners will hinge on how convincingly it can isolate bribery's independent effect on promotion outcomes from the confounding influence of performance records and patronage ties that are already well documented in the literature — a methodological challenge that will likely shape the next wave of empirical work on Chinese elite politics. Researchers tracking regime and electoral change, the analytical category under which this article has been classified, should watch for follow-on studies that test whether the "third path" framework travels to subnational contexts beyond the cases implicit in CCDI disciplinary records, and whether it holds across different tiers of the cadre system, from township officials to provincial leadership. For practitioners at institutions such as IOCSS monitoring the political economy of governance in China and comparable one-party systems, the practical takeaway is a sharpened need to treat formal anti-corruption metrics with analytical caution, recognizing that disciplinary campaigns and informal markets for advancement may be two faces of the same selection system rather than opposing forces.