[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: 2026-10-01
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
스킬 확인 결과: 이 작업은 ODA 제안서·보고서, 발표자료, 회의 보고서, 통화기록 인용 중 어느 것에도 해당하지 않아 적용할 스킬이 없습니다. 지침에 따라 이를 먼저 밝히고, 일반 학술 분석 기사로 작성합니다.
또한 제공된 자료가 논문 제목·저널명·키워드·URL뿐이고 초록은 비어 있어, 논문 본문의 구체적 발견(findings)을 제가 직접 확인할 수 없습니다. 이에 따라 아래 글은 (1) 논문 제목 자체가 명시하는 주장 구도(성과·후견 외 제3의 경로로서의 뇌물), (2) 저널 서지 정보(Journal of Contemporary Asia, DOI 2026.2679579), (3) 중국 엘리트 정치 연구에서 널리 검증된 별도의 학술적 사실들(시진핑 반부패 운동, 중앙기율검사위원회 등)을 근거로 구성했으며, 논문이 직접 보고하지 않은 세부 수치나 저자명은 추정하지 않았습니다.
China's one-party system has long presented a puzzle to scholars of comparative political economy: in the absence of competitive elections, how does the Chinese Communist Party decide who rises and who does not? For much of the reform era, two answers have dominated the literature — a performance-based "tournament" model in which local officials compete on measurable economic outcomes such as GDP growth, and a patronage model in which factional loyalty, mentor-protégé ties, and personal networks determine advancement. 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 challenges the sufficiency of this two-factor framework by proposing that bribery itself functions as an independent channel of political selection, alongside — and potentially in tension with — merit and connections. This intervention arrives at a moment when Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, launched in 2012 and overseen institutionally by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), has disciplined well over a million party cadres, making the question of how corrupt payments interact with promotion mechanisms a matter of direct relevance to how outside observers interpret Chinese governance.
The article's title signals a specific theoretical move: rather than treating bribery merely as rent-seeking behavior that corrupts an otherwise coherent selection system, it frames bribery as a selection logic in its own right — a "third path" that can substitute for, complement, or compete with the performance criteria emphasized in the tournament literature associated with scholars such as Li and Zhou, and the patronage criteria highlighted in factional-network studies such as the 2012 American Political Science Review work by Shih, Adolph, and Liu on the effect of informal ties on cadre promotion. If bribery operates as a parallel currency of advancement in the Chinese cadre management system, this implies that officials without strong factional patrons or standout GDP records may nonetheless purchase access to higher office, which would complicate existing models that treat performance and patronage as the two dominant, largely separable explanatory variables for who gets promoted within the party hierarchy.
This line of inquiry connects to broader regional patterns in Asian one-party and dominant-party political economies, where anti-corruption campaigns have become a recurring instrument of both governance reform and elite consolidation. Vietnam's Communist Party, for instance, has pursued its own high-profile "blazing furnace" (đốt lò) anti-corruption drive under General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, which, like China's campaign, has removed senior officials including former state and government leaders. Placing the Journal of Contemporary Asia article's argument about China alongside such comparative cases in Southeast Asia suggests a wider regional question: whether anti-corruption enforcement in dominant-party systems functions primarily as a governance corrective, a mechanism of internal political selection, or, as this article proposes for China, an actual pathway through which individuals accumulate power. This matters for institutions like IOCSS that track civil society space and political economy trends across Asia, since the space available for independent anti-corruption monitoring, journalism, and civil society advocacy is itself constrained in both China and Vietnam, limiting the external verifiability of any internal selection dynamic.
For researchers and policy analysts working on official development assistance and governance conditionality, the implications of treating bribery as a structural feature of political selection — rather than an aberration from it — are substantial. Donor institutions and multilateral development banks routinely rely on governance indicators, such as Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, to calibrate country risk and partnership terms, and China's own use of the CCDI apparatus to discipline cadres is frequently cited in such assessments as evidence of governance reform. If the Journal of Contemporary Asia article's framing holds, then anti-corruption enforcement campaigns and underlying bribery-driven selection processes may coexist rather than being mutually exclusive, which would caution against reading disciplinary statistics from bodies like the CCDI as a straightforward proxy for declining corruption's role in elite advancement. This has direct bearing on how development researchers and civil society organizations interpret governance data originating from China, and on the assumptions embedded in donor frameworks that link anti-corruption performance to eligibility for partnership or preferential financing terms.
Looking ahead, the article's framing invites further comparative and empirical work as China approaches its next major cadre reshuffling cycle tied to the Party Congress process, when patterns of promotion and removal will again offer observable data points against which the performance-patronage-bribery framework can be tested. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society research space, the value of this scholarship lies less in any single verified finding and more in the analytical reorientation it proposes: treating corruption not as a deviation to be measured and reduced, but as a variable with potential explanatory power for who actually governs. Future research building on this Journal of Contemporary Asia contribution would benefit from extending the comparative lens to other dominant-party and authoritarian contexts across Asia, and from pairing elite-level political selection analysis with civil society and press freedom indicators to assess how constrained oversight environments shape both the incidence and the interpretability of bribery-driven political advancement.