[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: 2026-10-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
스킬 확인 결과 먼저 말씀드립니다: 요청하신 글은 ODA 제안서·보고서, PPT, 회의 보고서, 통화 기록 인용 어디에도 해당하지 않는 학술 저널 논문 해설 기사이므로, 적용 가능한 전용 스킬이 없습니다. 이에 따라 일반 학술 분석 기사 형식으로 바로 작성합니다.
The question of how officials rise within China's one-party system has never been more consequential for outside observers than it is today, as Beijing's governance model increasingly shapes development financing, infrastructure diplomacy, and civil society space across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A 2026 article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage," enters a long-running scholarly debate about how the Chinese Communist Party identifies, promotes, and removes its cadres. For decades, foreign governments, multilateral lenders, and civil society organizations monitoring Chinese-financed projects abroad have had to make judgments about the competence and accountability of Chinese officials and state-linked enterprises without a settled understanding of what actually drives advancement inside the party-state. This article's framing — positioning bribery as a distinct and potentially independent channel of political selection — speaks directly to that uncertainty, and its publication in a journal that specializes in the political economy of contemporary Asia signals that the question is being taken seriously within area-studies scholarship rather than treated as a side note to corruption reporting.
The article's title itself stakes out its intervention by naming the two dominant paradigms it seeks to move beyond: performance and patronage. The performance paradigm, associated with the influential "political tournament" model advanced by economists such as Li Hongbin and Zhou Li-An in their widely cited work on GDP growth and promotion incentives among Chinese provincial leaders, holds that officials who deliver measurable economic results are rewarded with advancement. The patronage paradigm, developed in scholarship on factional networks by researchers including Victor Shih and collaborators studying ties to top leaders, holds instead that promotion depends on personal loyalty and connections to powerful patrons rather than, or in addition to, demonstrated output. By framing bribery as a "third path," the 2026 Journal of Contemporary Asia piece implies that neither growth metrics nor factional lineage fully explains observed promotion patterns, and that direct financial exchange — payment for position — operates as its own causal mechanism within China's cadre management system. This is a meaningful theoretical move because it treats corruption not merely as a byproduct of weak institutions but as a functioning, if illicit, allocation mechanism for political power.
This argument resonates with broader regional trends that outlets like the Journal of Contemporary Asia have tracked for years across hybrid and authoritarian political economies in East and Southeast Asia. Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, launched in 2012 and institutionalized through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and, after 2018, the National Supervisory Commission, has disciplined well over a million officials and remains the most visible evidence that the sale and purchase of office — often referred to in Chinese media and scholarship as "maiguan maiguan" (买官卖官), literally buying and selling official posts — was widespread enough to warrant a sustained, nationwide enforcement apparatus. An article proposing bribery as a structural "path to power" rather than isolated deviance fits within this documented enforcement record, and it also echoes comparative findings from one-party and dominant-party systems elsewhere in the region, including Vietnam, where scholars have similarly debated whether internal party discipline campaigns reflect genuine institutional reform or factional competition conducted through anti-corruption instruments.
For researchers and policymakers engaged with official development assistance and governance assessment, this line of inquiry carries direct implications. Governance indicators used by institutions such as the World Bank — including the Worldwide Governance Indicators' control-of-corruption measure — have long been criticized for failing to distinguish between corruption that undermines state capacity and corruption that, per the older "greasing the wheels" hypothesis associated with Samuel Huntington, may coexist with functional governance outcomes. A 2026 study situating bribery as a parallel selection mechanism to performance-based promotion offers empirical traction for that debate by suggesting these are not mutually exclusive channels but may operate simultaneously within the same bureaucratic hierarchy. For development agencies and civil society monitors assessing counterpart institutions in China-financed projects, this suggests that conventional due diligence frameworks built around either technocratic competence screening or anti-corruption compliance checklists may each capture only part of the relevant risk, since an official's position may reflect some blend of demonstrated results, patronage ties, and prior financial payment.
Looking ahead, this article's framing opens a research agenda that practitioners at institutions like IOCSS should watch closely as it develops: comparative studies testing whether bribery-driven selection operates differently across China's provincial tiers, state-owned enterprises, and the local party organs that oversee outbound investment and aid-adjacent financing. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's continued attention to political selection mechanisms in China, placed alongside its broader coverage of civil society and political economy across the region, suggests fertile ground for cross-national comparison with other dominant-party systems. For scholars of governance and for practitioners evaluating the reliability of counterpart officials in Chinese-linked development and infrastructure programs, the central takeaway is methodological caution: performance metrics and visible patronage networks alone will not fully predict who holds power, and any serious assessment of institutional risk needs to account for the possibility that office itself has, in some documented instances, been a commodity for sale.