[JCA] Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage
.
Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-13
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
한글 CLAUDE.md의 "작성 지시 시 스킬 우선 사용" 규칙에 따라 확인한 결과, 이 과제(학술지 기반 시사 분석 칼럼)에 맞는 스킬은 목록에 없습니다. ODA 제안서/보고서(oda-master-writer 계열), 발표자료(oda-ppt-design), 회의·미팅 보고서(plaud-meeting-report), 통화·회의 기록 인용(call-meeting-records) 중 어느 것도 "학술 논문 소개 분석 기사" 작성에 해당하지 않으므로, 지침대로 "맞는 스킬 없음"을 먼저 밝히고 바로 작성합니다.
The question of how individuals rise within authoritarian political systems has taken on renewed urgency as China enters its second decade under Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, an effort that has formally disciplined well over a million officials through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection since 2012. Against this backdrop, 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," directly challenges the two dominant frameworks that scholars have long used to explain cadre promotion in the Chinese Communist Party: technocratic performance legitimacy, measured through metrics such as GDP growth within a jurisdiction, and patronage ties built through factional loyalty or shared provincial and educational backgrounds. By foregrounding bribery as a distinct, third mechanism of political selection, the article (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2679579) enters a debate with direct relevance to how outside observers, including development institutions that engage with Chinese local governments, should interpret the incentives shaping subnational officials across the country.
The core intervention of the piece is conceptual as much as empirical: it reframes bribery not as mere corruption to be purged alongside legitimate selection criteria, but as a parallel channel through which officials can purchase advancement when performance signals are ambiguous or patronage networks are inaccessible. This matters because much of the existing literature on China's political economy, including work on the "cadre responsibility system" and target-based evaluation of local leaders, has tended to treat corruption as a deviation from, rather than a complement to, the formal promotion architecture. By positioning bribery alongside performance and patronage as a structurally comparable "path to power," the article invites readers to reconsider whether the same local officials who deliver strong economic indicators are also those best positioned, financially and relationally, to supplement weaker records with payments to superiors — a dynamic with implications for how provincial and municipal leadership turnover is understood in a one-party system where formal electoral accountability is absent.
This analytical move resonates with broader regional and global patterns in the study of authoritarian governance and political economy. Across much of Asia, Africa, and parts of Latin America, scholars studying one-party or dominant-party states have increasingly moved away from binary models of "meritocracy versus clientelism" toward more layered accounts of elite selection that incorporate informal payments, kinship networks, and factional bargaining simultaneously. The China case examined in this Journal of Contemporary Asia article is particularly consequential for this literature because of the scale of the country's cadre system, which governs the careers of tens of millions of party and state officials, and because China's anti-corruption drive under Xi Jinping has generated an unusually rich, if politically filtered, public record of disciplinary cases that researchers can use to probe how bribery functions within promotion decisions rather than simply as a post-hoc violation of them.
For practitioners working in development cooperation, governance assessment, and civil society monitoring, the implications of treating bribery as a selection mechanism rather than an aberration are significant. Institutions that evaluate subnational governance quality in China, or that partner with local governments on development, infrastructure, or environmental programs, often rely implicitly on the assumption that promoted officials represent either strong performers or well-connected insiders. If bribery functions as an independent and sometimes substitutable channel to power, as this article argues, then external assessments of "capable" or "reform-minded" local leadership may need to account for the possibility that career advancement reflects neither technical competence nor factional pedigree, but transactional access to superiors. This has downstream consequences for how civil society researchers and ODA-adjacent institutions interpret leadership changes in Chinese provinces and municipalities, particularly when assessing continuity risk for multi-year programs tied to specific local administrations.
The article's framing also carries research significance beyond the China field narrowly construed, since it offers a template for disaggregating "performance" and "patronage" as explanatory variables in other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian contexts where election-based accountability is weak or absent — a point underscored by the keywords attached to the piece, "china" and "election," which signal the author's interest in political selection as a substitute for electoral competition. Future comparative work might test whether a similar "third path" of informal payment operates in single-party or dominant-party systems elsewhere in Asia, and whether its prevalence rises or falls in tandem with the intensity of anti-corruption enforcement, as has been the case in China since the launch of the campaign associated with Xi Jinping. For researchers at institutions such as IOCSS that track the intersection of political regime type and development outcomes, the Journal of Contemporary Asia article is a useful reminder that political selection processes in authoritarian systems are rarely reducible to a single logic, and that bribery, far from being a residual category, may itself be a structured and analyzable pathway to power worth tracking alongside the more familiar variables of performance and patronage.