Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political elites are selected, promoted, and consolidated in authoritarian systems sits at the intersection of institutional analysis, political economy, and governance studies. In China, this question has acquired heightened urgency over the past decade as Xi Jinping's administration has pursued what is widely described as the most sweeping anti-corruption campaign in the People's Republic's history. Yet despite the scale and visibility of that campaign — which has ensnared hundreds of thousands of officials, including former Politburo Standing Committee members — scholarly understanding of the mechanisms that actually govern elite mobility within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains contested and incomplete. A new article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage," intervenes in this debate by proposing that bribery constitutes not merely an aberration within the political system but a structurally embedded route to advancement distinct from the two dominant frameworks through which scholars have typically explained CCP elite selection.
The dominant scholarly literature on political selection in China has long operated within a binary framework. On one side sits the performance legitimacy thesis, associated prominently with the work of scholars such as Andrew Walder and Susan Whiting, which holds that Chinese officials are promoted in significant measure based on measurable outputs — GDP growth, infrastructure investment, poverty reduction metrics, and fiscal management. This meritocratic logic, which the CCP itself actively promotes in its legitimating discourse, suggests that upward mobility in the party-state is at least partially responsive to governance quality, creating incentives for developmental administration even in the absence of electoral accountability. On the other side of the debate stands the patronage and factionalism literature, developed through the work of scholars including Victor Shih, Christopher Adolph, and Mingxing Liu, which argues that elite advancement is fundamentally governed by personal loyalty networks, with factional affiliation to senior leaders serving as the primary currency of upward mobility. These two frameworks have generated decades of productive empirical research, yet their binary structure has struggled to account for the full range of observable patterns in Chinese elite politics. The Journal of Contemporary Asia article takes aim at precisely this explanatory gap, arguing that a third mechanism — bribery conceived as a deliberate and institutionally conditioned strategy of office-buying — requires analytical recognition in its own right.
The theoretical contribution here is considerable. By framing bribery as a pathway rather than simply a pathology, the article invites a reconceptualization of what corruption actually does in the context of authoritarian political economy. If bribery is merely accidental rent extraction by already-powerful officials, it remains an analytical footnote. But if office-buying represents a systematic mechanism through which aspirants with capital but without strong patron networks can purchase advancement, then it alters the fundamental logic of political selection. It introduces market dynamics into what is ostensibly a hierarchical and merit-governed system, potentially allowing a different class of political actor — entrepreneurs, local revenue brokers, those embedded in high-growth economic regions — to translate economic success into political position. This has significant implications for understanding how economic liberalization and the rise of China's business elite intersect with party-state governance. The existence of a bribery pathway would suggest that the CCP's internal selectorate is more permeable and heterogeneous than either the performance or patronage frameworks alone would imply, and that the party has historically tolerated a degree of market-based elite recruitment precisely because it allows the absorption of economically dynamic actors who might otherwise constitute a destabilizing outside force.
This argument also carries important implications for understanding Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which has been the dominant political story in China since 2012. Much of the existing scholarship on that campaign has debated whether it represents a genuine institutional effort to improve governance quality, a politically motivated purge of factional rivals, or some combination of the two. The "third path" framework suggests a third interpretive possibility: that the campaign is in part a structural reordering of the political selection system itself, one that closes down the bribery pathway in favor of tighter centralized control over elite mobility and a return to more explicitly loyalty-based and ideologically screened promotion criteria. This reading would help explain why the campaign has proven so durable — extending well beyond any particular factional purge — and why it has been accompanied by parallel efforts to rebuild ideological discipline and reassert the primacy of party loyalty as the cardinal criterion for advancement. If office-buying had become a sufficiently routinized pathway, dismantling it would require not just prosecutions but a systematic reshaping of incentive structures, which is precisely what the campaign's institutional accompaniments — the reform of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the creation of the National Supervisory Commission, the revision of cadre evaluation criteria — appear designed to accomplish.
From the perspective of comparative political economy and development studies, the article's framing also connects to broader questions about the relationship between informal institutions and formal political structures in late-developing states. The literature on developmental states has long recognized that the boundary between corruption and informal coordination in high-growth environments is frequently blurred. Wade's work on Taiwan and Korea, Hutchcroft's analysis of the Philippines, and more recently Ang's scholarship on China's "directed improvisation" all point to the ways in which informal economic and political exchange can serve developmental functions even when nominally in violation of formal rules. A bribery pathway to political power, in this light, is not simply a failure of the formal system; it may have served as an adaptive mechanism that allowed local governance to remain responsive to rapidly changing economic conditions during the high-growth decades of the 1990s and 2000s. The policy implications of this reading are significant for scholars and practitioners engaged with questions of governance reform in China and in comparable authoritarian developmental contexts: if informal market mechanisms in political selection contributed to past growth performance, their removal as part of anti-corruption campaigns may have unanticipated effects on local governance capacity and developmental dynamism, effects that are already visible in some analyses of post-2012 local government risk aversion and investment slowdown.
Looking forward, the analytical framework proposed by this article opens several productive research directions. First, it raises the empirical question of what the relative weight of performance, patronage, and bribery pathways has been at different levels of the CCP hierarchy and in different periods, and what methodology can most reliably distinguish among them given the inherent opacity of authoritarian elite politics. Second, it invites comparative work asking whether analogous "third path" dynamics appear in other single-party or dominant-party systems — Vietnam's Communist Party, the ruling parties of various Central Asian republics, or even certain sub-national political machines in formally democratic systems — and under what conditions bribery becomes institutionalized rather than episodic. Third, and perhaps most consequentially for near-term policy analysis, it suggests that scholars and practitioners assessing the trajectory of Chinese elite politics under Xi Jinping should attend carefully to what is replacing the bribery pathway, not merely to the fact of its suppression. If ideological conformity and personal loyalty to the paramount leader become the primary selection criteria, the implications for technocratic governance capacity, policy innovation, and the party's long-run adaptability are profound. The Journal of Contemporary Asia article thus makes a contribution that extends well beyond the empirics of Chinese political promotion to illuminate the structural logics that govern how power is reproduced in party-states navigating the tensions between developmental imperatives and political control.