Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political power is acquired, consolidated, and reproduced within authoritarian systems has occupied comparative political scientists for decades, yet the People's Republic of China continues to generate analytical puzzles that confound existing frameworks. For much of the post-reform era, scholars of Chinese elite politics have organized their explanations around two principal mechanisms: performance-based selection, in which cadres rise through demonstrable achievements in economic growth or governance outcomes, and patronage networks, in which factional loyalty and personal relationships with powerful superiors determine career trajectories. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, proposes a significant revision to this binary by identifying bribery as a structurally independent third pathway to political advancement — one that is neither reducible to the logic of patron-client exchange nor simply a corrupt distortion of meritocratic competition. In an era defined by Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-corruption campaign and intensifying debates about the nature of authoritarian resilience, this intervention carries substantial weight for scholars of comparative politics, development governance, and civil society.
To appreciate the conceptual stakes of the argument, one must first understand how entrenched the performance-patronage dichotomy has become in China studies. The tournament model of cadre promotion, associated most prominently with economists Li Hongbin and Li-An Zhou, holds that Chinese officials compete in GDP-growth contests where superior economic performance is rewarded with advancement. This model exercised enormous influence in the 2000s and early 2010s, partly because it seemed to explain China's growth miracle through a mechanism compatible with rational institutional design. Against this, a robust literature on factional politics — drawing on the work of Victor Shih and his collaborators — demonstrated empirically that connections to powerful political networks often matter as much as or more than performance metrics. Between these two poles, corruption was typically treated as either a byproduct of patronage (officials paying for connections they could later monetize) or a distortion to be explained away. What the present article argues, by contrast, is that bribery functions as a distinct selection logic with its own structure, incentives, and systemic consequences — one in which officials pay their way upward not primarily to cement personal loyalty or factional affiliation, but to purchase advancement in a more transactional, market-like fashion. This distinction is theoretically important: it implies that corruption in China's cadre system is not merely a pathology of personal networks but a quasi-institutionalized practice with its own equilibria.
The analytical implications extend well beyond elite politics narrowly construed. If bribery constitutes an independent mechanism of political selection rather than an epiphenomenon of factional patronage, then Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign must be understood in more complex terms than either his critics or defenders typically acknowledge. The campaign has detained hundreds of thousands of officials since 2012, and official discourse frames it as a restoration of meritocratic integrity. Skeptics, meanwhile, have characterized it primarily as a factional purge — a mechanism for Xi to eliminate rivals and reward loyalists under the cover of anti-corruption rhetoric. The article's argument complicates both readings by suggesting that a significant portion of corruption cases may reflect not factional disloyalty but participation in a bribery market that operated semi-autonomously from network-based politics. This raises genuinely difficult questions about whether anti-corruption enforcement can successfully eliminate a mechanism that has become embedded in the incentive structures of a vast bureaucracy, or whether it selectively targets visible cases while leaving underlying market dynamics intact. The resilience of corruption despite sustained enforcement pressure in many developing and transitional contexts suggests that structural approaches to political selection are notoriously difficult to dismantle through campaigns alone.
From the perspective of development studies and ODA practice, the identification of bribery as an independent selection mechanism has direct consequences for how international donors and civil society organizations engage with Chinese governance at the subnational level. A substantial body of research on aid effectiveness in recipient countries has examined the ways in which political selection processes shape public service delivery, bureaucratic capacity, and the absorption of development resources. When political advancement depends primarily on performance, there are at least nominal incentives for officials to deliver measurable public goods. When it depends on patronage, loyalty networks may still deliver selective goods to politically connected constituencies. But when advancement depends significantly on the ability to raise and transfer funds through bribery markets, the consequences for governance are more corrosive: officials face strong incentives to extract resources from the jurisdictions they administer in order to finance their own upward mobility, creating a structural tension between personal advancement and effective stewardship. This dynamic has analogues in a number of contexts studied in the ODA literature, from sub-Saharan African states with high levels of bureaucratic venality to Southeast Asian polities where position-buying has been documented at the local government level. The article's contribution is to give this dynamic a theoretically rigorous name and analytical apparatus within the Chinese context.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this article intersects with several of the most pressing questions in comparative authoritarianism and global political economy. The broader theoretical literature on authoritarian resilience has increasingly moved away from assumptions of monolithic elite cohesion toward more granular accounts of how internal bargaining, distributional conflict, and institutional uncertainty shape regime stability. A bribery market in cadre promotion is, in effect, a hidden distributional system that transfers resources upward through the bureaucratic hierarchy — a system with its own winners and losers, its own forms of inequality, and its own vulnerabilities to disruption. As China's economic growth slows from the extraordinary rates of the reform era, the fiscal base available to officials seeking to finance their advancement through bribes will contract, potentially altering the dynamics of political selection in ways that remain difficult to predict. Researchers working at the intersection of Chinese politics, development governance, and civil society accountability will need to grapple with these structural shifts. For practitioners engaged in governance reform, civil society capacity-building, or anti-corruption programming in China-adjacent contexts — including the many developing countries now deeply integrated into China's Belt and Road networks and ODA architecture — understanding the internal selection logics of Chinese bureaucratic politics is not an academic luxury but a practical necessity. The article reviewed here provides an important analytical foundation for that understanding, and its insistence on moving beyond the comfortable binary of performance and patronage represents precisely the kind of conceptual innovation that the field requires.