Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political power is acquired and maintained in authoritarian systems has occupied scholars of comparative politics for decades, yet the mechanisms driving elite advancement in China remain contested and incompletely understood. Against a backdrop of Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-corruption campaigns, which have ensnared hundreds of thousands of officials since 2012, a growing body of research has begun to interrogate whether corruption in China functions merely as a deviant behavior to be eliminated or whether it constitutes something more structurally embedded — a feature, rather than a bug, of the political system itself. Published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, this article by entering the debate through the lens of political selection offers a provocation that carries significant implications not only for China scholars but for those engaged in broader questions of governance, development, and institutional reform across the Indo-Pacific.
The dominant frameworks for understanding Chinese elite advancement have long rested on two pillars. The first is performance-based promotion, sometimes characterized as a form of meritocracy, in which local officials compete for advancement by generating measurable economic outcomes — GDP growth, infrastructure investment, poverty reduction metrics — within their jurisdictions. This tournament model of promotion, theorized most influentially by Hongbin Li and Li-An Zhou, posits a rational incentive structure that has been credited with fueling China's extraordinary growth trajectory while also producing well-documented distortions, including the falsification of statistics and the over-investment in visible capital projects at the expense of social services. The second pillar is patronage, the formation of factional networks rooted in shared institutional affiliations, provincial ties, or personal loyalty to senior figures. Scholars including Sheng Sixin and Andrew Walder have shown how access to powerful patrons provides crucial insulation against political risk, smooths the path through career bottlenecks, and shapes who ultimately reaches the apex of provincial and central leadership. What this article argues is that neither framework fully accounts for observed patterns of political mobility, and that bribery — the direct purchase of appointments, promotions, and political protection — functions as a distinct and analytically separable third pathway, one that interacts with but cannot be reduced to either performance or patronage.
This framing represents a meaningful conceptual advance. Previous scholarship has acknowledged that the buying and selling of official positions — what Chinese observers call maiguanmaiguan — is widespread, but it has typically treated this phenomenon as a downstream consequence of weak institutional constraints rather than as an independent variable shaping who rises and who falls within the system. By treating bribery as a selection mechanism in its own right, the article invites researchers to ask different questions: not simply why officials are corrupt, but how corruption stratifies political opportunity, which types of officials are most likely to invest in purchased advancement versus cultivating performance records or patron networks, and what the systemic consequences are when the three pathways operate simultaneously. The theoretical implication is significant — if office-buying is endemic and patterned rather than random, then anti-corruption campaigns that remove individual actors without altering the structural incentives sustaining the market for positions will likely produce only cosmetic change in the composition of the elite, cycling out one set of position-buyers and replacing them with another.
The political economy dimensions of this argument extend well beyond China's domestic governance. China has become the world's largest provider of development finance, channeling hundreds of billions of dollars annually through bilateral agreements, policy bank lending, and infrastructure investments under the Belt and Road Initiative. The manner in which Chinese officials are selected — and the degree to which informal financial transactions structure their careers and shape their risk appetites — has direct implications for the quality and integrity of Chinese-linked development projects in recipient countries across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia. International development practitioners and researchers concerned with governance conditionality, anti-corruption norm diffusion, and the political economy of aid relationships must reckon with the possibility that their Chinese counterparts are operating within an incentive environment substantially different from what either the performance meritocracy narrative or the simple patronage model would suggest. A selection system in which financial extraction and position-buying are structurally embedded creates officials with particular debt structures, loyalty configurations, and risk-management strategies that have downstream effects on how Chinese development projects are designed, staffed, and executed on the ground.
For scholars of civil society and political development, the article's implications are equally pointed. A system in which bribery functions as a structural pathway to power tends to produce a self-reinforcing dynamic: officials who have purchased their positions must recoup their investment through the exercise of discretionary authority, which in turn sustains demand for subsequent rounds of position-buying among subordinates seeking protection and advancement. This dynamic crowds out the space for the kinds of transparent, rule-based institutional development that civil society actors and reformers inside China have intermittently sought to promote. It also shapes the boundary conditions of civil society engagement — organizations that seek to operate in policy space adjacent to official authority must navigate not only the formal regulatory environment but also the informal financial relationships structuring local power. Understanding how bribery as a selection mechanism intersects with the regulation of civil society remains an underexplored frontier that this article implicitly opens for future investigation.
Looking forward, the analytical framework advanced in this work arrives at a moment when the study of Chinese elite politics is undergoing significant methodological renewal. The growing availability of digitized prosecution records, disciplinary inspection reports, and cadre biographical databases has begun to make systematic empirical study of political selection mechanisms more tractable than it was a decade ago. For researchers in this field, the article points toward productive questions about variation across localities and policy domains — whether the relative salience of performance, patronage, and bribery as selection mechanisms differs between economically dynamic coastal provinces and resource-dependent interior regions, between regulatory agencies and service-delivery bureaucracies, between periods of heightened anti-corruption enforcement and relative quiescence. For practitioners engaged with China in multilateral settings, it reinforces the importance of looking past official accountability rhetoric to examine the incentive structures that actually govern official behavior. The anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping has reshaped the surface architecture of Chinese political life in dramatic ways, but the deeper question this article raises — whether selection by bribery can be dismantled without a fundamental restructuring of the political economy of official appointment — remains, at this writing, compellingly unresolved.