Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-15
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political systems select their leaders carries profound implications not only for governance within any given state, but for the entire ecosystem of international relations, development cooperation, and civil society engagement that surrounds it. In the case of China, this question has attracted decades of scholarly attention precisely because the country's institutional architecture defies easy categorization. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates neither through competitive elections nor through purely hereditary succession, yet it has sustained a remarkably durable system of elite reproduction that has allowed the world's most populous country to navigate extraordinary economic and political transformations. A new contribution in the Journal of Contemporary Asia adds an important and disquieting dimension to this ongoing inquiry, proposing that bribery constitutes a "third path" to political advancement in China — one that operates alongside, and sometimes in tension with, the two dominant frameworks the literature has long relied upon: meritocratic performance and factional patronage. Understanding this argument is essential not only for China scholars, but for anyone engaged in the global governance architecture through which international development assistance, civil society partnerships, and foreign policy engagements are conducted.
For much of the post-Mao era, the dominant analytical lens for understanding CCP cadre promotion has been the performance legitimacy thesis. In this account, local officials advance through the ranks by delivering measurable outcomes — GDP growth, infrastructure development, social stability indicators — that satisfy the preferences of central evaluators. This framework carried considerable explanatory power during the high-growth decades of the 1980s through the 2000s, when the party's implicit social contract rested heavily on material delivery. Alongside performance, a second strand of scholarship emphasized the role of political networks and factional affiliation, drawing on the sociology of patronage to explain why some officials advanced despite unremarkable records while others stagnated despite apparent competence. The contribution of the article under review lies in arguing that neither of these frameworks alone, nor even in combination, fully accounts for observed patterns of political selection. Bribery, the article suggests, is not simply a distortion of otherwise meritocratic or patronage-based processes; it functions as a structurally embedded mechanism through which aspiring officials actively purchase positions, appointments, and promotions. This reconceptualization has significant analytical weight, because it implies that the incentive structures facing local officials are fundamentally different from what either the performance or the patronage model would predict.
The argument connects to a broader body of scholarship on authoritarian resilience and the political economy of corruption. A substantial comparative literature has examined how corruption in authoritarian settings can simultaneously undermine state capacity and sustain regime stability, functioning as a form of informal revenue sharing that aligns the interests of elites at multiple levels of the hierarchy. What distinguishes the Chinese case, and what the article appears to illuminate, is the degree to which the purchase of political office has become routinized to the point of constituting an institutionalized pathway rather than a deviant practice. This has important implications for how we interpret Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which since 2012 has been the most sweeping exercise of disciplinary power in the CCP's history, ensnaring hundreds of thousands of officials at every level of the party-state apparatus. If bribery for office is structurally embedded rather than episodic, then the anti-corruption campaign must be read not simply as a governance reform effort but as a political instrument that selectively disrupts networks of transactional advancement in ways that serve the consolidation of central authority. The campaign's targeting patterns — disproportionately affecting rivals of Xi's faction while leaving certain networks relatively intact — become more interpretable through this lens, even as they complicate any straightforward assessment of the campaign's impact on actual governance quality.
For researchers and practitioners working in the field of international development and official development assistance, these findings carry substantial implications that have not always received adequate attention in ODA policy circles. Development agencies and multilateral institutions operating in or alongside China tend to engage with the Chinese state at multiple levels — through central government partnerships, provincial collaborations, and increasingly through sub-national actors in the context of South-South cooperation frameworks. If the officials managing these partnerships have been selected through transactional rather than strictly meritocratic processes, the accountability structures that ODA agencies typically assume are in place may be significantly weaker than formal institutional arrangements suggest. Moreover, as China's own overseas development finance has expanded dramatically through the Belt and Road Initiative and associated instruments, the question of whether Chinese implementing agencies export domestic political selection pathologies into recipient country governance contexts becomes a matter of urgent empirical inquiry. The normative frameworks that underpin international development cooperation — transparency, accountability, results-based management — rest on assumptions about the character of state actors that the bribery-as-selection model fundamentally challenges.
Civil society engagement with China adds yet another layer of complexity. International NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy organizations operating in or around China have long navigated the tension between engagement and the recognition that their interlocutors within the state may not be accountable in the ways that civil society partnership models typically presuppose. The criminalization of civil society under the 2017 Foreign NGO Management Law was widely understood as a political project, but the article's findings suggest an additional dimension: the officials responsible for implementing regulatory frameworks governing civil society may have acquired their positions through transactional rather than principled selection processes, making their behavior less predictable from a policy consistency standpoint and more vulnerable to sudden shifts driven by anti-corruption exposure or factional realignment. For organizations engaged in long-term partnerships with Chinese governmental counterparts, this structural uncertainty is not simply a background condition but a risk factor that deserves explicit treatment in institutional planning.
Looking forward, the article's framework raises a set of questions that will define the research agenda for China governance studies in the coming years, with direct relevance for policy communities. As Xi Jinping's consolidation of power has centralized authority to a degree unprecedented since the Maoist era, the conditions under which a third path of bribery-based selection can persist are themselves changing. Centralization may reduce the autonomy of local patronage networks and thereby alter the opportunity structures for transactional advancement, but it may equally concentrate corrupt practices at higher levels of the hierarchy where they are less visible to lower-ranking officials and external observers alike. The dynamic between anti-corruption enforcement and bribery-based selection is not a simple story of reform eliminating pathology; it is a contested process in which the boundaries of tolerated and prosecuted behavior are continuously renegotiated through political struggle. For the international community, including development practitioners, civil society organizations, and foreign policy analysts, the practical implication is that China's governance trajectory cannot be evaluated by reference to formal institutional changes alone. Understanding how power is actually acquired and exercised within the CCP apparatus — including through mechanisms that formal institutions neither sanction nor acknowledge — remains essential groundwork for any serious engagement with China as a development actor, a governance model, or a geopolitical interlocutor in the twenty-first century.