Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-17
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political elites are selected in authoritarian regimes has long occupied scholars of comparative politics, and nowhere does this question carry greater global consequence than in the People's Republic of China. As Beijing's influence extends across developing economies through infrastructure investment, multilateral institutions, and a rapidly expanding ODA architecture, understanding the internal logic of Chinese political selection becomes a matter not merely of academic curiosity but of practical significance for governments, civil society organizations, and development partners worldwide. A recent contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Asia intervenes in this longstanding debate by proposing that bribery constitutes what the authors term a "third path to power," distinct from the two dominant frameworks that have shaped scholarly understanding of cadre advancement in China: meritocratic performance and factional patronage. The implications of this argument, if substantiated, ripple outward well beyond the boundaries of comparative authoritarianism into questions about governance quality, institutional trust, and the sustainability of development partnerships with Chinese state actors.
The dominant literature on cadre promotion in China has oscillated between two poles. The first, associated with scholars such as Pierre Landry and others working in the tradition of rational authoritarian institutionalism, holds that the Chinese Communist Party operates a genuine meritocracy of sorts — one in which local officials who deliver measurable economic performance, particularly GDP growth, earn promotion through a relatively functional evaluation system. This view found considerable empirical support in the high-growth decades of the 1990s and 2000s, when subnational economic competition seemed to align incentives between central principals and local agents in ways that produced remarkable developmental outcomes. The second pole emphasizes factional patronage, arguing that personal connections to senior patrons — whether through shared provincial origins, common work histories, or membership in organized factions such as the Communist Youth League or the so-called "Shanghai clique" — are the decisive determinants of upward mobility within the party-state apparatus. Both frameworks have accumulated substantial empirical evidence, and both capture real dynamics within a system that is, of course, far too large and diverse to reduce to any single mechanism. The contribution of the article under consideration is to suggest that neither framework is sufficient, and that systematic bribery — the direct exchange of money or favors for official positions — operates as a structurally embedded third pathway that neither the meritocracy thesis nor the patronage thesis adequately theorizes.
This argument intersects with a broader set of concerns in development studies about the relationship between anticorruption rhetoric and actual institutional change. Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which began in earnest after 2012 and has now resulted in the investigation or punishment of more than two million officials at various levels, is often interpreted either as a genuine effort to clean up a predatory system or as a selective purge designed to eliminate political rivals under the guise of legal accountability. The "third path" thesis offers a more structurally grounded interpretation. If bribery is not merely an aberration within an otherwise functional system of political selection but a predictable, regularized mechanism through which positions are allocated — particularly at the county and township levels, where central oversight is weakest and positions are most numerous — then the anti-corruption campaign faces a fundamentally different challenge than its framing suggests. It is not simply removing bad actors from a sound institutional framework; it is attempting to suppress a mode of political reproduction that has become, over decades of reform-era governance, deeply embedded in local political economies. This distinction matters enormously for practitioners working in governance reform, because it implies that enforcement campaigns, however vigorous, cannot substitute for structural redesign of the incentive architecture within which local officials operate.
For scholars and practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the implications extend further. China's expanding role as a development finance actor has generated intense debate about the quality and conditionality of Chinese overseas engagement, particularly in contexts where recipient governments have weak rule-of-law institutions. Critics have argued that Chinese development finance, by declining to attach governance conditionality of the kind associated with Western donors and international financial institutions, effectively underwrites predatory governance in partner countries. Defenders counter that conditionality has often been deployed selectively and that China's approach respects formal sovereignty norms more consistently than Western alternatives. Whatever one's position in this debate, the finding that the Chinese party-state itself operates through a significantly bribery-mediated system of political selection introduces a layer of complexity that both sides of the argument tend to elide. If officials who manage China's overseas lending and contracting portfolios are themselves products of a selection process in which position-buying plays a structural role, this shapes the institutional culture they bring to project implementation, the tolerance for rent-seeking they exhibit in negotiating with local counterparts, and the norms they propagate through extended chains of subcontracting and joint venture relationships. Civil society organizations monitoring Chinese-financed infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South America have documented patterns of substandard construction, labor rights violations, and opaque financial arrangements that may, in part, reflect these upstream institutional dynamics.
Looking forward, the analytical agenda opened by this article suggests several productive directions for researchers and policymakers. First, there is urgent need for more granular, subnational comparative work that can distinguish the conditions under which different pathways to power — performance, patronage, and bribery — are more or less dominant. China is a country of extraordinary institutional heterogeneity, and what holds in a poor inland county may not hold in a coastal municipality integrated into global value chains. Second, longitudinal analysis is needed to assess whether Xi-era anti-corruption enforcement has genuinely shifted the relative weight of these three mechanisms or has instead displaced bribery into less visible forms, as some field-based accounts suggest. Third, and perhaps most consequentially for the international development community, the framework invites systematic comparative analysis across authoritarian and semi-authoritarian contexts in the Global South to assess whether bribery-as-selection-mechanism is a distinctly Chinese phenomenon or a more general feature of party-states with large bureaucracies, weak horizontal accountability, and rapid economic change. If the latter, then the theoretical contribution extends well beyond sinology into a general theory of authoritarian political economy with significant implications for how multilateral institutions, bilateral donors, and civil society actors design their engagement strategies. The article's provocation — that the Chinese political system cannot be understood through meritocracy or patronage alone — is, at its core, a provocation to think more rigorously about the conditions under which formal institutions and informal practices diverge, and what that divergence means for the quality of governance that billions of people in China and its partner countries actually experience.