Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election
The question of how political elites in authoritarian systems rise to power has long preoccupied scholars of comparative politics and development studies alike, and for good reason. The composition of ruling coalitions and the mechanisms through which officials are selected shape not only the domestic governance of states but also their orientation toward foreign partners, their receptivity to civil society engagement, and ultimately the quality and accountability of development outcomes. China, as the world's largest authoritarian state and a major actor in global development finance, presents a particularly consequential case. A new article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia by Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage challenges received wisdom in the field by proposing that existing frameworks for understanding Chinese elite circulation — centered on meritocratic performance and factional patronage — are insufficient on their own to explain how officials actually attain positions of power within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The study identifies bribery as a structurally distinct, empirically significant third pathway, one that operates alongside rather than simply within the other two mechanisms.
The dominant paradigm in the study of CCP cadre management has rested on two competing but often complementary logics. The performance-based explanation, associated most prominently with the work of Yasheng Huang, Susan Shirk, and more recently the economists associated with China's regional growth tournament thesis, holds that the Party promotes officials who deliver measurable economic results — GDP growth, investment attraction, infrastructure completion. This view treats the CCP as a meritocratic technocracy shaped by incentive structures aligned with developmental outcomes. The patronage-based explanation, by contrast, emphasizes factional loyalty, personal ties to powerful patrons, and the logic of political survival in a system where elite alignments determine career trajectories far more reliably than objective performance indicators. Both of these frameworks contain significant explanatory purchase, and neither should be entirely discarded. What the Journal of Contemporary Asia article contributes, however, is the analytical insistence that bribery — understood not simply as incidental corruption within these systems, but as a self-standing strategy of upward mobility — demands treatment as a category in its own right. Officials may bribe their way to positions not because they lack performance credentials or factional connections, but because bribery offers a faster, more reliable, and politically versatile route that bypasses the uncertainties inherent in the other two paths.
This argument carries substantial implications for how we understand the CCP's anti-corruption campaign launched under Xi Jinping's leadership from 2012 onward. The campaign, conducted through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and its successor institutions, has resulted in the investigation of over a million officials at various levels of the hierarchy and the removal of several standing Politburo members — a scale of enforcement unprecedented in post-Mao history. Much of the existing scholarship on this campaign has debated whether it reflects a genuine institutional commitment to governance improvement, a selective political instrument for factional consolidation, or some combination of both. If bribery is indeed a third and semi-autonomous pathway to power, then the anti-corruption campaign takes on additional analytical significance: it can be read not only as a mechanism of political discipline or elite reshuffling, but also as an attempt to disrupt a well-worn and arguably entrenched channel of upward mobility. The result would be a systematic restructuring of the incentive environment facing aspiring officials — one with unpredictable consequences for both governance quality and for the distribution of power among competing elite networks.
From a development and global political economy perspective, the findings of this study intersect in important ways with ongoing debates about China's role in international development finance and its engagement with civil society actors abroad. The character of China's domestic political system — including how its officials are selected and what behavioral logics they internalize in the course of their careers — directly conditions its posture as a development partner. Officials who have ascended through performance-based promotion may be more attuned to project outcomes and measurable deliverables. Those whose positions owe more to factional loyalty may prioritize alignment with central political directives over local development effectiveness. And officials who have navigated a bribery-dependent career path may carry with them behavioral repertoires and risk calculations that shape how they manage infrastructure projects, negotiate with counterpart governments, and engage with civil society intermediaries in recipient countries. The question of how political selection interacts with the practice of Chinese overseas development assistance — through institutions such as the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and more recently the mechanisms associated with the Belt and Road Initiative — remains understudied, but the framework proposed in this article offers useful analytical scaffolding for such inquiries.
For practitioners working at the intersection of governance reform and international development, this scholarship reinforces the importance of disaggregating the concept of corruption when assessing partner government systems. Development agencies, multilateral institutions, and civil society organizations that operate in China-adjacent political environments — whether in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, or Sub-Saharan Africa where Chinese development finance is heavily concentrated — must grapple with the reality that the governance counterparts they engage are themselves products of differentiated selection processes, each with its own logic of loyalty, accountability, and risk tolerance. The assumption that performance-based incentives are the primary driver of official behavior, an assumption embedded in much of the conditionality architecture of Western ODA, may be particularly poorly calibrated where the patronage and bribery pathways have historically been more decisive. Going forward, researchers and policymakers would benefit from more granular, subnational analyses of how these three pathways intersect and compete across different regions, levels of government, and policy domains within China itself, as well as from comparative work that situates China's experience within the broader landscape of authoritarian political selection in Asia and beyond.