Bribery as a Third Path to Power?: Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage(Elements in Chinese Economy and Governance)

While bribery has been extensively studied, the dynamics of personnel corruption in the public sector, often known as 'buying and selling of government offices,' remain underexplored. This form of corruption involves leaders' accepting or soliciting bribes from subordinates to influence recruitment, appointment, and promotion decisions, significantly impacting political selection and governance quality. This Element employs a dual perspective – corruption and elite mobility – to analyze the distribution of office-selling across the Chinese administrative matrix and its various forms and implications. Using two novel self-compiled datasets, it proposes a tripartite framework of performance, patronage, and purchase to reimagine political selection in China, highlighting the coexistence of multiple governance models: a meritocratic state prioritizing competence, a clientelist state emphasizing loyalty, and an investment state bound by money. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: why study buying and selling offices?; 2. Landscape: how widespread are the offices put up for sale?; 3. Typology: how does the sale of offices work?; 4. Causes: why is buying and selling offices possible?; 5. Purchase versus performance and patronage: a third paradigm?; 6. Restart the party: how central authorities combat personnel corruption; References.

Review :
'This book adds a new dimension to corruption studies by examining an underexplored form of official transgression: personnel corruption, also known as the buying and selling of government posts. Drawing on two novel self-compiled datasets, the book presents an insightful fourfold taxonomy of office sales: primitive bribery, evolved bribery, office-selling syndicates, and oligarchical power bases. Its tripartite framework of performance, patronage, and purchase illuminates the dynamics of political selection in specific contexts. With its conceptual clarity, solid theoretical foundation, rich evidence, and sophisticated analysis, the book advances scholarly research on corruption to a more nuanced level. The argument that bribery can become a third path to power carries significant practical implications for controlling corruption. The book is a must-read for scholars, students, and policymakers who seek a deeper understanding of hidden forms of corruption, their complex nature, and the dynamics that sustain them.' Ting Gong, City University of Hong Kong 'Bribery as a Third Path to Power? offers a powerful reconceptualization of how elites rise in authoritarian systems. Zhu shows that promotions aren't only about performance or patrons—they can also be bought. Mining two rare troves—280 'tiger' cases and 460 court judgments covering 2,500+ pay-for-promotion transactions—this book lays out the going rates, the middlemen, and the machinery of office-selling. The pay-to-promote world reshapes incentives across schools, police, state-owned enterprises, even hospitals. The payoff is a simple, memorable map of mobility: performance, patronage, and purchase. Clear, data-rich, and unsparing, this Element gives scholars, students, and general readers a vocabulary—and evidence—to talk about how money bends authority in contemporary China, and why Xi-era crackdowns target power-wealth networks. You won't see 'meritocracy vs. loyalty' the same way again.' Yuhua Wang, Harvard University 'Zhu provides a detailed, insightful, data-driven, and eloquent analysis of the role of dirty money and the trafficking in political offices in China that challenges both clientelist and factional models of Chinese politics, as well as claims that under Xi Jinping China has evolved a 'perfect' totalitarian dictatorship. This is a major contribution not just to the literature on corruption but to the larger literature on the fundamental nature of Chinese politics. Bribery as a Third Path to Power is a must read for serious students and scholars.' Andrew Wedeman, Georgia State University