Comment by maxglute

> substantially more meritocratic

It is substantially more meritocratic on domains that matter for governance, your analysis of the incentive structure between systems is off.

1) this 2026, old school CCP patronage networks are broadly dismantled.

2) even in the mass patronage, mass corruption days, system selects for BOTH corruption competence AND performance competence for the simple reason a CCP bureaucrat has to start from the bottom and climb up, which means they need to be good with patronage AND they need to be good with hitting development KPIs. More meritocratic they are at doing their jobs, the higher they climbed, the more they get promoted and more $$$ to graft, because ability to graft directly tied to actual job competence. Hence even cliques/patronage network has to select for actual competence. This works in PRC because there are many people, and hence pool of competence is high, they can have BOTH corruption and competence, i.e. whatever pool they draw from is ultimately filtered by performance meritocracy due to incentive structure. There is reason why PRC only country where positive corruption levels was correlated to positive growth.

This is not the western system where any idiot can enter politics at anytime, and they only domain they need to optimize for is popularity to get votes.

CCP cadre evaluation strictly does not evaluate on popularity domain. It focuses on administration/execution and in so much it needs to focus on patronage... which btw any political system has (factions/cliques)... the patronage system still selects for execution, not popularity. On side, functionally what west politics selects for IS mass patronage (popularity), so attention meritocracy and not performance meritocracy, aka completely stupid incentive structure for governance. West also has ample, ample corruption, "legalized" under lobbying and paper pushing industries, so I suppose west also meritocratically selects, except for lawyers etc, and KPIs is # of document generated and not # of things build. The two are not the same when it comes to nation building.