> substantially more meritocratic

Of course it is, your analysis of the entire incentive structure is off.

1) this 2026, patronage networks are broadly dismantled.

2) even in the mass patronage, mass corruption days, system system selects for BOTH corruption competence AND performance competence for the simple reason a CCP bureaucrat has to start from the bottom and climb, which means they need to be good with patronage AND they need to be good with hitting KPIs. If more meritocratic they are at doing their actual jobs, the higher they climbed, the more they get promoted, 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 position corruption levels was correlated to positive growth.

This is not the western system where any retard 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 itself fundamentally biases towards selects for candidates with execution, not popularity... i.e. functionally what west selects IS mass patronage (popularity), so attention meritocracy and not performance meritocracy, aka completely stupid incentive structure for governance.