The research conducted for this book is derived from the dissertation I wrote as a PhD Fellow at the Department of Political Science at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. It is the result of several years of research dedicated to the study of think tanks in China. As a PhD Fellow, I spent several months in China between 2012 and 2014. On one particular occasion, while a Visiting Fellow at China Foreign Affairs University (CFAU), I interviewed Chinese professors and academics, former diplomats and think-tank experts. Curiously, during the course of my visit, I discovered that even well-established European think tanks, such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) , had opened branch offices in China. However, my incredulity was not because SIPRI —among the most respected think tanks worldwide in the field of security studies—had an office in Beijing, but because the location was far more modest than those of other Chinese think tanks. My astonishment reflects how difficult it can be for Western scholars to fully comprehend the workings of the political and institutional environment in China. More precisely, we tend to take for granted the fact that some of the definitions, conditions and explanations used to understand specific political, cultural and social phenomena in the West can be directly transposed to explain how they work in China.
Today, among China Watchers and specialists on Chinese politics, the think-tank sector in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is often described according to a “false dilemma,” that is, based upon a simple and straightforward, yet also black-and-white thinking: Chinese think tanks are either directly incorporated into the state’s bureaucratic machine or indirectly state controlled. While such an idea seems to be profoundly justified, given China’s authoritarian context, the picture is still not complete. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to demonstrate that the blurred, complex and often understudied identity of think tanks in contemporary China, together with the struggle to accurately describe the different functions these actors are allowed to perform, warrants further investigation. In the following chapters, I thus investigate the conundrum raised by this sector in the PRC . Specifically, I am interested in answering some important questions: How can think tanks exert any influence in China if they lack independence from the government? What are the political and social conditions that allow them to play a role? How can the purpose and effectiveness of think tanks in contemporary China be measured? Can they retain credibility and still bring about change in the policymaking process? How do they infiltrate the echelons of supreme power while working within the state apparatus, and not autonomously? Through these questions, I will contribute to the existing debate about the role of think tanks within illiberal, non-Western democratic countries, tackling, in particular, the role of think tanks in the Chinese political system. The motivations driving the book’s research are therefore manifold.
First, the book is intended to contribute to the existing literature on the role of think tanks outside Western democratic contexts. In the traditional use of the term, think tanks are often described as non-state actors independent from states, political parties and private interests. However, this definition is becoming less and less popular among scholars and political scientists, especially those investigating the role of think tanks outside liberal domains, and has already attracted a lot of criticism. For the most part, the general tendency has been for the functions of think tanks to be analyzed from a Western perspective, that is, in the United States (US) or Europe . However, this has resulted in studies that do not furnish us with credible information about policy research organizations working within undemocratic and non-Western contexts.
Second, the book specifically focuses on the study of Chinese think tanks. Think tanks and policy research institutes in the PRC have become an essential resource filling a knowledge gap between Chinese political elites and China’s changing society. In this regard, the political opportunities “offered” by the various and numerous “characteristics” of the Chinese context in the field of Chinese studies represent an essential condition for fully understanding the diversity of their role. This is not to suggest that think tanks, research organizations and expert communities in China have generated (or are willing to generate) further pluralism and autonomy from the state, as argued by the liberal theories of civil society and the literature describing think tanks in Western democracies. Rather, think tanks and China’s ascent-community of experts represent today an essential resource through which to analyze and understand Chinese politics and its decision-making dynamics in the light of its authoritarian governing system and practices.
Third, this book updates previous research published on Chinese think tanks. Specifically, it acknowledges that the existing literature published about think tanks in China in the 1980s, 1990s and up to the end of the 2000s has largely omitted evidence about their role regarding China’s actions and diplomatic activities at the international level. The ascent role the PRC is now playing in world affairs has resulted in more opportunities for Chinese think tanks to play a growing and different role compared with the past, which, in parallel with an increased interaction they maintain with their Western counterparts, highlights the need to make particular reference to how they perform at regional and global levels. This has happened because there has been a change in the place of China in the world and its role in global governance. If predictions are confirmed, China will be the largest economic power within the next two years and by 2019 will overtake the US economy (The Economist 2014). While some believe that China will only reach and maintain the position of No. 2 power in the world (Breslin and Zeng 2016), the real challenge lies not just in economic terms, whether the country attains the No. 1 or No. 2 position—for many, the worst-case scenario is that, in the very short term, there will be political predominance by a non-Western, authoritarian and, even worse, Communist-ruled, country.
Not surprisingly, a lot of criticism about Chinese think tanks is often linked with the scarce prospects of regime change in the country. The idea is rooted in the fact that the less democratic a certain political context appears to be, the more restricted the political space will be for certain actors to become influential in decision- and policymaking processes, with the consequence that the opportunities think tanks will have to affect or influence political elites will be restricted. As a result, given the resilience of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collapse, the tendency is to assume that think tanks play only a marginal, and perhaps inconsequential, role in the vast and complicated scenario of the Chinese political system. Furthermore, in past decades, empirical efforts to understand the working mechanisms of the Chinese decision-making system, both at the national and international level, have encountered numerous obstacles, given China’s authoritarian context. The result has been that for a long time the PRC has been considered as a monolithic country governed by a homogeneous ruling elite. This has led to theories that other sectors and actors in Chinese politics and society are indeed essential components of China’s policymaking dynamics.
Fortunately, this tendency has now changed, and today there is a vigorous debate among China Watchers , political scientists and specialists about the many facets of the Chinese political system, its decision-making processes and the CCP . As for studies about the CCP , scholars are divided into two schools of thought (Dickson 2016). Some believe that the fate of the Communist Party is marked by imminent collapse, with the regime at a crossroads. When compared with previous political generations, weak leaders, a weak government and a weak Party have already undermined China’s long-standing political tradition (Li 2012). The Party’s actions have contributed to the growing number of complaints from the Chinese middle classes about government policies; and interest groups have never been so powerful as in recent years. Indeed, China is still far from presenting the main characteristics that would allow an ordered regime transition, that is, the acceptance of dissent and competition between different political forces, and inclusiveness, with large segments of the population entitled to oppose the government’s conduct (see Dahl 1971; Morlino 2012).
In fact, to others, quite the opposite seems to be true: the CCP has proved capable in the last decade of staying in power, notwithstanding the several internal and external crises it has faced. Andrew Nathan coined the expression “authoritarian resilience ” in order to explain the PRC political system, which assumes the eternal survival of the Chinese political regime (Nathan 2003). In such a context, although China remains a one-party rule , authoritarian regime , provincial and local governments, as well as state-owned enterprises (SOEs) , have been able to gain greater autonomy to pursue their own agendas (Perry 2013). Both visions highlight the necessity of increasing our knowledge of the complicated puzzles related to China’s political context and its decision-making system. As this research will demonstrate, think tanks are essential actors in the study of Chinese politics precisely because they are able to perform different functions, even though they operate within an authoritarian context.
Understanding Chinese Politics Through the Study of Chinese Think Tanks
Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the CCP on November 15, 2012 and President of the PRC on March 14, 2013. Since then, the authority of the CCP has rarely been under discussion, although skeptics of the Party’s resilience believe it is now a stagnant reality and internally divided. Two days later, the dismissal of the Chongqing Party Secretary, Bo Xilai, on March 16, 2013, was undoubtedly one among the many recorded major scandals that had hit the Chinese political scene in decades. The son of Bo Yibo , a veteran very close to Deng Xiaoping ’s political circle, Bo Xilai distinguished himself as one of the greatest free-thinking regional leaders, but may have proved to be too independent for the leaders in Beijing. Expelled from the Party on September 28, 2013, he is now detained in the Qincheng Prison in Beijing. This prison belongs to the Ministry of Public Security and, ironically, is the same detention site in which Bo Xilai’s father was detained during the years of the Cultural Revolution.
While the Bo Xilai scandal demonstrated the immediacy through which the Xi Jinping administration was able to solve political difficulties by the removal of leaders against the will of the people, in the eyes of the international community the sacking of Bo was seen as a clear sign that the Party was suffering from internal tensions and a lack of cohesiveness among its members. However, this tendency should not be regarded as the capacity of the CCP to resist political and institutional change—authoritarian resilience as it was defined previously—but rather as the result of “collective leadership ” based upon “new mechanisms, institutional regulations, policy measures, and political norms to resolve its inherent deficiencies and inadequacies” (Li 2016, 8). Rather than operating within a zero-sum dynamic, indeed a bipartisan logic, factions inside the CCP are oriented towards a more collaborative approach (Lai and Kang 2014).
Yet, in this light, it seems hard to believe that policymaking decisions in China are a result exclusively of the discretion of Party officials and cadres sitting in the CCP Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) . Wi...