The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series
under the Cornell East Asia Program.
The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
So tonight we're very happy to have with us Jane Hayward who comes to us now
as a research fellow in the Government Department
at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Prior to that she finished her PhD very close to us at NYU in 2012 in East Asian Studies
and then went about as far in one direction that she could go
which is to Tsinghua University in Beijing
where she was on a postdoc for three years from 2013 to 2016
in the Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the School of Public Policy and Management
there at Tsinghua and that was when we first met.
She was giving a talk at Seattle I think when we first met and then she went on as I said to the other direction
as far as she could go, to LSE so we're happy to have found a way to catch her
and bring her here this time. She has worked on a range of topics including
urban villages and agriculture in China but is here to talk to us about a separate topic,
new project she has today - think tanks in China
so please join me in welcoming Jane Hayward.
Thank you very much. Very happy to be invited here
to give this talk. I should start by saying that the starting point for this paper
is that in reading a lot of reports on Chinese think tanks something in particular keeps coming up
when I read reports by both media pundits and also scholars
and I'm talking in particular about scholars in the UK and the US
for the most part that they're criticized for not being independent,
in other words, they're not really taken seriously and this paper is in large part a critique of that perspective
that keeps on coming up
and the approach that I'm taking is how the rise of think tanks in China are
bound up with questions of class power as this Chinese state becomes increasingly integrated
into the global capitalist economy.
And as I go through I will of course have to say something about how these new type think tanks are
bound up with the rise of Xi Jinping which is so topical at the moment so
to begin there's a kind of conundrum around the question of Chinese think tanks
and this is very interesting time as well for me to be giving this talk with the National People's Congress
having just taken place in Beijing
and the end of presidential term limits having just been confirmed at that meeting
which appears to consolidate Xi Jinping's power and the strengthening of authoritarianism in China
around Xi Jinping and his cohort. So the conundrum
is how do we understand think tanks in China given that they are being promoted
by Xi Jinping at the same time that we're seeing an increased political and ideological control
under that same leadership and given that context do we in fact take them seriously.
So having talked about how think tanks are usually talked about by a lot of media pundits
in the US and UK let me talk -- let me give you an excerpt from The Economist.
This is an article called "The brains of the party" from March 2014.
Truly independent think tanks are not something the Communist Party really wants.
They are a feature of civil society as liberal democracies define it.
Nor does the party define it. Those think tanks and that's in inverted commas to show that they're
not really think tanks, those think tanks with the most influence in China, do not write for the public
but for a much smaller audience.
They are trusted instruments of the Communist Party and the State.
The biggest danger of this emperor advisor relationship is that it rewards advisers
who tell the Emperor what they already think
and this idea that Chinese think tanks are only telling China's leaders what they want to hear
or what they already think is something that comes up over and over again
so let's take on these set of assumptions behind this particular critique of Chinese think tanks.
The way that think tanks are traditionally or conventionally understood
comes from a set of assumptions based on the fact that think tanks first emerged in the early 20th century
in the US and UK and so they considered fundamentally liberal democratic institutions.
They're supposed to be independent from government
which means both of them and to be institutionally independent and also
privately funded. They're supposed to operate within a free marketplace of ideas.
This is a term you hear a lot about think tanks and it kind of assumes
that debates therefore take place within a level playing field.
There's not much of a discussion about how power operates and how class power in particular operates
and this also misses out the question of ideology, in other words, how ideas and discourses
including within liberal democracies tend to be structured within a particular framework
of what is considered acceptable and relevant to talk about
whereas ideal which don't fit into that discourse are considered irrelevant or somehow unacceptable.
And also think tanks are supposed to be thought about as being embedded within
civil society and that assumes that think tanks represent the interests of society as against the state
and it's an assumption that views think tanks as somehow democratic institutions,
that it misses the question or any kind of analysis of whose interests think tanks are in fact representing.
So let's have a look at a couple of critiques of this traditional view of
think-tanks. There's a great book by Thomas Medvetz that came out in 2012
called "Think tanks in America" and Medvetz talks about think tanks as being unique institutions
in that they have to operate in such a way
that they're constantly trying to live up to four different conditions at the same time.
That is, they need to secure funding so they need to please their donors.
They have to garner publicity.
They have to maintain a scholarly reputation so they can't get too close to government institutions or
at least they can't appear to get too close to government institutions but at
the same time they need to foster political influence
and to quote Medvetz,
"the need to cater to all four at once powerfully limits think tanks' capacity
to challenge the unspoken premises of the policy debate, to ask original questions
and to offer policy prescriptions that run counter to the interests of financial donors, politicians
or media institutions. In other words he's saying this idea of the free marketplace of ideas, it doesn't really exist.
Another article that I want to draw your attention to is a great jointly authored or collectively authored article
that appeared in Critical Policy Studies called "The view from nowhere"
and this is a set of ethnographic research on the formation of British healthcare policy
concerning the reforms to the NHS and the scholars went into -- I think they studied
full think tanks and they conducted a number of interviews with the heads of
these think tanks and the scholars within these think tanks
to establish how this policy concerning British healthcare was put into practice
and how they decided on what policies they were going to be advocating to the British government
and what they found was these think tanks worked a lot backstage in order to build ties with
government ministers and with corporate donors, not only to get their ideas heard
but in order to establish which ideas would be palatable to government officials in the first place.
So in other words the healthcare debate took place largely behind closed doors
without any public consultation whatsoever.
The result has been that the NHS has been chronically underfunded for years
and is being slowly dismantled and privatized.
This is in the face of actually widespread public disapproval
but there's nothing really that the public can do about it because this package of reforms
was decided upon and then presented to the British public
pretty much fait accompli. So think tanks involved in this supposed debate
were in fact adopting a set of neoliberal norms and assumptions about the benefits of efficiency,
choice and privatization. There wasn't really any free and public
debates or exchange of ideas about what those terms meant or in whose interest they were operating.
So the debate itself took place very much within the ideological framework
to which the British government was subscribing at the time.
Any kind of think tanks which operate outside of this set of this kind of neoliberal ideology
is going to have quite a hard time getting their ideas heard or taken seriously.
There are a few exceptions to that but that's kind of the dominant way that think tanks in the US and the UK
have been operating. So just to conclude this section
Anglo-american think tanks I don't think can be meaningfully said to represent
the interests of society against the state. They're structurally inclined to
further the interests of corporate donors and work to get their ideas onto
the government agenda by
in fact telling politicians what they want to hear.
The ideas advocated by think tanks remain firmly within the framework of
what is considered politically acceptable at the time
and there's no real genuine free marketplace of ideas when it comes to advocating about
matters of government policy.
So why is it that China's leaders are deciding to promote think tanks now?
The next section of what I'm going to talk about actually comes from a set of interviews that I carried out
while I was in the Institute for Contemporary China Studies at Tsinghua University
from 2013 to 2016. There I was able to talk to a lot of scholars working within
think tanks or scholars who were studying Chinese think tanks and
involved in the debates about the development of think tanks in that country.
And the kinds of ideas that they came up with about why China was needing think tanks
were scholars within regular government research institute
are very skilled at gathering data and drafting political speeches but actually
they weren't really considered to be very good at coming up with sophisticated ways of
interpreting data or presenting new and innovative ideas
or proposing new strategies. Also the bureaucracy the government bureaucracy
was designed with conformity in mind which means that government researchers
are unwilling to lose promotion opportunities or offend their bosses by
suggesting or proposing unconventional ideas which might rock the boat.
They're also the way that the bureaucratic institutions are organized
is that there are rigid controls on staff numbers which means is again this is about
maintaining the stability and the status quo of the system so it's very difficult
to recruit new members from outside who might have new kinds of ideas
and any new ideas that government researchers do come up with their stove-pipe.
Stove-pipe is a term that means ideas are passed upwards within institutions
rather than exchanged for debate with scholars or other institutions outside
so it's a very insular system and the system is conducive in fact to
institutional conflict. That means that different ministries tend to compete for
influence with one another and for a larger slice of the
central budget funds rather than cooperating to try to come up with
disinterested policy advice which is what really Chinese leaders are looking for.
Also with China's growing role in world affairs there's kind of been a blurring of the policy boundaries
between the domestic and the international and that seems to be requiring far more complex forms
of analysis that government research simply aren't trained to provide
and a number of officials have apparently privately expressed frustration
that in international deliberations particularly with the US, Chinese negotiators are
repeatedly being outwitted by their counterparts in the US who have better
trained advisors. This is obviously a source of frustration.
So what are these new type thing tanks? These have started to be promoted quite seriously
since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and the plan is to approve 50 to 100 so-called
new type think tanks by 2020 and these 50 to 100 are specially selected and
approved think tanks by the Party Central Committee which will
have special connections to government. There'll be special advisers to governments.
And the list of the first 25 of this 100 think tanks
was released in December 2015 while I was in Beijing. I was actually working on this paper
and the rest other think tanks are currently vying it amongst themselves to get onto that list.
So official think tanks -- there are three kinds of think tanks, broadly speaking,
there are many different kinds but broadly speaking,
there are official think tanks which are government institutions, attached to
government institutions, so for example the National Development and Reform Commission
is attached to the State Council. Then there are semi-official think tanks
which are set up by government institutions and they're managed by state approved personnel.
So for example institutions within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
would count as semi-official think tanks.
I think two of those have made it onto the list of the first 25 official new-type think tanks.
Then what I'm going to talk about more in this talk later are civil think tanks
which are non-governmental. They're mostly privately funded
and they don't have institutional or any serious institutional connections to government
and two of those that I'll be talking about later are the China Center for International Economic Exchanges and
the Unirule Institute of Economics. There's no fixed model however.
So there are a lot of think tanks within universities for instance and they're
sometimes called civil think tanks even though the fact that you know
universities are really considered government institutions
so it's a bit
the definitions are a little bit blurred. So all of these are what will eventually
be 50 to 100 official nationally recognized newtype think tanks.
All of them are going to be affiliated to the Central Propaganda Department
of the Chinese Communist Party.
That's now been renamed to the Central Publicity Department which sounds a lot friendlier
but it's the same thing and through this connection their uncensored reports will be
transmitted directly to the top leadership and whichever government department is considered relevant
for that report and this is designed to diversify and accelerates the channels of expertise
into central policymaking,
bypassing government bureaus and this appears to be one of the ways that Xi Jinping
is trying to get around to the government bureaucracies part of his consolidation of power.
It's clearly being to shift political power
away from the bureaucracies and onto the party and onto himself and his advisers
and one of the ways he's doing it is to set up this think tank system
to get around the bureaucracies. Some people have been saying with Xi Jinping's
- what people are calling Xi Jinping's power grab - that there's going to be a shutdown on any meaningful forms
of political debate. I don't really think that's true.
I think this think-tank system shows that actually debate is going to be taking place.
It will certainly be within a particular ideological framework
but there're certainly going to be meaningful debate happening.
So because these think tanks are happening in a non liberal democratic regime
there have been a number of attempts by think-tank scholars to try to reevaluate the term
"independence" because that's considered kind of only relevant certainly in the way that
it's usually talked about. That's considered to only really apply within liberal democracy
so a very well-known think tank scholar Zhu Xufeng for example has talked about
how think tanks should only be regarded as -- should be regarded as independent
as long as they constitute an independent legal personality
which determines that they work to serve the public interest
and that they're not attached to a larger government department or
corporation and another well-known scholar Hu Angang who, full disclosure,
he was my boss while I was working at Tsinghua. He's come up with three different criteria for
what counts as independence.
He says that one is -- a think tank should count as independent
if the scholars there have autonomy in selecting their topics of research,
autonomy in conducting their research and the ability to publish independently.
Now Hu Angang's think-tank has just recently made the list of the first official 25 think tanks
that are now government recognized and as he was explaining to me
as I was doing writing this paper, there is something called commissioned topics or assigned topics
which means that government institutions
in this case it was the National Development and Reform Commission
will come to him with a list of about a hundred topics that they want to be researched
and he'll selects a few from the list so
for the last five year plans I think he selected eleven topics
and he was then paid by the National Development and Reform Commission to work specifically
on those topics and anything he published for them would have been
confidential and classified but at the same time he said
he was writing on all kinds of other things and had those scholars within his institution
carrying out research and other topics independently which he could then
publish on his own so in that sense he would say his his think tank was still
for the most part independent. So I'm now going to the theoretical part of this talk.
The framework that I used for thinking about how to understand think tanks in China is called
the internationalization of the state.
Now this is a historical materialist approach which is influenced by the work
of a number of particular political geographers and historical sociologists
in particular Bob Jessop, Robert Brenner William Robinson.
And what this looks at is how nation-states transform as they engage with the global capitalist economy
and in particular it looks at how nation-states - institutional, spatial and social structure -
are transformed to accommodate to the needs of the global capitalist economy
and the emphasis on here largely is on the transformation of the class structure
and analysis looks at how state institutions are also sites of contestation
as the forces both inside and outside the state institutions which reflect the interests of capital and in particular
the interests of international capital become increasingly dominant
within the state. So how does this happen?
Political scientist Robert Cox has come up with a kind of a three-stage explanation of how this takes place
which is quite useful to think about.
First of all the community of nation-states as it were agreed on an idea of what he calls
a global ideological consensus. Now most recently that has been dominated by the
United States and it's been ideologically rooted in neoclassical
economics and more recently neoliberalism.
And this has been promoted by the US in universities, in international education and exchange programs
and also funded by institutions. This promotion of these ideas has been
funded by international institutions such as the Ford Foundation
and it's also being promoted through various ways due to US dominance of the
international institutions such as the World Bank for example.
Participation within this global order founded on this global ideological consensus is then
hierarchically structured, according to Robert Cox,
and the promotion of the ideological consensus within the underrepresented States takes place, to quote Cox,
by people who have been socialized to the norms of the consensus.
So in other words what he's talking about are local staff who
graduated from universities in the advanced capitalist countries, usually in the UK and the US.
They hold positions at major financial institutions and then
they return to their home countries and they take high-level jobs in institutions
where they work to promote the ideas of the global ideological consensus
and effectively they work to promote the interest of global capital
within their own country through their work in these institutions.
And this cohort is what I refer to in this paper as the global technocracy.
So it's a powerful technocratic class of managers and experts
whose role is to facilitate and negotiate the policies of the global ideological consensus.
So please note think tanks are one of the institutions through which the global technocracy operates
but also this particular cohort, this class of people,
they're not generally democratically accountable
so I really don't buy this idea that think tanks represent the people
and are more or less democratic institutions.
So what kind of concrete processes do we want to look at
when we're looking out for signs of the internationalization of the state?
In other words where do we look for clues that the forces that are representative
of the global ideological consensus and of the interests of global capital have
achieved dominance within state institutions?
Well we're looking for example for changes in finance and taxation policy within particular nation states.
We're looking for changes in property rights in particular moves
towards privatization as we've certainly been seeing in China. We're looking for
the production of a land market specifically one designed with the interests of global investors in mind
and we're looking for the production of an army of mobile low-cost workers again
to work, to supply cheap labor to incoming global capital
and also the production of an ideology conducive to maintaining a stable, compliant population
while these social upheavals are taking place.
It's important to note that all these changes constitutive of the internationalization of the state
are always going to be contested.
They're going to be contested inside of state institutions sorry outside of state institutions
so for example workers, rights movements in factories to get better labor conditions
but also inside - it resisted inside state institutions
and we can see that in disagreements over policy making.
So for example in China we can see the major debates that have been taking place and are still
taking place over the question of land privatization
particularly the privatization of rural land
which is certainly not an issue that is contained within China domestically.
There are many global corporate interests that would be very interested in
getting access to China's land who have a role in these debates as well
but of course many Chinese policymakers view
the question of the privatization of rural land as providing a license for corporations
to ride roughshod over peasant land rights,
potentially producing huge amounts of landlessness and possibly a social instability.
So having laid out that kind of theoretical framework I'll just say what I plan to do in the rest of the paper
which is to look at three interrelated processes
through which the internationalization of the state is taking place in China.
First of all the internationalization of Chinese policymaking.
This is the process by which China's policymakers are increasingly coming to reflect
the values of the global ideological consensus.
Secondly the ways that Chinese policymakers are integrating with the global technocracy
and finally I look at how there's an emerging capitalist class within China allied with global capital
to a large extent which is also bound up with these same processes.
So when scholars talk about internationalization and particularly
when they talk about internationalization with respect to China's think tanks,
what they're usually talking about is China's increased participation in international institution,
increased international exchanges and moves to increasingly strengthen China's voice
in global policymaking and also to increase China's interests and to promote China's national interests
in reshaping the global world order.
These are issues that get talked about a lot but I'm approaching this from a slightly different perspective.
I'm looking more internally about how the Chinese nation-state, its society and institutions are themselves
being restructured and adapted to the requirements of the world capitalist economy
and how think tanks are implicated in this.
So how does this be taking place in China since 1978? The four angles from which I'm looking at this,
the first one is that there's been a large increase in scholars studying
abroad and also a large increase in their prestige when they return home
which is largely promoted by, has been largely promoted by the state
since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978.
So according to the Ministry of Education from 1978 to 2007 1.21 million students and scholars studied abroad
and 319 700 returned and a large number of these scholars were, for start,
they would have received better perks on the job and higher salaries than scholars
who had only studied in China because they considered more valuable, and a
large number of these would have taken on positions at leading universities, at
policy and research institutions and in Chinese banks.
Secondly there have been changes to China's official state policy discourse become increasingly
compatible with the neoclassical or neoliberal discourses which are
characteristic of the global ideological consensus
and one of the most striking changes that's taken place is the disappearance of the language of class
relatively suddenly at around 1985. The word class which is 阶级
disappeared from policy documents, just disappeared. It happened strikingly fast
and it was replaced with the word social strata 阶层 which is a different concept.
It's a reference to wealth disparities and it's a much more fluid category
and it doesn't carry the connotations of systemic oppression
within the capitalist system that you get with the word class
and this took place -- this is something that a number of scholars have written about,
most prominently by Pun Ngai and she points out how this took place in the mid 80s
just as a working class was starting to emerge in China
so in other words with large numbers of layoffs from state-owned enterprises
and with migrant workers flooding into the cities from the countryside you get this new working-class emerging
but suddenly they don't have the language of class to represent themselves politically.
So as Pun Ngai puts it they're rendered inarticulate
and this was a deliberate strategic move by the state in the interest of political stability
and in fact similarities can be drawn with the disappearance of class analysis.
This is something also pointed out by Pun Ngai.
Disappearance of class analysis from academic studies in the 1980s as well
under Reagan and Thatcher in the US and the UK
just as neoliberal policies were starting to take hold in those countries
and we might look at this as part of the same kind of process
and third the Chinese government has embraced scientific expertise
and sought to recruit technocrats into the bureaucracies at all levels.
This is during the reform period certainly from the beginning of the 1980s
and again this is a deliberate strategy following the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution
to produce a politically stable environment of managers and technocrats that are, shall we say,
less susceptible to being socially and politically motivated
and this has worked to further depoliticize Chinese policy discourse and removed from discussion
the language of class and Marxist categories in favor of the language of science and rationality.
And this is also parallels or closely reflects something that happens in the US in the 1950s.
There was a turn to scientific expertise in US policymaking
which was promoted during the fifties by the RAND Corporation
which was a very prominent -- RAND is a very prominent US think tank with very close ties
to the military and this again was a political strategy to undermine Marxist categories
and socialist politics which would have been considered dangerous and subversive
during the Cold War era. And forth, a close alliance started to emerge
between this new technocratic class in China and an emerging entrepreneurial class
which the scholar Lin Chun has referred to as a crooked fusion of marketization and bureaucratization
oriented towards capital and in particular international capital and many of these entrepreneurs of course
were also overseas returnees. And over the past decades these entrepreneurs and
this class alliance have been asserting their own political and
economic interest by funding think tanks and taking on managerial positions
within them. There's a scholar at the Brookings Institute called Cheng Li
who has analyzed these processes and he's talked about this in particular with respect to
the China Center of International Economic exchanges, which as I mentioned earlier is on the list
of the first 25 officially recognized new-type think tanks
and this is a membership organization with many leading entrepreneurs and CEOs
among its members and it's funded by their membership fees and donations
so in other words this particular think-tank
is having a huge amount of private and corporate capital going into it.
So all of these four changes that I've talked about and in particular this
strong alliance between the technocratic officials and and entrepreneurs are
starting to have an impact on the shaping of Chinese think tanks.
So now let me say something about how the global technocracy is operating within China.
That is, how Chinese scholars are starting to converge or integrate into the global technocracy.
This is happening where by a set of scholars and policymakers generally who trained overseas
often economists who trained at prestigious US and UK institutions
and they took on posts at important international financial institutions
and they're very much oriented towards the global ideological consensus
and to promoting and implementing its values within the Chinese state.
So let me talk about two scholars in particular.
One is Hu Angang, again, my former boss.
He's head of the Institute for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the School of Public Policy and Management
at Tsinghua which again is one of the first 25 new types think tanks.
He was a postdoc at Yale in 1991.
He was a postdoc at the Center for International Studies at MIT in 1998.
He regularly recruit scholars with graduate training into his think tank at Tsinghua
in particular graduate training from the US and the UK and he writes regular reports
for China's top leaders summarizing and explaining the key reports from institutions such as
the UNDP and the World Bank and interpreting their significance for China
so he very much sees as part of his role encouraging China's leaders to produce policymaking
which is compatible with international norms and standards
and it's worth talking about this new mechanism of feedback
for Chinese think tank scholars which is called the pishi （批示）.
Previously when a scholar would write a report and send it off to a government ministry or
address it to a particular political leader they would have no idea if it had been taken seriously
but lately the pishi system is a signature that a particular leader writes on the report
and it basically says this is interesting we should take it seriously,
well this is interesting please send it off to this department
and usually occasionally the original author would find out about that from
word-of-mouth and know that his report had been taken seriously but now these
pishi - these signatures are being scanned and the scan is being sent back to the author
and Hu Angang and his Institute are very proud that he's got quite a large number of pishi
including several from Li Keqiang so his reports do appear to be getting quite a lot of attention.
And the pishi has been adopted as one of the ways that university departments are being ranked.
It's like how many publications do you have.
It's also now taken into account how many pishi you have.
So it's become -- how influential these things are was becoming increasingly important
and now another thing another interesting thing about Hu Angang is that he was talking to me
how he was trying to make clear to me
how he doesn't always tell the government what they want to hear
because I was interviewing him about this issue and he told me about a report
that he'd written in 2009 just before the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change
and he teamed up with some scholars from the Brookings Institute and he wrote
this report which was trying to persuade Chinese leaders to cooperate with the US government
which presents Obama in coming to some kind of agreement on climate change.
And he used the slogan, "one world one dream", that was the 2008 slogan for the Olympics "one world one dream"
and he addressed that slogan to China's premiers and the leadership and said in other words
saying don't see the US as your rival you need to cooperate on this but
unfortunately China's leaders at the time were too concerned that the
America was trying to hinder their development by imposing
climate change restrictions on them so so an agreement never happened unfortunately.
Secondly just a new fill in who a number of you may have heard of.
He's a very famous economist, a professor at Peking University.
He's also one of the vice chairs of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges
that I mentioned earlier. He has a PhD from Chicago which is renowned for its promotion
of neoclassical economics. He played an important role in the WTO
debates persuading China's more conservative leaders of the benefits of
opening up China's economy to international market competition.
And at Peking University he helped to redesign the Economics curriculum
to be more in line with the American model and particularly the Chicago model of economics.
He was chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank.
From 2008 to 2011 he was a founding member of the China Center for Economic Research
which is a think-tank at Peking University. In 2008 that became the National School of Development
and in 2013 that the National School of Development, that think-tank, was ranked
in the top 5 think tanks under the category of highest professional
influence in the National Ranking System - National Think Tanks Ranking System can
be compiled by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and in 2015 the National
School of Development was also included in the National first 25 list of new-type think tanks.
Within the National School of Development Lin had a smaller think tank
called the Center for New Structural Economics
and this smaller Center is becoming I think quite influential now
in formulating China's overseas strategies
so for example the One Belt One Road and the Silk Road strategy and also formulating policies
for Chinese entrepreneurial activities in Africa.
And it's actually promoting. This institute is starting to promote its own version of development
with some development model rooted in the basic premises taken from neoclassical economics.
So to say something about how think tanks are increasingly bound up with emerging capitalist
class dynamics within China, the tripartite elite - this term was used
by Cheng Li, the Brookings Institute scholar that I mentioned earlier - and it
refers to a kind of emerging class in its own right in China consisting of
overseas trained scholars, internationally connected entrepreneurs
technocratic officials - these three coalescing within China's think tanks
and as I mentioned earlier the think tank in particular that he's talking
about is the China Center for International Economic Exchange
where Yifu Lin is a Vice Chair and in his paper on this Cheng Li points in particular
to a well-known case where officials, property developers, bankers and public intellectuals
bound up with this think-tank, all cooperated to follow their own interests
in the local real estate market. And to quote Cheng Li, he says, "only time will tell whether
these fascinating changes in the composition of Chinese think tanks will
contribute to profound and positive developments in decision-making
and elite politics or whether this new confluence of political, economic and
academic elites will spell trouble for China's future".
So I think this quote is worth highlighting because it points to an important debate among policymakers
which has been going on over the last ten years. For example where two scholars
Xue Lan and Zhu Xufeng in 2009 pointed to a shift in the makeup of political power
during the reform period from the monopolization of power by administrative elites
to the monopolization of power by an alliance of political and corporate elites
and if unchecked these scholars argued think tanks will be absorbed into this alliance
and will represent only elite interests not the interests of marginalized social groups
which they believed was really the role that think tanks should be doing.
So this has been quite a large ongoing debate in China over the last 10 years
and the language of the debates is couched in terms of powerful interest groups
强势利益团体, not class because of course class now, we can't use that term because it's considered
politically unacceptable but class I think is really what they're talking about.
And these class interests, these powerful class interest groups, they usually talk,
very often talk about real estates when these debates come up in the literature.
And this is against weak groups.
This is against the interests of weak groups, 弱势群体, that they're operating
and weak groups who is usually said to be represented by peasantry and migrant workers
so scholars and pundits outside of China who are arguing in favor of independence for think tanks
are missing the fact that this debate is taking place.
They're missing the ways that independence in China means the capture of think tanks
by emerging capitalist class represented by this political and corporate alliance
and this debate which is ongoing is largely taking place over the question of civil think tanks
which are independent from government institutions.
And then I'll consider -- these particular think tanks are actually kind
of valorized by a lot of more liberal minded scholars certainly outside
certainly in the West who think that these are more genuine think tanks
because they're they don't have government ties but actually these are
considered by a lot of policymakers in China to be of most concern.
Several think tanks they have no limit on funding because they're not bound up
with government budgets the way that official think tanks are.
And a few of them have attracted very large amounts of corporate and foreign funds and some of them are
actually managing to out-compete government research institutions in terms of hiring the best scholars
often overseas scholars because they're able to pay higher salaries.
But actually recently their development has been restricted
and there aren't that many successful civil think tanks and
statistics showed from 2013 that there are only 5% of think tanks are civil.
A law in 2005, this is largely the reason, a law in 2005 compelled civil think tanks to register
with the Civil Affairs Bureau and to also to register with a local official institution
which many were unable to do so of course those think tanks basically collapsed
and now there are very few of them. But critics of these think tanks claim that
because they find funding so difficult to attract because they don't have the
benefit of being able to attract government funding
they're more susceptible to being co-opted by overseas interests.
In other words bull talked by Western interests because they need to appeal to them for foreign funding
so this debate is taking place largely between two camps in China.
I mean it's a complex debate but to sort of characterize what it looks like,
the first camp is arguing in favor of the development of a donor code culture in
China in order to diversify the sources going to think tanks and this
this camp tends to idealize the US government think tank system as a model and
advocates increased independence for think tanks from government
and calls for things like tax incentives to encourage corporate donations into think tanks
and actually suggest that maybe some people think that there's a
corporate lobbying system beginning to emerge in China
that think tanks are going to become increasingly powerful in terms of their impact on policy making
but I mean entrepreneurs are going to become increasingly powerful in terms of their
impact on policy making via think tanks
but the second camp is much more critical of of this civil think tanks
and much more critical of the US, of the US think tanks
in particular and very skeptical of this concept of the free market of ideas
and a good representation of this camp is an article that appeared
in Kahn millet which is a military journal and this article appeared in I
think it was 2015 and it drew heavily on a report from New York Times - investigative report
which examines the close links between major think tanks in the US especially Brookings
and real estate corporations and it basically was pitched in terms of a warning to China
saying don't allow too much corporate funding into your think tanks because
this is what will happen. They argue that think tanks should be
contained within government institutions in order to create what they call an
internal market of ideas or they talk about this idea of central ideas and
forward interests. In other words you have a set of think tanks within
government institutions but all representing maybe different aspects of society
in order to balance how the debate takes place so in other words
the interests of migrant workers and peasants and corporations are all able
to take place on a more level playing field because they're contained within
government institutions. Civil think tanks are considered to be important
because as some argue they're further from the political power center and
therefore they're more representative of social interests but the idea is that
their development continues to be restricted so they can't become too powerful
and have a disproportionate role in the policy-making process so
just to finish it's worth saying something about the Unirule Institute of Economics
which I mentioned earlier. This is a very well-known think-tank
that for a while - it's a civil think-tank that gets a lot of its funding from corporations.
I think they take it as a matter of pride but they don't
accept any government funding and for a while they were very successful in China.
They very much promote free market interest and privatization
but in the past couple of years there have been reports in the Western media talking about government efforts
to hamper their activities for example closing down their conferences or
preventing the those scholars from travelling abroad
and things like that and this is talked about as a crackdown on free speech.
That's how it's talked about in the media and it certainly is.
It certainly is a hindering of free speech
but the way of presenting it that way actually misses the ways that think tanks such as Unirule
are promoting policies
such as the privatization of rural lands which are it's not just the
question of free speech, it's also a question of the extent to which
global capital is able to have control over Chinese policymaking
and something was pointed to in China by critics of Unirule is for example
the close connections between Unirule and the Cato Institute which is, you probably know,
a very famous think-tank in the US which has been particularly vocal in trying to lobby and advocate
the Chinese government to privatize its land
which a lot of policy makers in China see as a serious call for concern
because it may accelerate processes of peasant land expropriation. So to finish
what I really want to do is say when we examine the question of Chinese think tanks
let's treat with real skepticism this question of if they're independent
they'll somehow be more democratically representative
and that's -- let's perhaps look at the context of how this debate is operating in China.
If you want a look at where China -- where China's think-tank system is going in the future
well there's a number of directions it might take.
Are we seeing the emergence of the corporate lobbying system like we see in the US
or alternatively is this system going to be successfully balanced within
government institutions to maintain some kind of level playing field which
is what a number of scholars and policymakers are advocating for.
And yet the question arises here if the interests of global capitalism are
already, if those kinds of vested interests are already deeply entrenched
within government institutions, how realistic is that really?
Or another interpretation is are these think tanks best understood in fact as a kind of
massive surveillance system that are going to be reporting on
socialist issues and social problems back to the government
as a fulfillment in the ends of maintaining some kind of helping the party state to maintain social stability
but in the end preventing any more democratic form of politics from emerging.
Thank you. I'll finish there.