1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:04,680 The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series 2 00:00:04,680 --> 00:00:06,440 under the Cornell East Asia Program. 3 00:00:06,440 --> 00:00:10,020 The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker. 4 00:00:10,020 --> 00:00:11,400 We hope you enjoy. 5 00:00:11,400 --> 00:00:16,280 So tonight we're very happy to have with us Jane Hayward who comes to us now 6 00:00:16,280 --> 00:00:21,320 as a research fellow in the Government Department 7 00:00:21,320 --> 00:00:25,420 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. 8 00:00:25,420 --> 00:00:33,780 Prior to that she finished her PhD very close to us at NYU in 2012 in East Asian Studies 9 00:00:33,780 --> 00:00:38,000 and then went about as far in one direction that she could go 10 00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:40,880 which is to Tsinghua University in Beijing 11 00:00:40,880 --> 00:00:46,607 where she was on a postdoc for three years from 2013 to 2016 12 00:00:46,607 --> 00:00:52,620 in the Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the School of Public Policy and Management 13 00:00:52,620 --> 00:00:55,700 there at Tsinghua and that was when we first met. 14 00:00:55,700 --> 00:01:03,539 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 15 00:01:03,539 --> 00:01:09,689 as far as she could go, to LSE so we're happy to have found a way to catch her 16 00:01:09,689 --> 00:01:16,520 and bring her here this time. She has worked on a range of topics including 17 00:01:16,520 --> 00:01:24,880 urban villages and agriculture in China but is here to talk to us about a separate topic, 18 00:01:24,880 --> 00:01:27,775 new project she has today - think tanks in China 19 00:01:27,775 --> 00:01:32,840 so please join me in welcoming Jane Hayward. 20 00:01:32,840 --> 00:01:36,120 Thank you very much. Very happy to be invited here 21 00:01:36,120 --> 00:01:44,460 to give this talk. I should start by saying that the starting point for this paper 22 00:01:44,460 --> 00:01:52,600 is that in reading a lot of reports on Chinese think tanks something in particular keeps coming up 23 00:01:52,600 --> 00:01:58,300 when I read reports by both media pundits and also scholars 24 00:01:58,300 --> 00:02:02,130 and I'm talking in particular about scholars in the UK and the US 25 00:02:02,130 --> 00:02:09,080 for the most part that they're criticized for not being independent, 26 00:02:09,080 --> 00:02:15,060 in other words, they're not really taken seriously and this paper is in large part a critique of that perspective 27 00:02:15,060 --> 00:02:16,140 that keeps on coming up 28 00:02:16,140 --> 00:02:21,239 and the approach that I'm taking is how the rise of think tanks in China are 29 00:02:21,239 --> 00:02:27,560 bound up with questions of class power as this Chinese state becomes increasingly integrated 30 00:02:27,560 --> 00:02:29,800 into the global capitalist economy. 31 00:02:29,800 --> 00:02:36,239 And as I go through I will of course have to say something about how these new type think tanks are 32 00:02:36,239 --> 00:02:45,980 bound up with the rise of Xi Jinping which is so topical at the moment so 33 00:02:45,980 --> 00:02:52,180 to begin there's a kind of conundrum around the question of Chinese think tanks 34 00:02:52,180 --> 00:02:58,200 and this is very interesting time as well for me to be giving this talk with the National People's Congress 35 00:02:58,200 --> 00:03:00,420 having just taken place in Beijing 36 00:03:00,420 --> 00:03:05,960 and the end of presidential term limits having just been confirmed at that meeting 37 00:03:05,960 --> 00:03:13,600 which appears to consolidate Xi Jinping's power and the strengthening of authoritarianism in China 38 00:03:13,600 --> 00:03:17,579 around Xi Jinping and his cohort. So the conundrum 39 00:03:17,579 --> 00:03:21,570 is how do we understand think tanks in China given that they are being promoted 40 00:03:21,570 --> 00:03:27,970 by Xi Jinping at the same time that we're seeing an increased political and ideological control 41 00:03:27,970 --> 00:03:33,570 under that same leadership and given that context do we in fact take them seriously. 42 00:03:33,570 --> 00:03:44,940 So having talked about how think tanks are usually talked about by a lot of media pundits 43 00:03:44,940 --> 00:03:50,380 in the US and UK let me talk -- let me give you an excerpt from The Economist. 44 00:03:50,380 --> 00:03:55,140 This is an article called "The brains of the party" from March 2014. 45 00:03:55,140 --> 00:04:00,740 Truly independent think tanks are not something the Communist Party really wants. 46 00:04:00,740 --> 00:04:06,220 They are a feature of civil society as liberal democracies define it. 47 00:04:06,220 --> 00:04:12,269 Nor does the party define it. Those think tanks and that's in inverted commas to show that they're 48 00:04:12,269 --> 00:04:17,600 not really think tanks, those think tanks with the most influence in China, do not write for the public 49 00:04:17,600 --> 00:04:20,650 but for a much smaller audience. 50 00:04:20,650 --> 00:04:24,681 They are trusted instruments of the Communist Party and the State. 51 00:04:24,681 --> 00:04:30,140 The biggest danger of this emperor advisor relationship is that it rewards advisers 52 00:04:30,140 --> 00:04:32,800 who tell the Emperor what they already think 53 00:04:32,800 --> 00:04:37,560 and this idea that Chinese think tanks are only telling China's leaders what they want to hear 54 00:04:37,560 --> 00:04:43,100 or what they already think is something that comes up over and over again 55 00:04:43,100 --> 00:04:50,780 so let's take on these set of assumptions behind this particular critique of Chinese think tanks. 56 00:04:50,780 --> 00:04:55,680 The way that think tanks are traditionally or conventionally understood 57 00:04:55,680 --> 00:05:04,000 comes from a set of assumptions based on the fact that think tanks first emerged in the early 20th century 58 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:09,900 in the US and UK and so they considered fundamentally liberal democratic institutions. 59 00:05:09,900 --> 00:05:13,720 They're supposed to be independent from government 60 00:05:13,720 --> 00:05:18,039 which means both of them and to be institutionally independent and also 61 00:05:18,039 --> 00:05:23,660 privately funded. They're supposed to operate within a free marketplace of ideas. 62 00:05:23,660 --> 00:05:27,370 This is a term you hear a lot about think tanks and it kind of assumes 63 00:05:27,370 --> 00:05:30,935 that debates therefore take place within a level playing field. 64 00:05:30,935 --> 00:05:38,040 There's not much of a discussion about how power operates and how class power in particular operates 65 00:05:38,040 --> 00:05:44,900 and this also misses out the question of ideology, in other words, how ideas and discourses 66 00:05:44,900 --> 00:05:50,700 including within liberal democracies tend to be structured within a particular framework 67 00:05:50,700 --> 00:05:54,720 of what is considered acceptable and relevant to talk about 68 00:05:54,720 --> 00:06:00,360 whereas ideal which don't fit into that discourse are considered irrelevant or somehow unacceptable. 69 00:06:00,360 --> 00:06:07,000 And also think tanks are supposed to be thought about as being embedded within 70 00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:14,880 civil society and that assumes that think tanks represent the interests of society as against the state 71 00:06:14,880 --> 00:06:20,720 and it's an assumption that views think tanks as somehow democratic institutions, 72 00:06:20,720 --> 00:06:27,720 that it misses the question or any kind of analysis of whose interests think tanks are in fact representing. 73 00:06:27,720 --> 00:06:35,699 So let's have a look at a couple of critiques of this traditional view of 74 00:06:35,699 --> 00:06:40,500 think-tanks. There's a great book by Thomas Medvetz that came out in 2012 75 00:06:40,500 --> 00:06:47,520 called "Think tanks in America" and Medvetz talks about think tanks as being unique institutions 76 00:06:47,520 --> 00:06:52,409 in that they have to operate in such a way 77 00:06:52,409 --> 00:07:01,180 that they're constantly trying to live up to four different conditions at the same time. 78 00:07:01,180 --> 00:07:04,740 That is, they need to secure funding so they need to please their donors. 79 00:07:04,740 --> 00:07:06,840 They have to garner publicity. 80 00:07:06,840 --> 00:07:12,960 They have to maintain a scholarly reputation so they can't get too close to government institutions or 81 00:07:12,960 --> 00:07:16,800 at least they can't appear to get too close to government institutions but at 82 00:07:16,800 --> 00:07:19,900 the same time they need to foster political influence 83 00:07:19,900 --> 00:07:21,389 and to quote Medvetz, 84 00:07:21,389 --> 00:07:27,300 "the need to cater to all four at once powerfully limits think tanks' capacity 85 00:07:27,300 --> 00:07:32,980 to challenge the unspoken premises of the policy debate, to ask original questions 86 00:07:32,980 --> 00:07:39,820 and to offer policy prescriptions that run counter to the interests of financial donors, politicians 87 00:07:39,820 --> 00:07:47,700 or media institutions. In other words he's saying this idea of the free marketplace of ideas, it doesn't really exist. 88 00:07:47,700 --> 00:07:54,660 Another article that I want to draw your attention to is a great jointly authored or collectively authored article 89 00:07:54,660 --> 00:08:00,020 that appeared in Critical Policy Studies called "The view from nowhere" 90 00:08:00,020 --> 00:08:05,940 and this is a set of ethnographic research on the formation of British healthcare policy 91 00:08:05,940 --> 00:08:15,060 concerning the reforms to the NHS and the scholars went into -- I think they studied 92 00:08:15,060 --> 00:08:18,180 full think tanks and they conducted a number of interviews with the heads of 93 00:08:18,180 --> 00:08:20,620 these think tanks and the scholars within these think tanks 94 00:08:20,620 --> 00:08:26,460 to establish how this policy concerning British healthcare was put into practice 95 00:08:26,460 --> 00:08:30,940 and how they decided on what policies they were going to be advocating to the British government 96 00:08:30,940 --> 00:08:37,300 and what they found was these think tanks worked a lot backstage in order to build ties with 97 00:08:37,300 --> 00:08:42,400 government ministers and with corporate donors, not only to get their ideas heard 98 00:08:42,400 --> 00:08:47,780 but in order to establish which ideas would be palatable to government officials in the first place. 99 00:08:47,780 --> 00:08:53,160 So in other words the healthcare debate took place largely behind closed doors 100 00:08:53,160 --> 00:08:56,360 without any public consultation whatsoever. 101 00:08:56,360 --> 00:09:03,901 The result has been that the NHS has been chronically underfunded for years 102 00:09:03,901 --> 00:09:09,020 and is being slowly dismantled and privatized. 103 00:09:09,020 --> 00:09:11,750 This is in the face of actually widespread public disapproval 104 00:09:11,750 --> 00:09:16,260 but there's nothing really that the public can do about it because this package of reforms 105 00:09:16,260 --> 00:09:19,790 was decided upon and then presented to the British public 106 00:09:19,790 --> 00:09:24,830 pretty much fait accompli. So think tanks involved in this supposed debate 107 00:09:24,830 --> 00:09:32,500 were in fact adopting a set of neoliberal norms and assumptions about the benefits of efficiency, 108 00:09:32,500 --> 00:09:37,220 choice and privatization. There wasn't really any free and public 109 00:09:37,220 --> 00:09:43,420 debates or exchange of ideas about what those terms meant or in whose interest they were operating. 110 00:09:43,420 --> 00:09:49,663 So the debate itself took place very much within the ideological framework 111 00:09:49,663 --> 00:09:55,340 to which the British government was subscribing at the time. 112 00:09:55,340 --> 00:10:01,940 Any kind of think tanks which operate outside of this set of this kind of neoliberal ideology 113 00:10:01,940 --> 00:10:06,360 is going to have quite a hard time getting their ideas heard or taken seriously. 114 00:10:06,360 --> 00:10:12,300 There are a few exceptions to that but that's kind of the dominant way that think tanks in the US and the UK 115 00:10:12,300 --> 00:10:15,400 have been operating. So just to conclude this section 116 00:10:15,400 --> 00:10:19,400 Anglo-american think tanks I don't think can be meaningfully said to represent 117 00:10:19,400 --> 00:10:24,800 the interests of society against the state. They're structurally inclined to 118 00:10:24,800 --> 00:10:28,790 further the interests of corporate donors and work to get their ideas onto 119 00:10:28,790 --> 00:10:30,480 the government agenda by 120 00:10:30,480 --> 00:10:33,440 in fact telling politicians what they want to hear. 121 00:10:33,440 --> 00:10:38,240 The ideas advocated by think tanks remain firmly within the framework of 122 00:10:38,240 --> 00:10:41,420 what is considered politically acceptable at the time 123 00:10:41,420 --> 00:10:47,480 and there's no real genuine free marketplace of ideas when it comes to advocating about 124 00:10:47,480 --> 00:10:49,060 matters of government policy. 125 00:10:49,060 --> 00:10:57,560 So why is it that China's leaders are deciding to promote think tanks now? 126 00:10:57,560 --> 00:11:03,380 The next section of what I'm going to talk about actually comes from a set of interviews that I carried out 127 00:11:03,380 --> 00:11:09,860 while I was in the Institute for Contemporary China Studies at Tsinghua University 128 00:11:09,860 --> 00:11:15,950 from 2013 to 2016. There I was able to talk to a lot of scholars working within 129 00:11:15,950 --> 00:11:19,280 think tanks or scholars who were studying Chinese think tanks and 130 00:11:19,280 --> 00:11:23,420 involved in the debates about the development of think tanks in that country. 131 00:11:23,420 --> 00:11:32,100 And the kinds of ideas that they came up with about why China was needing think tanks 132 00:11:32,100 --> 00:11:36,070 were scholars within regular government research institute 133 00:11:36,070 --> 00:11:41,900 are very skilled at gathering data and drafting political speeches but actually 134 00:11:41,900 --> 00:11:47,700 they weren't really considered to be very good at coming up with sophisticated ways of 135 00:11:47,700 --> 00:11:51,080 interpreting data or presenting new and innovative ideas 136 00:11:51,080 --> 00:11:56,780 or proposing new strategies. Also the bureaucracy the government bureaucracy 137 00:11:56,780 --> 00:12:01,940 was designed with conformity in mind which means that government researchers 138 00:12:01,940 --> 00:12:07,540 are unwilling to lose promotion opportunities or offend their bosses by 139 00:12:07,540 --> 00:12:12,020 suggesting or proposing unconventional ideas which might rock the boat. 140 00:12:12,020 --> 00:12:16,820 They're also the way that the bureaucratic institutions are organized 141 00:12:16,820 --> 00:12:23,780 is that there are rigid controls on staff numbers which means is again this is about 142 00:12:23,780 --> 00:12:27,290 maintaining the stability and the status quo of the system so it's very difficult 143 00:12:27,290 --> 00:12:31,850 to recruit new members from outside who might have new kinds of ideas 144 00:12:31,850 --> 00:12:38,110 and any new ideas that government researchers do come up with their stove-pipe. 145 00:12:38,110 --> 00:12:43,580 Stove-pipe is a term that means ideas are passed upwards within institutions 146 00:12:43,580 --> 00:12:48,200 rather than exchanged for debate with scholars or other institutions outside 147 00:12:48,200 --> 00:12:53,740 so it's a very insular system and the system is conducive in fact to 148 00:12:53,740 --> 00:12:59,300 institutional conflict. That means that different ministries tend to compete for 149 00:12:59,300 --> 00:13:03,710 influence with one another and for a larger slice of the 150 00:13:03,710 --> 00:13:08,200 central budget funds rather than cooperating to try to come up with 151 00:13:08,200 --> 00:13:13,380 disinterested policy advice which is what really Chinese leaders are looking for. 152 00:13:13,380 --> 00:13:20,580 Also with China's growing role in world affairs there's kind of been a blurring of the policy boundaries 153 00:13:20,580 --> 00:13:27,040 between the domestic and the international and that seems to be requiring far more complex forms 154 00:13:27,040 --> 00:13:32,300 of analysis that government research simply aren't trained to provide 155 00:13:32,300 --> 00:13:37,420 and a number of officials have apparently privately expressed frustration 156 00:13:37,420 --> 00:13:43,220 that in international deliberations particularly with the US, Chinese negotiators are 157 00:13:43,220 --> 00:13:47,300 repeatedly being outwitted by their counterparts in the US who have better 158 00:13:47,300 --> 00:13:50,640 trained advisors. This is obviously a source of frustration. 159 00:13:50,640 --> 00:13:56,560 So what are these new type thing tanks? These have started to be promoted quite seriously 160 00:13:56,560 --> 00:14:10,760 since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and the plan is to approve 50 to 100 so-called 161 00:14:10,760 --> 00:14:17,480 new type think tanks by 2020 and these 50 to 100 are specially selected and 162 00:14:17,480 --> 00:14:23,420 approved think tanks by the Party Central Committee which will 163 00:14:23,420 --> 00:14:31,040 have special connections to government. There'll be special advisers to governments. 164 00:14:31,040 --> 00:14:35,440 And the list of the first 25 of this 100 think tanks 165 00:14:35,440 --> 00:14:42,040 was released in December 2015 while I was in Beijing. I was actually working on this paper 166 00:14:42,040 --> 00:14:50,100 and the rest other think tanks are currently vying it amongst themselves to get onto that list. 167 00:14:50,100 --> 00:14:54,280 So official think tanks -- there are three kinds of think tanks, broadly speaking, 168 00:14:54,280 --> 00:14:56,450 there are many different kinds but broadly speaking, 169 00:14:56,450 --> 00:15:02,270 there are official think tanks which are government institutions, attached to 170 00:15:02,270 --> 00:15:06,920 government institutions, so for example the National Development and Reform Commission 171 00:15:06,920 --> 00:15:11,140 is attached to the State Council. Then there are semi-official think tanks 172 00:15:11,140 --> 00:15:17,380 which are set up by government institutions and they're managed by state approved personnel. 173 00:15:17,380 --> 00:15:23,760 So for example institutions within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 174 00:15:23,760 --> 00:15:25,200 would count as semi-official think tanks. 175 00:15:25,200 --> 00:15:31,700 I think two of those have made it onto the list of the first 25 official new-type think tanks. 176 00:15:31,700 --> 00:15:36,860 Then what I'm going to talk about more in this talk later are civil think tanks 177 00:15:36,860 --> 00:15:41,460 which are non-governmental. They're mostly privately funded 178 00:15:41,460 --> 00:15:45,900 and they don't have institutional or any serious institutional connections to government 179 00:15:45,900 --> 00:15:52,370 and two of those that I'll be talking about later are the China Center for International Economic Exchanges and 180 00:15:52,370 --> 00:15:57,010 the Unirule Institute of Economics. There's no fixed model however. 181 00:15:57,010 --> 00:16:01,670 So there are a lot of think tanks within universities for instance and they're 182 00:16:01,670 --> 00:16:05,209 sometimes called civil think tanks even though the fact that you know 183 00:16:05,209 --> 00:16:08,280 universities are really considered government institutions 184 00:16:08,280 --> 00:16:08,930 so it's a bit 185 00:16:08,930 --> 00:16:15,769 the definitions are a little bit blurred. So all of these are what will eventually 186 00:16:15,769 --> 00:16:21,140 be 50 to 100 official nationally recognized newtype think tanks. 187 00:16:21,140 --> 00:16:26,100 All of them are going to be affiliated to the Central Propaganda Department 188 00:16:26,100 --> 00:16:27,460 of the Chinese Communist Party. 189 00:16:27,460 --> 00:16:32,720 That's now been renamed to the Central Publicity Department which sounds a lot friendlier 190 00:16:32,720 --> 00:16:38,570 but it's the same thing and through this connection their uncensored reports will be 191 00:16:38,570 --> 00:16:45,400 transmitted directly to the top leadership and whichever government department is considered relevant 192 00:16:45,400 --> 00:16:51,120 for that report and this is designed to diversify and accelerates the channels of expertise 193 00:16:51,120 --> 00:16:53,440 into central policymaking, 194 00:16:53,440 --> 00:16:59,640 bypassing government bureaus and this appears to be one of the ways that Xi Jinping 195 00:16:59,640 --> 00:17:05,500 is trying to get around to the government bureaucracies part of his consolidation of power. 196 00:17:05,500 --> 00:17:09,470 It's clearly being to shift political power 197 00:17:09,470 --> 00:17:14,780 away from the bureaucracies and onto the party and onto himself and his advisers 198 00:17:14,780 --> 00:17:19,160 and one of the ways he's doing it is to set up this think tank system 199 00:17:19,160 --> 00:17:24,470 to get around the bureaucracies. Some people have been saying with Xi Jinping's 200 00:17:24,470 --> 00:17:32,520 - what people are calling Xi Jinping's power grab - that there's going to be a shutdown on any meaningful forms 201 00:17:32,520 --> 00:17:35,040 of political debate. I don't really think that's true. 202 00:17:35,040 --> 00:17:40,100 I think this think-tank system shows that actually debate is going to be taking place. 203 00:17:40,100 --> 00:17:43,540 It will certainly be within a particular ideological framework 204 00:17:43,540 --> 00:17:45,820 but there're certainly going to be meaningful debate happening. 205 00:17:45,820 --> 00:17:51,020 So because these think tanks are happening in a non liberal democratic regime 206 00:17:51,020 --> 00:18:07,190 there have been a number of attempts by think-tank scholars to try to reevaluate the term 207 00:18:07,190 --> 00:18:12,420 "independence" because that's considered kind of only relevant certainly in the way that 208 00:18:12,420 --> 00:18:17,160 it's usually talked about. That's considered to only really apply within liberal democracy 209 00:18:17,160 --> 00:18:22,520 so a very well-known think tank scholar Zhu Xufeng for example has talked about 210 00:18:22,520 --> 00:18:26,940 how think tanks should only be regarded as -- should be regarded as independent 211 00:18:26,940 --> 00:18:30,980 as long as they constitute an independent legal personality 212 00:18:30,980 --> 00:18:33,790 which determines that they work to serve the public interest 213 00:18:33,790 --> 00:18:37,940 and that they're not attached to a larger government department or 214 00:18:37,940 --> 00:18:43,370 corporation and another well-known scholar Hu Angang who, full disclosure, 215 00:18:43,370 --> 00:18:50,040 he was my boss while I was working at Tsinghua. He's come up with three different criteria for 216 00:18:50,040 --> 00:18:52,010 what counts as independence. 217 00:18:52,010 --> 00:18:57,400 He says that one is -- a think tank should count as independent 218 00:18:57,400 --> 00:19:01,450 if the scholars there have autonomy in selecting their topics of research, 219 00:19:01,450 --> 00:19:07,280 autonomy in conducting their research and the ability to publish independently. 220 00:19:07,280 --> 00:19:15,500 Now Hu Angang's think-tank has just recently made the list of the first official 25 think tanks 221 00:19:15,500 --> 00:19:20,580 that are now government recognized and as he was explaining to me 222 00:19:20,580 --> 00:19:28,060 as I was doing writing this paper, there is something called commissioned topics or assigned topics 223 00:19:28,060 --> 00:19:31,120 which means that government institutions 224 00:19:31,120 --> 00:19:34,040 in this case it was the National Development and Reform Commission 225 00:19:34,040 --> 00:19:39,000 will come to him with a list of about a hundred topics that they want to be researched 226 00:19:39,000 --> 00:19:41,679 and he'll selects a few from the list so 227 00:19:41,679 --> 00:19:45,380 for the last five year plans I think he selected eleven topics 228 00:19:45,380 --> 00:19:50,440 and he was then paid by the National Development and Reform Commission to work specifically 229 00:19:50,440 --> 00:19:53,880 on those topics and anything he published for them would have been 230 00:19:53,880 --> 00:19:57,378 confidential and classified but at the same time he said 231 00:19:57,378 --> 00:20:03,039 he was writing on all kinds of other things and had those scholars within his institution 232 00:20:03,039 --> 00:20:06,940 carrying out research and other topics independently which he could then 233 00:20:06,940 --> 00:20:11,020 publish on his own so in that sense he would say his his think tank was still 234 00:20:11,020 --> 00:20:22,080 for the most part independent. So I'm now going to the theoretical part of this talk. 235 00:20:22,080 --> 00:20:28,060 The framework that I used for thinking about how to understand think tanks in China is called 236 00:20:28,060 --> 00:20:29,500 the internationalization of the state. 237 00:20:29,500 --> 00:20:35,740 Now this is a historical materialist approach which is influenced by the work 238 00:20:35,740 --> 00:20:40,160 of a number of particular political geographers and historical sociologists 239 00:20:40,160 --> 00:20:44,240 in particular Bob Jessop, Robert Brenner William Robinson. 240 00:20:44,240 --> 00:20:53,600 And what this looks at is how nation-states transform as they engage with the global capitalist economy 241 00:20:53,600 --> 00:20:59,680 and in particular it looks at how nation-states - institutional, spatial and social structure - 242 00:20:59,680 --> 00:21:04,380 are transformed to accommodate to the needs of the global capitalist economy 243 00:21:04,380 --> 00:21:10,580 and the emphasis on here largely is on the transformation of the class structure 244 00:21:10,580 --> 00:21:16,240 and analysis looks at how state institutions are also sites of contestation 245 00:21:16,240 --> 00:21:25,830 as the forces both inside and outside the state institutions which reflect the interests of capital and in particular 246 00:21:26,130 --> 00:21:31,720 the interests of international capital become increasingly dominant 247 00:21:31,720 --> 00:21:35,520 within the state. So how does this happen? 248 00:21:35,520 --> 00:21:45,460 Political scientist Robert Cox has come up with a kind of a three-stage explanation of how this takes place 249 00:21:45,460 --> 00:21:47,200 which is quite useful to think about. 250 00:21:47,200 --> 00:21:55,360 First of all the community of nation-states as it were agreed on an idea of what he calls 251 00:21:55,360 --> 00:22:00,580 a global ideological consensus. Now most recently that has been dominated by the 252 00:22:00,580 --> 00:22:05,800 United States and it's been ideologically rooted in neoclassical 253 00:22:05,800 --> 00:22:09,780 economics and more recently neoliberalism. 254 00:22:09,780 --> 00:22:16,480 And this has been promoted by the US in universities, in international education and exchange programs 255 00:22:16,480 --> 00:22:21,220 and also funded by institutions. This promotion of these ideas has been 256 00:22:21,220 --> 00:22:25,020 funded by international institutions such as the Ford Foundation 257 00:22:25,020 --> 00:22:31,420 and it's also being promoted through various ways due to US dominance of the 258 00:22:31,420 --> 00:22:36,420 international institutions such as the World Bank for example. 259 00:22:36,420 --> 00:22:45,220 Participation within this global order founded on this global ideological consensus is then 260 00:22:45,220 --> 00:22:48,320 hierarchically structured, according to Robert Cox, 261 00:22:48,320 --> 00:22:56,300 and the promotion of the ideological consensus within the underrepresented States takes place, to quote Cox, 262 00:22:56,300 --> 00:23:01,100 by people who have been socialized to the norms of the consensus. 263 00:23:01,100 --> 00:23:04,810 So in other words what he's talking about are local staff who 264 00:23:04,810 --> 00:23:10,400 graduated from universities in the advanced capitalist countries, usually in the UK and the US. 265 00:23:10,400 --> 00:23:15,010 They hold positions at major financial institutions and then 266 00:23:15,010 --> 00:23:19,000 they return to their home countries and they take high-level jobs in institutions 267 00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:24,300 where they work to promote the ideas of the global ideological consensus 268 00:23:24,300 --> 00:23:29,110 and effectively they work to promote the interest of global capital 269 00:23:29,110 --> 00:23:32,200 within their own country through their work in these institutions. 270 00:23:32,200 --> 00:23:37,440 And this cohort is what I refer to in this paper as the global technocracy. 271 00:23:37,440 --> 00:23:41,086 So it's a powerful technocratic class of managers and experts 272 00:23:41,086 --> 00:23:47,610 whose role is to facilitate and negotiate the policies of the global ideological consensus. 273 00:23:47,610 --> 00:23:54,620 So please note think tanks are one of the institutions through which the global technocracy operates 274 00:23:54,620 --> 00:23:58,260 but also this particular cohort, this class of people, 275 00:23:58,260 --> 00:24:02,160 they're not generally democratically accountable 276 00:24:02,160 --> 00:24:06,580 so I really don't buy this idea that think tanks represent the people 277 00:24:06,580 --> 00:24:09,120 and are more or less democratic institutions. 278 00:24:09,120 --> 00:24:15,440 So what kind of concrete processes do we want to look at 279 00:24:15,440 --> 00:24:18,800 when we're looking out for signs of the internationalization of the state? 280 00:24:18,800 --> 00:24:24,970 In other words where do we look for clues that the forces that are representative 281 00:24:24,970 --> 00:24:30,250 of the global ideological consensus and of the interests of global capital have 282 00:24:30,250 --> 00:24:33,060 achieved dominance within state institutions? 283 00:24:33,060 --> 00:24:39,340 Well we're looking for example for changes in finance and taxation policy within particular nation states. 284 00:24:39,340 --> 00:24:43,840 We're looking for changes in property rights in particular moves 285 00:24:43,840 --> 00:24:48,790 towards privatization as we've certainly been seeing in China. We're looking for 286 00:24:48,790 --> 00:24:55,780 the production of a land market specifically one designed with the interests of global investors in mind 287 00:24:55,780 --> 00:25:02,260 and we're looking for the production of an army of mobile low-cost workers again 288 00:25:02,260 --> 00:25:09,680 to work, to supply cheap labor to incoming global capital 289 00:25:09,680 --> 00:25:16,840 and also the production of an ideology conducive to maintaining a stable, compliant population 290 00:25:16,840 --> 00:25:19,720 while these social upheavals are taking place. 291 00:25:19,720 --> 00:25:27,360 It's important to note that all these changes constitutive of the internationalization of the state 292 00:25:27,360 --> 00:25:29,760 are always going to be contested. 293 00:25:29,760 --> 00:25:36,000 They're going to be contested inside of state institutions sorry outside of state institutions 294 00:25:36,000 --> 00:25:43,040 so for example workers, rights movements in factories to get better labor conditions 295 00:25:43,040 --> 00:25:46,810 but also inside - it resisted inside state institutions 296 00:25:46,810 --> 00:25:50,200 and we can see that in disagreements over policy making. 297 00:25:50,200 --> 00:25:55,210 So for example in China we can see the major debates that have been taking place and are still 298 00:25:55,210 --> 00:25:58,780 taking place over the question of land privatization 299 00:25:58,780 --> 00:26:01,640 particularly the privatization of rural land 300 00:26:01,640 --> 00:26:07,440 which is certainly not an issue that is contained within China domestically. 301 00:26:07,440 --> 00:26:11,500 There are many global corporate interests that would be very interested in 302 00:26:11,500 --> 00:26:17,360 getting access to China's land who have a role in these debates as well 303 00:26:17,360 --> 00:26:21,269 but of course many Chinese policymakers view 304 00:26:21,269 --> 00:26:27,720 the question of the privatization of rural land as providing a license for corporations 305 00:26:27,720 --> 00:26:30,780 to ride roughshod over peasant land rights, 306 00:26:30,780 --> 00:26:38,020 potentially producing huge amounts of landlessness and possibly a social instability. 307 00:26:38,020 --> 00:26:50,039 So having laid out that kind of theoretical framework I'll just say what I plan to do in the rest of the paper 308 00:26:50,039 --> 00:26:54,400 which is to look at three interrelated processes 309 00:26:54,400 --> 00:26:58,500 through which the internationalization of the state is taking place in China. 310 00:26:58,500 --> 00:27:02,198 First of all the internationalization of Chinese policymaking. 311 00:27:02,198 --> 00:27:08,360 This is the process by which China's policymakers are increasingly coming to reflect 312 00:27:08,360 --> 00:27:12,660 the values of the global ideological consensus. 313 00:27:12,660 --> 00:27:19,160 Secondly the ways that Chinese policymakers are integrating with the global technocracy 314 00:27:19,160 --> 00:27:26,669 and finally I look at how there's an emerging capitalist class within China allied with global capital 315 00:27:26,669 --> 00:27:32,029 to a large extent which is also bound up with these same processes. 316 00:27:38,280 --> 00:27:42,040 So when scholars talk about internationalization and particularly 317 00:27:42,040 --> 00:27:47,720 when they talk about internationalization with respect to China's think tanks, 318 00:27:47,720 --> 00:27:53,720 what they're usually talking about is China's increased participation in international institution, 319 00:27:53,720 --> 00:28:01,020 increased international exchanges and moves to increasingly strengthen China's voice 320 00:28:01,020 --> 00:28:12,440 in global policymaking and also to increase China's interests and to promote China's national interests 321 00:28:12,440 --> 00:28:15,080 in reshaping the global world order. 322 00:28:15,080 --> 00:28:19,820 These are issues that get talked about a lot but I'm approaching this from a slightly different perspective. 323 00:28:19,820 --> 00:28:27,840 I'm looking more internally about how the Chinese nation-state, its society and institutions are themselves 324 00:28:27,840 --> 00:28:34,540 being restructured and adapted to the requirements of the world capitalist economy 325 00:28:34,540 --> 00:28:37,800 and how think tanks are implicated in this. 326 00:28:37,800 --> 00:28:50,860 So how does this be taking place in China since 1978? The four angles from which I'm looking at this, 327 00:28:50,860 --> 00:28:55,390 the first one is that there's been a large increase in scholars studying 328 00:28:55,390 --> 00:29:00,580 abroad and also a large increase in their prestige when they return home 329 00:29:00,580 --> 00:29:05,860 which is largely promoted by, has been largely promoted by the state 330 00:29:05,860 --> 00:29:09,520 since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978. 331 00:29:09,520 --> 00:29:19,400 So according to the Ministry of Education from 1978 to 2007 1.21 million students and scholars studied abroad 332 00:29:19,400 --> 00:29:26,740 and 319 700 returned and a large number of these scholars were, for start, 333 00:29:26,740 --> 00:29:30,910 they would have received better perks on the job and higher salaries than scholars 334 00:29:30,910 --> 00:29:35,590 who had only studied in China because they considered more valuable, and a 335 00:29:35,590 --> 00:29:39,820 large number of these would have taken on positions at leading universities, at 336 00:29:39,820 --> 00:29:44,971 policy and research institutions and in Chinese banks. 337 00:29:44,971 --> 00:29:52,430 Secondly there have been changes to China's official state policy discourse become increasingly 338 00:29:52,430 --> 00:29:56,810 compatible with the neoclassical or neoliberal discourses which are 339 00:29:56,810 --> 00:30:01,340 characteristic of the global ideological consensus 340 00:30:01,340 --> 00:30:08,120 and one of the most striking changes that's taken place is the disappearance of the language of class 341 00:30:08,120 --> 00:30:14,800 relatively suddenly at around 1985. The word class which is 阶级 342 00:30:14,800 --> 00:30:20,260 disappeared from policy documents, just disappeared. It happened strikingly fast 343 00:30:20,260 --> 00:30:27,300 and it was replaced with the word social strata 阶层 which is a different concept. 344 00:30:27,300 --> 00:30:33,100 It's a reference to wealth disparities and it's a much more fluid category 345 00:30:33,100 --> 00:30:36,400 and it doesn't carry the connotations of systemic oppression 346 00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:41,140 within the capitalist system that you get with the word class 347 00:30:41,140 --> 00:30:46,380 and this took place -- this is something that a number of scholars have written about, 348 00:30:46,380 --> 00:30:52,880 most prominently by Pun Ngai and she points out how this took place in the mid 80s 349 00:30:52,880 --> 00:30:57,340 just as a working class was starting to emerge in China 350 00:30:57,340 --> 00:31:01,820 so in other words with large numbers of layoffs from state-owned enterprises 351 00:31:01,820 --> 00:31:07,900 and with migrant workers flooding into the cities from the countryside you get this new working-class emerging 352 00:31:07,900 --> 00:31:12,100 but suddenly they don't have the language of class to represent themselves politically. 353 00:31:12,100 --> 00:31:17,440 So as Pun Ngai puts it they're rendered inarticulate 354 00:31:17,440 --> 00:31:24,240 and this was a deliberate strategic move by the state in the interest of political stability 355 00:31:24,240 --> 00:31:30,040 and in fact similarities can be drawn with the disappearance of class analysis. 356 00:31:30,040 --> 00:31:33,940 This is something also pointed out by Pun Ngai. 357 00:31:33,940 --> 00:31:39,350 Disappearance of class analysis from academic studies in the 1980s as well 358 00:31:39,350 --> 00:31:42,540 under Reagan and Thatcher in the US and the UK 359 00:31:42,540 --> 00:31:46,040 just as neoliberal policies were starting to take hold in those countries 360 00:31:46,040 --> 00:31:49,620 and we might look at this as part of the same kind of process 361 00:31:49,620 --> 00:31:56,060 and third the Chinese government has embraced scientific expertise 362 00:31:56,060 --> 00:32:00,560 and sought to recruit technocrats into the bureaucracies at all levels. 363 00:32:00,560 --> 00:32:05,020 This is during the reform period certainly from the beginning of the 1980s 364 00:32:05,020 --> 00:32:10,980 and again this is a deliberate strategy following the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution 365 00:32:10,980 --> 00:32:17,430 to produce a politically stable environment of managers and technocrats that are, shall we say, 366 00:32:17,430 --> 00:32:23,060 less susceptible to being socially and politically motivated 367 00:32:23,060 --> 00:32:30,640 and this has worked to further depoliticize Chinese policy discourse and removed from discussion 368 00:32:30,640 --> 00:32:38,180 the language of class and Marxist categories in favor of the language of science and rationality. 369 00:32:38,180 --> 00:32:46,590 And this is also parallels or closely reflects something that happens in the US in the 1950s. 370 00:32:46,590 --> 00:32:52,440 There was a turn to scientific expertise in US policymaking 371 00:32:52,440 --> 00:32:57,320 which was promoted during the fifties by the RAND Corporation 372 00:32:57,320 --> 00:33:03,500 which was a very prominent -- RAND is a very prominent US think tank with very close ties 373 00:33:03,500 --> 00:33:09,060 to the military and this again was a political strategy to undermine Marxist categories 374 00:33:09,060 --> 00:33:12,720 and socialist politics which would have been considered dangerous and subversive 375 00:33:12,720 --> 00:33:21,110 during the Cold War era. And forth, a close alliance started to emerge 376 00:33:21,110 --> 00:33:29,340 between this new technocratic class in China and an emerging entrepreneurial class 377 00:33:29,340 --> 00:33:36,560 which the scholar Lin Chun has referred to as a crooked fusion of marketization and bureaucratization 378 00:33:36,560 --> 00:33:43,440 oriented towards capital and in particular international capital and many of these entrepreneurs of course 379 00:33:43,440 --> 00:33:50,100 were also overseas returnees. And over the past decades these entrepreneurs and 380 00:33:50,100 --> 00:33:55,590 this class alliance have been asserting their own political and 381 00:33:55,590 --> 00:34:00,870 economic interest by funding think tanks and taking on managerial positions 382 00:34:00,870 --> 00:34:05,860 within them. There's a scholar at the Brookings Institute called Cheng Li 383 00:34:05,860 --> 00:34:11,300 who has analyzed these processes and he's talked about this in particular with respect to 384 00:34:11,300 --> 00:34:17,280 the China Center of International Economic exchanges, which as I mentioned earlier is on the list 385 00:34:17,280 --> 00:34:23,700 of the first 25 officially recognized new-type think tanks 386 00:34:23,700 --> 00:34:29,300 and this is a membership organization with many leading entrepreneurs and CEOs 387 00:34:29,300 --> 00:34:34,260 among its members and it's funded by their membership fees and donations 388 00:34:34,260 --> 00:34:36,500 so in other words this particular think-tank 389 00:34:36,500 --> 00:34:41,210 is having a huge amount of private and corporate capital going into it. 390 00:34:41,210 --> 00:34:46,940 So all of these four changes that I've talked about and in particular this 391 00:34:46,940 --> 00:34:52,250 strong alliance between the technocratic officials and and entrepreneurs are 392 00:34:52,250 --> 00:34:57,880 starting to have an impact on the shaping of Chinese think tanks. 393 00:34:57,880 --> 00:35:10,080 So now let me say something about how the global technocracy is operating within China. 394 00:35:10,080 --> 00:35:15,040 That is, how Chinese scholars are starting to converge or integrate into the global technocracy. 395 00:35:15,040 --> 00:35:22,740 This is happening where by a set of scholars and policymakers generally who trained overseas 396 00:35:22,740 --> 00:35:28,160 often economists who trained at prestigious US and UK institutions 397 00:35:28,160 --> 00:35:34,120 and they took on posts at important international financial institutions 398 00:35:34,120 --> 00:35:40,600 and they're very much oriented towards the global ideological consensus 399 00:35:40,600 --> 00:35:45,620 and to promoting and implementing its values within the Chinese state. 400 00:35:45,620 --> 00:35:49,280 So let me talk about two scholars in particular. 401 00:35:49,280 --> 00:35:52,520 One is Hu Angang, again, my former boss. 402 00:35:52,520 --> 00:35:57,650 He's head of the Institute for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the School of Public Policy and Management 403 00:35:57,650 --> 00:36:04,420 at Tsinghua which again is one of the first 25 new types think tanks. 404 00:36:04,420 --> 00:36:08,860 He was a postdoc at Yale in 1991. 405 00:36:08,860 --> 00:36:14,760 He was a postdoc at the Center for International Studies at MIT in 1998. 406 00:36:14,760 --> 00:36:20,520 He regularly recruit scholars with graduate training into his think tank at Tsinghua 407 00:36:20,520 --> 00:36:28,060 in particular graduate training from the US and the UK and he writes regular reports 408 00:36:28,060 --> 00:36:34,960 for China's top leaders summarizing and explaining the key reports from institutions such as 409 00:36:34,960 --> 00:36:39,300 the UNDP and the World Bank and interpreting their significance for China 410 00:36:39,300 --> 00:36:46,020 so he very much sees as part of his role encouraging China's leaders to produce policymaking 411 00:36:46,020 --> 00:36:50,620 which is compatible with international norms and standards 412 00:36:50,620 --> 00:36:54,900 and it's worth talking about this new mechanism of feedback 413 00:36:54,900 --> 00:36:59,640 for Chinese think tank scholars which is called the pishi （批示）. 414 00:36:59,640 --> 00:37:05,140 Previously when a scholar would write a report and send it off to a government ministry or 415 00:37:05,140 --> 00:37:16,300 address it to a particular political leader they would have no idea if it had been taken seriously 416 00:37:16,300 --> 00:37:23,180 but lately the pishi system is a signature that a particular leader writes on the report 417 00:37:23,180 --> 00:37:28,200 and it basically says this is interesting we should take it seriously, 418 00:37:28,200 --> 00:37:29,740 well this is interesting please send it off to this department 419 00:37:29,740 --> 00:37:34,810 and usually occasionally the original author would find out about that from 420 00:37:34,810 --> 00:37:38,350 word-of-mouth and know that his report had been taken seriously but now these 421 00:37:38,350 --> 00:37:45,760 pishi - these signatures are being scanned and the scan is being sent back to the author 422 00:37:45,760 --> 00:37:51,920 and Hu Angang and his Institute are very proud that he's got quite a large number of pishi 423 00:37:51,920 --> 00:37:57,760 including several from Li Keqiang so his reports do appear to be getting quite a lot of attention. 424 00:37:57,760 --> 00:38:04,900 And the pishi has been adopted as one of the ways that university departments are being ranked. 425 00:38:04,900 --> 00:38:07,424 It's like how many publications do you have. 426 00:38:07,424 --> 00:38:10,860 It's also now taken into account how many pishi you have. 427 00:38:10,860 --> 00:38:16,940 So it's become -- how influential these things are was becoming increasingly important 428 00:38:16,940 --> 00:38:25,270 and now another thing another interesting thing about Hu Angang is that he was talking to me 429 00:38:25,270 --> 00:38:28,910 how he was trying to make clear to me 430 00:38:28,910 --> 00:38:31,400 how he doesn't always tell the government what they want to hear 431 00:38:31,400 --> 00:38:36,680 because I was interviewing him about this issue and he told me about a report 432 00:38:36,680 --> 00:38:42,849 that he'd written in 2009 just before the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change 433 00:38:42,849 --> 00:38:48,410 and he teamed up with some scholars from the Brookings Institute and he wrote 434 00:38:48,410 --> 00:38:54,920 this report which was trying to persuade Chinese leaders to cooperate with the US government 435 00:38:54,920 --> 00:39:00,900 which presents Obama in coming to some kind of agreement on climate change. 436 00:39:00,900 --> 00:39:07,922 And he used the slogan, "one world one dream", that was the 2008 slogan for the Olympics "one world one dream" 437 00:39:07,922 --> 00:39:19,730 and he addressed that slogan to China's premiers and the leadership and said in other words 438 00:39:19,730 --> 00:39:23,989 saying don't see the US as your rival you need to cooperate on this but 439 00:39:23,989 --> 00:39:28,579 unfortunately China's leaders at the time were too concerned that the 440 00:39:28,579 --> 00:39:35,029 America was trying to hinder their development by imposing 441 00:39:35,029 --> 00:39:41,780 climate change restrictions on them so so an agreement never happened unfortunately. 442 00:39:41,780 --> 00:39:48,099 Secondly just a new fill in who a number of you may have heard of. 443 00:39:48,099 --> 00:39:53,260 He's a very famous economist, a professor at Peking University. 444 00:39:53,260 --> 00:39:58,240 He's also one of the vice chairs of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges 445 00:39:58,240 --> 00:40:04,220 that I mentioned earlier. He has a PhD from Chicago which is renowned for its promotion 446 00:40:04,220 --> 00:40:08,900 of neoclassical economics. He played an important role in the WTO 447 00:40:08,900 --> 00:40:14,900 debates persuading China's more conservative leaders of the benefits of 448 00:40:14,900 --> 00:40:18,500 opening up China's economy to international market competition. 449 00:40:18,500 --> 00:40:23,380 And at Peking University he helped to redesign the Economics curriculum 450 00:40:23,380 --> 00:40:30,240 to be more in line with the American model and particularly the Chicago model of economics. 451 00:40:30,240 --> 00:40:35,289 He was chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank. 452 00:40:35,289 --> 00:40:42,090 From 2008 to 2011 he was a founding member of the China Center for Economic Research 453 00:40:42,090 --> 00:40:51,540 which is a think-tank at Peking University. In 2008 that became the National School of Development 454 00:40:51,540 --> 00:40:57,140 and in 2013 that the National School of Development, that think-tank, was ranked 455 00:40:57,140 --> 00:41:02,540 in the top 5 think tanks under the category of highest professional 456 00:41:02,540 --> 00:41:07,400 influence in the National Ranking System - National Think Tanks Ranking System can 457 00:41:07,400 --> 00:41:14,690 be compiled by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and in 2015 the National 458 00:41:14,690 --> 00:41:23,460 School of Development was also included in the National first 25 list of new-type think tanks. 459 00:41:23,460 --> 00:41:27,520 Within the National School of Development Lin had a smaller think tank 460 00:41:27,520 --> 00:41:30,620 called the Center for New Structural Economics 461 00:41:30,620 --> 00:41:35,720 and this smaller Center is becoming I think quite influential now 462 00:41:35,720 --> 00:41:41,120 in formulating China's overseas strategies 463 00:41:41,120 --> 00:41:48,340 so for example the One Belt One Road and the Silk Road strategy and also formulating policies 464 00:41:48,340 --> 00:41:52,500 for Chinese entrepreneurial activities in Africa. 465 00:41:52,500 --> 00:42:00,377 And it's actually promoting. This institute is starting to promote its own version of development 466 00:42:00,377 --> 00:42:08,680 with some development model rooted in the basic premises taken from neoclassical economics. 467 00:42:08,680 --> 00:42:21,960 So to say something about how think tanks are increasingly bound up with emerging capitalist 468 00:42:21,960 --> 00:42:27,710 class dynamics within China, the tripartite elite - this term was used 469 00:42:27,710 --> 00:42:34,520 by Cheng Li, the Brookings Institute scholar that I mentioned earlier - and it 470 00:42:34,520 --> 00:42:40,220 refers to a kind of emerging class in its own right in China consisting of 471 00:42:40,220 --> 00:42:44,200 overseas trained scholars, internationally connected entrepreneurs 472 00:42:44,200 --> 00:42:49,240 technocratic officials - these three coalescing within China's think tanks 473 00:42:49,240 --> 00:42:53,200 and as I mentioned earlier the think tank in particular that he's talking 474 00:42:53,200 --> 00:42:56,590 about is the China Center for International Economic Exchange 475 00:42:56,590 --> 00:43:05,440 where Yifu Lin is a Vice Chair and in his paper on this Cheng Li points in particular 476 00:43:05,440 --> 00:43:11,600 to a well-known case where officials, property developers, bankers and public intellectuals 477 00:43:11,600 --> 00:43:16,520 bound up with this think-tank, all cooperated to follow their own interests 478 00:43:16,520 --> 00:43:26,200 in the local real estate market. And to quote Cheng Li, he says, "only time will tell whether 479 00:43:26,200 --> 00:43:30,610 these fascinating changes in the composition of Chinese think tanks will 480 00:43:30,610 --> 00:43:34,840 contribute to profound and positive developments in decision-making 481 00:43:34,840 --> 00:43:40,180 and elite politics or whether this new confluence of political, economic and 482 00:43:40,180 --> 00:43:43,780 academic elites will spell trouble for China's future". 483 00:43:43,780 --> 00:43:49,990 So I think this quote is worth highlighting because it points to an important debate among policymakers 484 00:43:49,990 --> 00:43:56,230 which has been going on over the last ten years. For example where two scholars 485 00:43:56,230 --> 00:44:05,720 Xue Lan and Zhu Xufeng in 2009 pointed to a shift in the makeup of political power 486 00:44:05,720 --> 00:44:12,620 during the reform period from the monopolization of power by administrative elites 487 00:44:12,620 --> 00:44:17,880 to the monopolization of power by an alliance of political and corporate elites 488 00:44:17,880 --> 00:44:24,440 and if unchecked these scholars argued think tanks will be absorbed into this alliance 489 00:44:24,440 --> 00:44:31,800 and will represent only elite interests not the interests of marginalized social groups 490 00:44:31,800 --> 00:44:36,300 which they believed was really the role that think tanks should be doing. 491 00:44:36,300 --> 00:44:41,360 So this has been quite a large ongoing debate in China over the last 10 years 492 00:44:41,360 --> 00:44:49,700 and the language of the debates is couched in terms of powerful interest groups 493 00:44:49,700 --> 00:44:54,620 强势利益团体, not class because of course class now, we can't use that term because it's considered 494 00:44:54,620 --> 00:44:58,240 politically unacceptable but class I think is really what they're talking about. 495 00:44:58,240 --> 00:45:02,779 And these class interests, these powerful class interest groups, they usually talk, 496 00:45:02,779 --> 00:45:06,900 very often talk about real estates when these debates come up in the literature. 497 00:45:06,900 --> 00:45:11,080 And this is against weak groups. 498 00:45:11,080 --> 00:45:15,880 This is against the interests of weak groups, 弱势群体, that they're operating 499 00:45:15,880 --> 00:45:25,420 and weak groups who is usually said to be represented by peasantry and migrant workers 500 00:45:25,420 --> 00:45:31,080 so scholars and pundits outside of China who are arguing in favor of independence for think tanks 501 00:45:31,080 --> 00:45:37,320 are missing the fact that this debate is taking place. 502 00:45:37,320 --> 00:45:41,940 They're missing the ways that independence in China means the capture of think tanks 503 00:45:41,940 --> 00:45:48,480 by emerging capitalist class represented by this political and corporate alliance 504 00:45:48,480 --> 00:45:55,800 and this debate which is ongoing is largely taking place over the question of civil think tanks 505 00:45:55,800 --> 00:45:58,400 which are independent from government institutions. 506 00:45:58,400 --> 00:46:04,460 And then I'll consider -- these particular think tanks are actually kind 507 00:46:04,460 --> 00:46:09,380 of valorized by a lot of more liberal minded scholars certainly outside 508 00:46:09,380 --> 00:46:12,769 certainly in the West who think that these are more genuine think tanks 509 00:46:12,769 --> 00:46:17,000 because they're they don't have government ties but actually these are 510 00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:22,039 considered by a lot of policymakers in China to be of most concern. 511 00:46:22,039 --> 00:46:25,880 Several think tanks they have no limit on funding because they're not bound up 512 00:46:25,880 --> 00:46:30,120 with government budgets the way that official think tanks are. 513 00:46:30,120 --> 00:46:37,860 And a few of them have attracted very large amounts of corporate and foreign funds and some of them are 514 00:46:37,860 --> 00:46:44,202 actually managing to out-compete government research institutions in terms of hiring the best scholars 515 00:46:44,202 --> 00:46:49,180 often overseas scholars because they're able to pay higher salaries. 516 00:46:49,180 --> 00:46:54,260 But actually recently their development has been restricted 517 00:46:54,260 --> 00:46:58,450 and there aren't that many successful civil think tanks and 518 00:46:58,450 --> 00:47:04,100 statistics showed from 2013 that there are only 5% of think tanks are civil. 519 00:47:04,100 --> 00:47:10,340 A law in 2005, this is largely the reason, a law in 2005 compelled civil think tanks to register 520 00:47:10,340 --> 00:47:16,180 with the Civil Affairs Bureau and to also to register with a local official institution 521 00:47:16,180 --> 00:47:25,920 which many were unable to do so of course those think tanks basically collapsed 522 00:47:25,920 --> 00:47:31,380 and now there are very few of them. But critics of these think tanks claim that 523 00:47:31,380 --> 00:47:36,510 because they find funding so difficult to attract because they don't have the 524 00:47:36,510 --> 00:47:39,620 benefit of being able to attract government funding 525 00:47:39,620 --> 00:47:45,100 they're more susceptible to being co-opted by overseas interests. 526 00:47:45,100 --> 00:47:53,880 In other words bull talked by Western interests because they need to appeal to them for foreign funding 527 00:47:53,880 --> 00:47:58,280 so this debate is taking place largely between two camps in China. 528 00:47:58,280 --> 00:48:03,160 I mean it's a complex debate but to sort of characterize what it looks like, 529 00:48:03,160 --> 00:48:12,480 the first camp is arguing in favor of the development of a donor code culture in 530 00:48:12,480 --> 00:48:20,039 China in order to diversify the sources going to think tanks and this 531 00:48:20,039 --> 00:48:26,250 this camp tends to idealize the US government think tank system as a model and 532 00:48:26,250 --> 00:48:30,560 advocates increased independence for think tanks from government 533 00:48:30,560 --> 00:48:35,900 and calls for things like tax incentives to encourage corporate donations into think tanks 534 00:48:35,900 --> 00:48:42,210 and actually suggest that maybe some people think that there's a 535 00:48:42,210 --> 00:48:46,380 corporate lobbying system beginning to emerge in China 536 00:48:46,380 --> 00:48:53,880 that think tanks are going to become increasingly powerful in terms of their impact on policy making 537 00:48:53,880 --> 00:48:59,720 but I mean entrepreneurs are going to become increasingly powerful in terms of their 538 00:48:59,720 --> 00:49:02,430 impact on policy making via think tanks 539 00:49:02,430 --> 00:49:11,579 but the second camp is much more critical of of this civil think tanks 540 00:49:11,579 --> 00:49:16,310 and much more critical of the US, of the US think tanks 541 00:49:16,310 --> 00:49:23,590 in particular and very skeptical of this concept of the free market of ideas 542 00:49:23,590 --> 00:49:29,720 and a good representation of this camp is an article that appeared 543 00:49:29,720 --> 00:49:34,790 in Kahn millet which is a military journal and this article appeared in I 544 00:49:34,790 --> 00:49:42,700 think it was 2015 and it drew heavily on a report from New York Times - investigative report 545 00:49:42,700 --> 00:49:49,420 which examines the close links between major think tanks in the US especially Brookings 546 00:49:49,420 --> 00:49:56,960 and real estate corporations and it basically was pitched in terms of a warning to China 547 00:49:56,960 --> 00:50:02,600 saying don't allow too much corporate funding into your think tanks because 548 00:50:02,600 --> 00:50:06,680 this is what will happen. They argue that think tanks should be 549 00:50:06,680 --> 00:50:11,300 contained within government institutions in order to create what they call an 550 00:50:11,300 --> 00:50:16,670 internal market of ideas or they talk about this idea of central ideas and 551 00:50:16,670 --> 00:50:20,510 forward interests. In other words you have a set of think tanks within 552 00:50:20,510 --> 00:50:27,440 government institutions but all representing maybe different aspects of society 553 00:50:27,440 --> 00:50:33,840 in order to balance how the debate takes place so in other words 554 00:50:33,840 --> 00:50:37,340 the interests of migrant workers and peasants and corporations are all able 555 00:50:37,340 --> 00:50:40,760 to take place on a more level playing field because they're contained within 556 00:50:40,760 --> 00:50:47,300 government institutions. Civil think tanks are considered to be important 557 00:50:47,300 --> 00:50:51,830 because as some argue they're further from the political power center and 558 00:50:51,830 --> 00:50:55,910 therefore they're more representative of social interests but the idea is that 559 00:50:55,910 --> 00:51:00,800 their development continues to be restricted so they can't become too powerful 560 00:51:00,800 --> 00:51:06,320 and have a disproportionate role in the policy-making process so 561 00:51:06,320 --> 00:51:11,880 just to finish it's worth saying something about the Unirule Institute of Economics 562 00:51:11,880 --> 00:51:15,890 which I mentioned earlier. This is a very well-known think-tank 563 00:51:15,890 --> 00:51:21,753 that for a while - it's a civil think-tank that gets a lot of its funding from corporations. 564 00:51:21,753 --> 00:51:25,130 I think they take it as a matter of pride but they don't 565 00:51:25,130 --> 00:51:30,549 accept any government funding and for a while they were very successful in China. 566 00:51:30,549 --> 00:51:36,340 They very much promote free market interest and privatization 567 00:51:36,340 --> 00:51:44,140 but in the past couple of years there have been reports in the Western media talking about government efforts 568 00:51:44,140 --> 00:51:50,020 to hamper their activities for example closing down their conferences or 569 00:51:50,020 --> 00:51:54,079 preventing the those scholars from travelling abroad 570 00:51:54,079 --> 00:51:58,880 and things like that and this is talked about as a crackdown on free speech. 571 00:51:58,880 --> 00:52:02,580 That's how it's talked about in the media and it certainly is. 572 00:52:02,580 --> 00:52:07,160 It certainly is a hindering of free speech 573 00:52:07,160 --> 00:52:12,600 but the way of presenting it that way actually misses the ways that think tanks such as Unirule 574 00:52:12,600 --> 00:52:14,569 are promoting policies 575 00:52:14,569 --> 00:52:19,430 such as the privatization of rural lands which are it's not just the 576 00:52:19,430 --> 00:52:24,380 question of free speech, it's also a question of the extent to which 577 00:52:24,380 --> 00:52:28,960 global capital is able to have control over Chinese policymaking 578 00:52:28,960 --> 00:52:33,840 and something was pointed to in China by critics of Unirule is for example 579 00:52:33,840 --> 00:52:42,620 the close connections between Unirule and the Cato Institute which is, you probably know, 580 00:52:42,620 --> 00:52:51,640 a very famous think-tank in the US which has been particularly vocal in trying to lobby and advocate 581 00:52:51,640 --> 00:52:54,800 the Chinese government to privatize its land 582 00:52:54,800 --> 00:53:00,700 which a lot of policy makers in China see as a serious call for concern 583 00:53:00,700 --> 00:53:13,029 because it may accelerate processes of peasant land expropriation. So to finish 584 00:53:14,680 --> 00:53:21,520 what I really want to do is say when we examine the question of Chinese think tanks 585 00:53:21,520 --> 00:53:27,020 let's treat with real skepticism this question of if they're independent 586 00:53:27,020 --> 00:53:30,220 they'll somehow be more democratically representative 587 00:53:30,220 --> 00:53:35,420 and that's -- let's perhaps look at the context of how this debate is operating in China. 588 00:53:35,420 --> 00:53:41,082 If you want a look at where China -- where China's think-tank system is going in the future 589 00:53:41,082 --> 00:53:44,025 well there's a number of directions it might take. 590 00:53:44,025 --> 00:53:49,740 Are we seeing the emergence of the corporate lobbying system like we see in the US 591 00:53:49,740 --> 00:53:55,940 or alternatively is this system going to be successfully balanced within 592 00:53:55,940 --> 00:54:00,230 government institutions to maintain some kind of level playing field which 593 00:54:00,230 --> 00:54:04,440 is what a number of scholars and policymakers are advocating for. 594 00:54:04,440 --> 00:54:09,740 And yet the question arises here if the interests of global capitalism are 595 00:54:09,740 --> 00:54:13,670 already, if those kinds of vested interests are already deeply entrenched 596 00:54:13,670 --> 00:54:17,990 within government institutions, how realistic is that really? 597 00:54:17,990 --> 00:54:25,160 Or another interpretation is are these think tanks best understood in fact as a kind of 598 00:54:25,160 --> 00:54:30,080 massive surveillance system that are going to be reporting on 599 00:54:30,080 --> 00:54:33,140 socialist issues and social problems back to the government 600 00:54:33,140 --> 00:54:40,970 as a fulfillment in the ends of maintaining some kind of helping the party state to maintain social stability 601 00:54:40,970 --> 00:54:48,600 but in the end preventing any more democratic form of politics from emerging. 602 00:54:48,600 --> 00:54:56,059 Thank you. I'll finish there.