China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2019 | Page 13

China Policy Journal
1. Introduction
The world around China is becoming
ever more complex
and fluid. On the one hand,
the United States and Europe are increasingly
defensive in trade and more
negative toward the current system of
globalization and global governance,
taking tougher measures to impede the
inflow of China’s products and investment;
on the other hand, China’s peripheral
areas turn out to be ever more
destabilized, continuously disrupted
by unpredictable contingencies ranging
from North Korea issues to maritime
skirmishes for territorial claims.
Overwhelmed by these unprecedented
challenges, Chinese policymakers and
political elites increasingly depend on
foreign policy think tanks for more information
and advice. This may help
to explain the “fever” to “construct
new types of think tanks with Chinese
characteristics” that has been emerging
since early 2015.
China’s foreign policy think
tanks form a community of many foreign
policy research institutions belonging
to different components of
China’s overall political regime and
policymaking system. Among them,
two of the most elite ones deserve the
most attention and intensive research.
Both of them belong to China’s “foreign
affairs system,” the government
section within China’s executive system
mandated for and specialized in
handling foreign policy-related issues,
but they are affiliated to central and
provincial-level government, respectively.
One is the China Institute of
International Studies (CIIS), a direct
subsidiary of China’s Ministry of Foreign
Affairs (MOF), while the other
one is the Shanghai Institutes for International
Studies (SIIS), a think tank
fully financed by Shanghai Municipal
Government, a provincial-level government
in China. Therefore, these
two think tanks constitute a relatively
complete picture of China’s elite foreign
policy think tanks within China’s
foreign policymaking system.
From late 2014 to March 2015,
the “Belt and Road initiative” (BRI)
was formally established by China’s
central government as a long-term
strategic framework guiding China’s
policy for foreign relations and global
governance over the next decade. Naturally,
both the CIIS and SIIS play an
active and important role in the process
of formulating this initiative. Their
interactions with political leadership
and other components of China’s foreign
policymaking regime on the BRI
issues may offer an interesting window
to observe some of the most revealing
features of think tanks’ influence over
China’s foreign policymaking. Therefore,
this paper conducts a case study
on the CIIS and SIIS, observing the
mechanism in which they interact with
and pose influence on China’s political
system and policymaking regime over
BRI issues, with a purpose to clarify
some characteristics. It is intended
that, by publishing this paper, a more
detailed picture can be drawn on Chinese
foreign policy think tanks’ role in
policymaking, with improved theoretic
depth and empirical precision.
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