China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2019 | Page 18

Chinese Foreign Policy Think Tanks’ Policy Influence
works will gradually become integrated
and generate a “field of power.” This
“field” covers the whole society and
shapes the behavioral models of social
actors (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).
On the basis of this viewpoint, U.S. sociologist
Medvetz defined think tanks
as a “central space of the field of power.”
In his opinion, the “field of power” consists
of four major subfields: politics and
bureaucracy, economy, cultural production,
and media, and think tanks just
form a “central space” between all these
subfields. He argued that the boundary
of this “central space” is always fluid in
synchronization with the changes of the
overall “field of power” (Medvetz 2012).
This paper reinterprets Medvetz’s
points and establishes a synthesized
theoretic paradigm that may work as a
guiding paradigm to frame the whole
analysis of this paper. Figure 1 gives a
panoramic view of this paradigm. As
Figure 1 reveals, the whole political regime
of China can be interpreted as a
three-layered “field of power.” The outer
layer is composed of four “sub-fields”:
politics, business, academia, and media.
The middle layer is made of interactive
forces between think tanks and the four
subfields of outer layer, which continu-
ously push the exchanges of information
and resources between them. This
is a dynamic layer largely driven by China’s
knowledge regime. 4 The inner layer
is the entire system of Chinese think
tanks, which has developed into a complex
structure containing a variety of institutions,
5 forming a “central space” in
the center of the “field of power.”
Furthermore, Figure 1 shows
that, within China’s regime, think tanks’
connections with the two “sub-fields” of
politics and academia are much closer
and tighter than their links to the business
and media. In order to build a more
accurate perceptional framework to analyze
CIIS and SIIS’s policy relevance,
it is necessary to take a more focused
anatomy on China’s foreign policymaking
system.
3.2 China’s Foreign Policymaking
System inside “Political Sub-
Field”: The Regime Defining the
Positions of CIIS and SIIS
Figure 2 shows China’s overall policymaking
system on foreign policy-related
issues. In this system, the supreme level
of the whole chains of commanding includes
the general secretary of Chinese
4 The author of this paper defines the knowledge regime as an institutionalized mechanism that
continuously generates multiple streams of processed policy-related information and data and
that heavily influences the perceptions and cognitions of members of policy community. John. L.
Campbell made a detailed comparative research on knowledge regime in his work and regarded it
as a parallel to production regime and policymaking regime. Details can be found in: Campbell and
Pedersen (2014).
5 There are already many categorizations on the types of Chinese think tanks. The author of this
paper argues that Chinese think tanks can be divided into five major systems that cover three executive
levels. The five major systems are: (1) in-house research organs of party and government;
(2) specialized foreign policy think tanks; (3) party school system; (4) academy of social sciences
system; and (5) research institutes affiliated to universities. Each of these five think tank systems is
distributed across three levels: central, provincial, and below-provincial levels. The details of this
categorization can be found in: Xin (2017).
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