Remodeling China's think tanks

Innovative talent, institutional guarantees and effective online and offline communication are needed to boost their global influence

At a recent meeting of the Central Leading Group for Overall Reform, President Xi Jinping, who is the group's leader, stressed that China should build a batch of think tanks with relatively big influence and good international reputation, saying its think tank building has increasingly failed to adapt to changing situations.

With this remark, Xi has not only pointed out the existing problems facing China's think tanks, but also outlined explicit requirements for their future development.

Currently, China's exploration for its think tank development model is mainly based on the experiences in Western countries, especially the United States. Due to its different political system, history and culture, any move to transplant the Western model to China will cause its think tank development to be unsuitable for its national conditions.

As part of the efforts to push for the modernization of its national governance system, China should not only learn from the experiences of other countries, it should also learn from its own governance wisdom over the past millennia, in a bid to creatively build a new type of think tank development model.

History and the present both show that as knowledge-intensive bodies, the core competitiveness of think tanks is their intellectual capital, and that only through boosting their institutional guarantees, human resources and transmission capacity can China's think tanks become a real driving force for the nation's rejuvenation.

China's ancient rulers had a long tradition of consulting with trusted advisers on the making of significant decisions. Although China's think tanks in a modern sense emerged after reform and opening-up in 1978, its think tank development began to bud as early as in the Spring Autumn and Warring States period (770-221 BC) and experienced a boom at both the official and non-official levels after that.