ABSTRACT
In 2008, the book What Does China Think?1 caught my attention. At that time, I was a Yenching visiting scholar at Harvard University. Two scholars recommended this book to me when they learned that I specialized in China’s think tanks. The author Mark Leonard had founded the leading independent think tank-namely, The Foreign Policy Centre-under the patronage of the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Leonard subsequently served as director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform. During his visit to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in 2005, he learned that more than 4,000 full-time researchers contributed to one think tank in China-a staggering number given that approximately 1,000 think tank staff members worked throughout the United Kingdom at the time and just over 5,000 think tank experts existed across Europe. Considering that there are many communist party schools as well as research institutions incorporated into all central ministries and local governments in China, Leonard believed set out to determine what so many researchers thought,2 spending three years interviewing representatives in China’s theory circle, reviewing think tank experts’ major theories and ideas on economic, political, and international affairs from the past two decades in order to complete his book.
