Space to think? Chinese think tanks and the uneven development of party-state power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The campaign to propagate a new generation of think tanks “with Chinese characteristics” has been one of Xi Jinping's signature projects. Charting the rise of China's “new-type” think tanks and their evolving organizational ecology, the paper asks what it means to think like a party-state through an extended ideational infrastructure. This question is explored with reference to the idealized (liberal, Western) norm of the “independent” think tank, but more importantly on its own terms, and in relation to the distinctive spatiality of party-state power in China. To this end, the paper juxtaposes a top-down reading of China's think-tank program, via authorized policy frameworks, mandates, and “guidance” from Beijing, with the experiences of an outlier case, the strategically important region of the Greater Bay Area (GBA), encompassing Hong Kong, Macao, and the Pearl River Delta. Literally and politically distant from Beijing, this was an historic epicenter of the reform process, with a long-established reputation for experimentation and independent thinking. Here, new-type think tanks are being rolled out in tandem with the ideological project of national unification, the ongoing “integration” of this uniquely heterogeneous and globally integrated region, the securitization of Hong Kong, geoeconomic stresses, and geopolitical realignments. The paper argues that the conditions of existence and operating environment of Chinese think tanks render them for the most part creatures of, and appendages to, an unevenly developed party-state, albeit with consequences that are not entirely predictable.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".