Chinese Foreign Policy Research Institutes and the Practice of Influence

Abstract

In the Maoist era, Chinese leaders had little need for foreign policy advice due to China’s limited involvement in the international community and to the ideological, personalistic, and top-down pattern of decisionmaking under Mao Zedong. The launching of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s marked the beginning of a process of gradual transformation of Chinese foreign policy from ideology to pragmatism, and from self-exclusion and passivity to greater involvement and active participation in international affairs. The vigorous conduct of diplomacy with 171 countries with which China today has diplomatic ties and in numerous regional and international organizations, combined with the rapid expansion of Chinese interests around the globe, have exponentially increased the Chinese leadership’s need for information, analysis, and advice about the outside world to safeguard and advance Chinese national interests. One of the important means by which this need has been met is through the system of Chinese foreign policy research institutes.