Opinion | Why China and the US need to worry about the war on think tanks and free thought
- Xi Jinping’s discomfort with the pluralism of think tanks is matched by the US distrust of Confucius Institutes and Chinese students
- Policy intellectuals are increasingly needed in a complex world, and it is the high responsibility of Beijing and Washington to keep the conversation flowing
Right, you don’t have to remind me: the Chinese civilisation of 3,000-plus years has at the ready ancient sayings for almost everything that comes up in life – sort of like the French who “always have a word for it”.
Well, we Americans are not voiceless ninnies without our own cultural verbiage, and, for what I am about to argue, our best insipid phrase would be something like “Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater” or “Look Before You Leap” … you get the idea.
Here’s the policy point: consider for a moment the think tank, a seemingly non-glamorous dull-as-dishwater subject. But it’s not: in such a tank, the sharpest sharks of the human mindset swim probingly, relentlessly, hungrily. For such intellectual jaws, America is rightly famous – the daunting Rand Corporation on our West Coast, the influential Centre for Strategic and International Studies on the East, and so on.