Welcome

"A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" is how many outside observers feel about internal authoritarian politics. And thus Winston Churchill's bonmot about the Russian Politburo’s decision to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact may as well describe contemporary Chinese politics. Puzzled, the public and foreign governments often ask country experts for advice. But who are those experts, who may thus come to wield considerable influence over important international policy decisions? What are their backgrounds and affiliations, and how do they arrive at their conclusions?

Our project contains two separate studies to answer these questions in the case of China. The first is a snowball survey among "China Watchers", to identify who the experts are, and gather information on their background and interconnections to identify possible subcommunities and biases in the field as a whole. The second is an expert survey panel among a subset of those experts, to learn more about the day-to-day internal dynamics of the Chinese political elites and the interaction among experts themselves.

Find some first results for the second study in the Influence section, and preliminary results for the first study in the China Experts section - or download our working paper here.